I know you've been
there: sitting too long with one leg crossed over the other, your leg has gone
numb. When you change your position, you feel the sensation of pinpricks or
maybe it feels something like an isolated rain shower within your body (my
personal mythology).
This is the
feeling I'm having now. Over the last four years, my interest in biochemistry
has been on a steady decline – during which my interests in things I’d once
held dear waned. I was suppressing parts of myself so as to devote myself to a
subject to which I was never truly devoted. While I was initially intrigued by
all carbon-based chemicals, I have only recently realized that I hold the carbon
tip of my pencil before all other allotropes. This graphite is the key to the
written word, and has been waiting to unlock the door to my future. Holding my pencil high – and feeling the rain
shower begin in my raised arm, I am proud to call myself an English major.
While this may
seem like little more than a personal declaration, it has changed so many
things in my life. I find desires I’d
forgotten resurfacing: desires to play my clarinet, to write fiction, to read
books I’d never gotten around to reading, to play a role in my community
through volunteer work, and to enthusiastically take on new challenges in my
personal and professional life.
I will admit that
these desires have not completely come into fruition, but they are beginning to
blossom and for that I am thankful. I doubt that I will ever return to the
place where I was at high school graduation – at the top of my class and
involved in every extra-curricular activity available, from drama club to
marching band to the Spanish club – but there is a part of that over-achieving
valedictorian that I will always carry around with me.
She will be with
me as I continue my education, and she will remain with me throughout my
journeys in editing and publishing from green to grey. Thanks to her influence,
I will never again succumb to the numbness.
I
have a love of word games – Balderdash, Scrabble, and Boggle are personal
favorites – and find it hard to resist a good book of word puzzles. I even have an artistic flair for drawing words
– bubble letters, block letters, calligraphy, you name it.
But
by themselves, words carry little weight.
They must be combined in a particular way to convey a particular
meaning. I remember getting a rush of excitement before each road trip, knowing
that I would get the opportunity to begin a new story in my notebook. The
products of my creativity weren’t extraordinary (though my mother was an avid
reader of my work), but they provided invaluable practice in my formative
years, without which I might have the same apathy towards language that plagues
many of my peers.
For
a time, I feigned interest in other subjects I believed to be more “worthy” of
my attention. However, a return to my first love was inevitable – if my
extensive online blog wasn’t a clue to my denied interests, my unconscious
accumulation of books was. Silly as it
seems to me now, I was blind to these details for a long time.
Strangely
enough, it took a movie – a movie I only decided to rent when I saw it on the
shelf at the movie store – to open my eyes to the truth. The movie is called Suburban Girl, and I can’t say I ever
saw advertisements for its release. What
caught my eye was the title of the book upon which it was based: A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing.
I had read it in my freshman year of high school, and while I could
remember that I had thoroughly enjoyed it, I couldn’t – for the life of me –
remember the plot. So I watched it.
It
tells the story of a manuscript editor in a publishing house who grows into
herself – with the help of Alec Baldwin, I might add. The plot of the story isn’t important; what
is, is the lightbulb that it illuminated in my mind.
For
the first time in my life I can see the path in front of me: I am going to earn
my living surrounded by words. I am
going to be an editor.
