Don’t be afraid to take a life detour

Being 31 is a difficult age. It’s the age where you’re not ‘young’ anymore. The wild years are behind you, and you should look ahead and think about settling down. You know, buy a house, get a dog, have a kid, get married, in whatever order. But at the same time, 31 is also the age where I start to feel more like myself every day, where I’m finally figuring out what I want to do with my life.

It’s like trying to decide what you want to become in high school. No one knows what they want to do when they are 16. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I just picked something. In my case, it was journalism because I wanted to become a writer. Good choice? Perhaps. But in reality, it didn’t equip me with more skills than I already had. I came away from university with the sense that journalism had set me up for failure. Magazines sales were going down, and the internet was coming up. Everyone said this was going to be the end of journalism as we knew it. I had a lifelong of scrambling for a job ahead of me.

They were right. But not in the way they thought they were.

Yes, journalism as we knew it is changing. But that is not a bad thing. It took me almost ten years to come back around to journalism and writing. I took detours, got another education, worked other jobs and found myself drawn back to freelance journalism.

Truth is there will always be a need for good quality content. It doesn’t matter if it’s for print, digital or anything else. Because magazine print sales are going down, doesn’t mean people stop reading. I see people on their phones all the time. Reading news sites, blogs, watching videos. They are consuming content all the time.

I’m not saying all content out there is great, far from it. But therein lies the opportunity.

Come up with great content, get it out there. Talk to people, inspire people. Be a journalist in your own life and that of others. And I guarantee you; it doesn’t matter which medium you choose. Video, text, photography – everything goes here. As long as it tells a story that is yours, and that makes other people feel something.

When I graduated from journalism school, I knew two things: I didn’t want to be a freelancer, and I didn’t like journalism. I was wrong on both accounts, and it only took me several detours and ten years to figure that out. And that is okay.

Don’t be afraid to take a detour; they are never a waste of time. It’s the detours in life that helped me figure out what I wanted to do. They helped me find what I knew all along: writing is my passion.