Musings on Self-Prophecy....

Almost five years ago I was interviewing for a job at a facility for the disabled. Sitting across from me was a man I would come to respect, admire, befriend, and loathe in equal portions in the years to come. But in one moment he became one of my favorite interviewers of all time. And he did it by asking one question:

What would you like to be doing in five years?

Having family members in HR gives you baggage when it comes to your answers in interviews. I had been coached, instructed, and outright ordered not to say too much about my creative ambitions. I had no real background or experience at that time, and one member of my HR mafia had told me that talking about myself was verboden. It was all about what the company needed. I needed to focus on that at all costs.

But, seeing as I already had a bad temp job to go back to in an hour... I figured what the hell.

So I told this man that I was going to be a writer. In five years I would be making a living – if not a profit – by my pen. I believed it. And so did he. I got the job.

It took me three years to get over what I had to go through at that facility. But as the past slips further and further behind me, I can put things – and why they happened – increasingly into perspective. I may not have been able to admit it when I walked out the facility’s doors for the last time, but my time there made me what I am today. It gave me calouses I didn't have, understanding I couldn't have seen otherwise... and a determination to make that one statement true.

I didn’t realize how deep that determination went until I updated my resume (Me go through another round of job searching? How shocking....) and realized it had been almost five years since that wonderful little interview.

Life isn’t perfect. I’m certainly not raking in truckloads of cash I envisioned, and my fiction career has taken a backseat while I’ve built up a client list. But I’ve found a way to write things and have people pay me for the privilege.

It’s been nearly five years and I am a writer. That’s something that would have blown the mind of the girl sitting in that interview. But I honestly believe that the road to get here started because she wasn’t afraid to answer that one good question.




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