My First Draft is an experiment, an exploration in finding a voice.
I’ve always been a behind the scenes kind of person. As a child I was on the sidelines—so afraid of everything that my heart raced out of fear for the lives of my friends who dared hang by their knees, upside down on the jungle gym. As an adult, I built a career out of safely staying in the background—working for a long time for someone who needed my words, my intuition, and my support to keep them in the center of the spotlight they desired. It was easy. I was really good at it. And I was well rewarded. Moving from job-to-job, garnering promotion after promotion, and being compensated at rates that sometimes staggered me. It was Silicon Valley’s heyday. I’m glad I was part of it.
The high tech life
I’ve had a lot of different jobs. But from PR to product marketing, advertising to usability testing, there was always one constant. I was the go-to writer on the team. I built my career putting my words in other people’s mouths. But I never had much fun doing it. I never felt particularly connected to or fulfilled by my work. So I started searching.
The leap
My life has often been one of manic extremes. Not to disappoint, the first thing I did when I finally got lucky enough to work for a startup that went public was buy a sailboat and set off for Mexico and Central America. I sold or gave away everything that didn’t fit on the boat, bought some scuba tanks and a compressor, quit my job, provisioned the galley, said goodbye to friends and family and set sail for southern latitudes.
That ought to do the trick!
Turned out to be the best thing I had ever done and the hardest I had ever worked. I spent two years living on the hook between Bahia de los Angeles in the Sea of Cortez and Playa del Coco, Costa Rica. I made my own water, caught my own food, saw manta rays and whale sharks, and have since forgotten more about plumbing and diesel engines than I ever wanted to know. I met people who changed me forever.
I’ll be writing more about that journey here on My First Draft.
The hard landing
What could be next but a career change? IPO money does not last for ever after all. Mine ran out and I had to come home, find a job, and get back to it. The homecoming included a divorce and a few other life altering changes. There will be more to say on life lessons learned during that time here on My First Draft too.
A few years of consulting, a lot of volunteer projects, three new addresses, and a bunch more traveling, led me to choose a career in the nonprofit sector. What could be more fulfilling than putting my hard-earned skills to work for a cause I believed in? I started sending out resumes.
Crickets. Turns out the nonprofit sector wasn’t as excited about my career change as I was.
Then, as if there was some kind of universal convergence occurring, I stumbled on a listing for a position at an organization that embodied everything I wanted. And it read like someone had used my resume as a crib sheet for drafting the job description.
I threw everything I had ever learned about professional communications out the window, broke every rule of cover letter etiquette, begged for an interview and offered to work for practically nothing. And whataya know? That did the trick!
The next step
I love my job. I’m beginning to become intimately familiar with that feeling of universal convergence. We’re doing something great together—the life changing, earth axis shifting kind of great. I know it.
I imagine this must be how all of those startup-junky technophiles that I worked with must have felt. I never got it. I just couldn’t bring myself to give a crap about the next big thing. They totally got off on it. I think I finally understand how they felt.
I work with some of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. I’ve grown more professionally in the past two and half years than in the rest of my 17+ year career. Seventeen years? Man, I’m old.
I get to go to places like Yosemite, Olympic National Park, and the Santa Monica Mountains. They actually pay me to go there…a little meeting, a little hiking, a little more meeting, a little more hiking. It’s sure a far cry from the endless hours spent going back and forth in the climate-controlled walkway between the Hilton and the Orange County Convention Center in beautiful Orlando, Florida. For so long, it seemed that every hi-tech conference was held in that hateful place. Sorry, Orlando. Not a fan.
The discovery
So, why am I still feeling so antsy? A writer friend of mine finally clued me in. He said, “you are a writer.” He said it in a completely matter of fact way, as if that explained everything. Turns out it did.
A big part of my job has always been writing. But I’m still writing words for other people. Speeches, blog posts, editorials, articles, emails… You get the picture.
Almost twenty years into it and I’m a writer without a voice.
Here is where I’ll try to find it.
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