I'm never quite comfortable writing a personal biography, and yet I seem to often find myself caught in the dilemma of having to write one. As a journalism student, I've found that writing other people's biographies comes fairly easily, usually fueled by a great deal of creative force.
Perhaps writing a biography seems too personal and revealing. Yet, the truth is quite the opposite. My mere biography is just a list of what I've done. It may hint at what drives me, but really doesn't say much about
who I am. Writing, on the other hand, is very personal and very revealing. If you want to be naked in front of a million strangers, blog.
But I digress. Or perhaps I'm procrastinating from the task at hand, which is to write a biography of myself for the feature writing class this blog has been created for.
I began college with an eye on a journalism major. Actually, it was an interdisciplinary major in journalism
and public relations because the first university I attended had a terrible journalism program and so decided to just throw a bunch of classes together and call it an
interdisciplinary program. Of course, every freshman thinks he or she knows what they are going to major in and I soon discovered, from my freshman perspective, that beer, women, co-ed dorms and fraternity life were the best parts of college.
By sophomore year I was a Criminal Justice major.
Switching to Criminal Justice may or may not have been influenced, in some small way, by the fact that I had began college as an Intelligence Analyst for the United States Army Reserve. But I digress once again. It's a story for another time. For now, let it add depth and perspective to my tale.
Don't get me wrong, Criminal Justice is a fascinating field. Crime scene investigation, criminal theory, Constitutional law, criminal law, abnormal psychology -- all subjects worth drooling over during course registration each semester. But something was missing and that something was actually more complicated and deep-rooted than perhaps I realized at first.
The simple truth is that I am insatiably curious, and adventurous (I'm also a hopeless romantic and a stubborn idealist, but that's another matter entirely). And I seem to have a unique perspective on the world around me that ensures that few things are insignificant to me and trivial things have exciting possibilities for rising on the
cool scale. Often it is the things least expected (or noticed by others) that have me bursting at the seams to enthusiastically relate to others.
And I
like love to write. I love to capture moments with my camera. I love everything that squeezes another ounce of creativity out of me. I have an ingrained need to share my perspectives on the world, current events, and whatever else with others -- not so much with the goal of influencing how they think, but rather to present them with things to think about; new ways to look at the world.
I came to the realization that at the end of my life I would have to be writing. There was simply no other way. It's a paradigm-shifting realization when, through a series of twists and turns, you come to the conclusion that you took the road most traveled and will soon be parting with that $50k salary you're receiving for slaving away in a sanitized corporate cube farm in order to plunge back into a life of student poverty for a more significant goal. It's much easier if you're single with no responsibilities to anyone but yourself and count yourself among the few truly hopeless dreamers.
So sometimes you just have to go back to where the roads first diverged and get on the right path.
So here I am, a journalism student, blogging my disconnected musings. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
