Every year, without fail, someone will gift me a notebook. It’s not exactly a secret that I love to write, though I tend not to advertise it all the time, and I can’t blame that first instinct to give the writer a place to journal her thoughts and ideas before they vanish. Unfortunately, I was born in 2005, which means I started using laptops in fourth grade and haven’t stopped since. Kids these days, right?
But my first ever story was written in a red notebook.
I was five years old, and I didn’t know how to spell all that well, but I’d learned the word spectrum fairly recently and wanted to do something with it. So I pieced together something about rainbows and other worlds. An adopted little girl who plants flowers in an apocalyptic wasteland. I illustrated the cover and everything. With little fanfare, I realized I wanted to be an author.
Since then, that was my Thing. Once I got a handle of Google Docs, it was over for everyone. I wrote silly stories throughout my childhood, once with a friend in sixth grade just because we finished our English quiz early. I centered my personality around the fact that I enjoyed reading and writing, because these were the formative years nobody knew who they were so they picked an archetype for themselves. I could’ve done a lot worse than The Writer, I think, but that stack of notebooks is still growing.
It was a natural next step for me to conceive a full-length novel when I was eleven. That is, I thought vaguely of this story in idle moments and the liminal space between sleep and consciousness, but I didn’t suck it up and start drafting until I was twelve. It was pretty terrible, because I was twelve and all, but I owe everything to that decision. It’s that same story that I rewrote in high school and self-published when I was sixteen, and whose sequels I’m working on right now.
The thing is, it’s exceptionally rare to decide your lifelong passion before you’ve graduated high school, let alone before you’ve learned your times tables. But it’s not as though I’ve approached the rest of my life with absolute certainty or that I now have telescopic vision of the next twenty years. I may have chosen what I like, but I didn’t know who I was, not really. Often, I don’t have the faintest clue of the next five years, or even the next two. I still oscillate wildly between that wonderful surety and a debilitating fear of the future. Especially since that aforementioned lifelong passion happens to be creative writing and not, you know, hedge fund management. You’ll learn soon enough about my less-than-fully formed productivity habits and my monthly crashouts about jobs and internships.
Indeed, I happened to form the nucleus of my interests and aspirations from a very, very young age, but that passion has evolved with me in the same way someone might start out wanting to pursue acting and then realize they’re better suited for behind-the-scenes work. I still feel a certain catharsis from writing fantasy fiction like in the pages of that red notebook, but I see myself switching genres someday, and I also see myself doing a lot more than creative writing as an adult. Over the years, I’ve looked into work in fields like publishing, PR, academia, journalism, social media marketing, and so on, and I don’t want to box myself in even if I will always be writing no matter what.
For instance, I write articles on movies and music for NYU’s newspaper. I’ve picked up minor marketing internships and taken business classes to learn about the professional world. Some things I like more than others, and I’m sure one thing or another will fall to the wayside once I graduate. For every notebook I fill, another remains unfinished. The easy part is figuring out how I can use my ability to write wherever I work, but the scary part is that it’ll never look the same way as it did as a child, when I could just tell myself I would be an author and leave it at that.
That’s the thing they don’t tell you about choosing what you want to do at five years old. You’ll have to keep choosing—and wisely this time.
TL;DR: If you picked a lifelong passion as a child like I did, you still have endless opportunities to figure out who you are. If you didn’t, don’t worry. You’re probably better off anyway.
By Oshmi Ghosh
Oshmi Ghosh is a rising junior at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English with minors in Creative Writing, History, and Entertainment Business. You can usually find her appreciating the simple things in life: tea with milk and sugar, a good book, and/or intensely competitive board games.
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