Three years ago I registered the domain "sassandbalderdash.com" and began planning the early content that would lay the foundation for this blog. Three years is significant. In that time, I could've gone to law school or served a jail sentence for carjacking. If you've taken the LSAT, you'll feel me when I say I'm not sure which of those outcomes might have been more likely.
September 2012 was a time of big changes in my life, the first real autumn of my existence that I could feel in my bones. I had been out of college with an English degree for four months struggling to land interviews, and my weight loss had just reached the milestone of 110 pounds. I was restless, jaded by optimism, and for the first time, I was genuinely fearful that everything wouldn't turn out okay the way it always seemed it would when there was something preordained to look forward to, like another year of school. In more ways than one, this little blog made me understand happiness, resurrected the writer in me, and empowered me to dream bigger.
Perhaps the biggest regret of my life-the one that weighs heavy on my morning commute and that sneaks into the spotlight in my mind when I close my eyes at night-is that I convinced myself writing could never be anything more than a hobby, the treadmill to exhaust a vibrant imagination. Writing online has introduced me to so many other writers, bloggers, and authors, many of whom are my generational peers, who have been working in their field for years. Their LinkedIn pages map a focused progression from college, to an internship, to the entry level job that got their foot in the door, to the coveted position they hold now as hard-working individuals with veritable professional experience. I've romanticized the experience of these Writers because I know I'll never be one of them, which isn't to say I won't write, but I'll never be able to boast that I knew in college that I wanted to pursue writing as both a passion and profession.
Looking back at my life in the rear-view mirror, it almost seems impossible that I couldn't know writing is what made me happy. From the Saturday mornings I'd spend writing stories in crayon on the kitchen floor with cartoons filling the silence, to the 15-page papers using literary theory in college, my passion for writing has been beating me over the head since I was six years old. Yet, I still went off to college as a Biology (?!?!?!) major with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. When Chem-111 so unceremoniously reminded me that I'm only capable of mathematical functions I can perform on my fingers, I switched my major to English with plans to go to law school and pursue intellectual property law. It took bombing the LSAT to finally realize that I had no idea what I truly wanted to do my degree or my life, and I was making important decisions based upon lingering career infatuations I flirted with at different points of my life: a veterinarian to assuage my fear of wavering from my childhood response to, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and a lawyer to ensure absolute financial security. Veterinarian and lawyer are both worthy, rewarding professions, but I was passionate about them for the wrong reasons, and that's probably why I'm not wearing cute puppy scrubs or framing my Juris Doctor today.
I think we've all been casually brainwashed into believing that being happy is easy, at least as easy as those motivational quote Instagram accounts make it seem. When we're young, we're expected to pick an obscure, future career out of the hat of your skills and interests and commit to becoming it without fully understanding the implications. Maybe some people do know exactly what they want out of their life and their career when their mouths are still sticky and stained red from Kool-Aid, but I'm ready to admit that I was not one of them. The pressure to go with the flow and convince everyone else, and myself, that I knew exactly what I wanted from my education and my career influenced many missed opportunities and hasty decisions that could drive me crazy if I enumerated them all. For a long time, abandoning writing (the kind I did just for myself and not for a grade in red pen) became collateral damage in the pursuit of being the person I wanted everyone to think I was: Capable, Together, Focused.
I don't recall when it happened exactly-maybe it was junior high, when braces and puberty took precedence over everything else-but at some point I stopped writing. Just stopped. It wasn't writer's block or an act of defiance, like a petulant child firing her piano teacher after a rough day of playing 'Chopsticks,' it just slipped away. The notebook in which I used to scribble poems got buried in my nightstand, a souvenir of my former self I'd examine like a familiar relic of some lost civilization when cleaning my room. Years went by and the thing that made me the most happy and gave me the most peace lay dormant, showing faint signs of life only for writing assignments at school. Looking back on all of it has made me realize that being happy-personally or professionally-is a lot more complicated than we make it seem.
You've probably heard that Leo Tolstoy quote, "If you want to be happy, be." It's a great concept in theory, but in practice it's a negligent oversimplification of happiness. It suggests if you aren't happy, you aren't trying hard enough. Study more smiley faces, smell a few roses, and reassess. We all could and should try harder to be happy where we are, to see the sunshine in our shadowy circumstances, but I think true happiness requires upkeep. It takes effort and understanding without pretense, and that can be difficult if you're still figuring out what makes your happy clock tick.
It wasn't until I started writing this blog, letting my words and writing style wander freely without a prompt, that I realized how unhappy I had been while I was in the pursuit of everything else that seemed so important. It was the passive sort of unhappiness that doesn't stifle laughter, but instead waits quietly in the doorway for you to acknowledge that it's been standing there unnoticed for a while. Expectations and excuses took precedence. Sometimes it takes stumbling upon the hobby, job, career, person, cat, city, whatever it is to make you understand what makes your heart swell, what makes the alarm clock feel like a triumphant bugle rather than a death knell.
And so for three years this blog has grown from its humble beginnings with mandatory alliteration in the headline of every article to the passion project I'm proud of today. Sass & Balderdash been the metaphorical lines on the wall measuring my growth not only as a writer, but as a young adult still very much figuring everything out. It's seen me through the early struggles to find a job to where I am today, a person working in an industry she enjoys with more clarity about her career path than ever before. Most importantly, this blog was the rabbit hole that dropped me back into my happy place-writing-and even though it took some time and a few false starts, I'm glad to be back here- happy.
Katie Hoffman is a writer living in the suburbs of Chicago. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @bykatiehoffman.
