Who I am and how I got here.
Life is a journey.
We are all explorers on the path of life and everything is unknown until we discover it. Ours is a quest to find out who we are and what we are made of.
My journey began in a small town in central Indiana. I played sports and rode bikes and did everything that kids do when they are bored out of their minds because they live in the middle of nowhere. It was in high school that I began writing. I worked for the school newspaper as a staff writer and wrote tons of poetry. After school I worked as a pressroom assistant at the local newspaper, officially known as Elwood Publishing. My father was the pressroom supervisor there and as a kid I used to help him on some of his late Friday nights, working half the night to print the Saturday morning edition. In a way, I learned how to put together a newspaper before I learned how to drive. I had been around it from such a young age I guess you could say I have ink in my blood. To this day I still have it tattooed on my right wrist, embedded there from, most likely, a sharp metal printing plate.
My section of Indiana was a small place that seemed to get smaller the older I got. In some ways, I was my father’s son there and I was who he was and was made of what he was made of. This was not a bad thing, but I wanted something different for myself. I looked around and could not see what that was, so when I was 20 years old, at the impulsive suggestion of a friend, I quit my job and packed my car and began a journey to a warmer, bigger place with no snow, no corn, and all unknowns. I felt at home in Florida before I even arrived. I was on a permanent vacation, despite having to go to work five days a week. I felt as if I lived in a Jimmy Buffet song. This was the beginning of my journey to find myself. All I knew at the time was that I was definitely in Florida.
I was hired as a press operator at a major newspaper a few months after I arrived. It had always been my dream to work at a big city newspaper. I thought I was at my dream job. I lasted about two years before I realized that I wanted more. So I quit my job and was exploring again.
After a few jobs in a few different industries, I decided that I needed to go to school. So I enrolled at Pasco-Hernando Community College. I didn’t realize I had actually started college at the time. I was only taking classes. However, this was a journey of self- discovery like none I had undertaken yet. I drove on, semester after semester, transferring to St. Petersburg College. I loved the writing classes. I could see my internal narrative taking shape, gaining an audible voice. Then one day I was writing a research paper and it clicked: I could do this for a living.
Today I am a few months away from my B.A. in Mass Communications from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, focusing on magazine journalism. This is exciting, and I am ready to graduate, but I cannot look at it as the end of a long, five-year journey. It is merely the threshold to a path that will lead me onward, into the future. To another place where I can find out a little bit more about who I am and what I am made of.