Quiet Epiphany ...

It came to me in my car.

Devoid of fanfare. No trumpets.

I've never had a dream.

Dream as in "aspiration," not the nocturnal nonsense that plays out in my head.

I know people who know, from an early age, what they want to do. And they've done it. I have a friend who always wanted to be a sports journalist. Today, she's rather high in the ranks at ESPN.

And I have a friend who has a friend who was once a kid who wanted to be in a band. Today, he's the lead singer of Pearl Jam.

Goals are good. Destinations. Not end points, but landmarks along the way.

And I've never had one.

No wonder I don't know where the hell I'm going.

Mind you, I'm a big believer in everything happening the way it's meant to happen.

I don't regret anything. My "career" to date may not have been part of a master plan, at least not any master plan of which I'm consciously aware, but I have met some extraordinary people along the way, people I otherwise might not have met, and so, in that way, I have done very well.

But at the moment, I am bobbing along in a vast sea of possibility. Which way is shore? In which direction should I start swimming? I have no idea.

I mentioned this to my mom the other day, hoping that she might say, "Oh, honey, don't you remember? When you were little, you wanted to be ...," that she would remind me of a forgotten plan and the light bulb would illuminate above my head and off I'd go.

But no. She did remind me that there was a time when I wanted to be a doctor. Mmm hmm. I remember that. I was young. And I was going to grow up to own my own hospital and I told my grandmother that she could stay there for free. My cousin Lora was going to be my nurse.

Today, Lora's a nurse. I'm not a doctor. Mind you, for a while, I was on that path. I started college in pre-med. But I quickly learned that that was not the path for me.

I also remember, as a child, wanting to be a lawyer. But that desire wasn't borne out of any deep-seated desire to practice law. No, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer when I heard my parents discussing how much their lawyer billed per hour. I didn't understand then that what an attorney bills is not what they earn. To my young mind, there were people working at jobs who made a few dollars an hour and then there was Mr. Attorney Man who was billing $125. And I thought, "I would like to make $125 an hour." And my brief legal plan was born.

It didn't last.

I returned to the doctor plan.

And then, late in my senior year of high school, a teacher declared that I was going to be a writer. Hmm. Yeah, OK. That sounded good. I liked writing.

But who got paid to write, I wondered. Journalists, I thought.

OK, then. Journalism school.

But not real journalism school. Not Missouri or Northwestern or any of the heavy hitters.

Alas, my journalism plan was short-lived.

Back to the aforementioned pre-med status.

But I had no patience for all the prerequisites. I wanted to jump right into anatomy.

I took a writing course to lighten my heavy science load.

And it was fun. So I took another.

And one day, lying in bed in my room in my parents' house, I looked at my Einstein poster, given to me by English Teacher Dave, and the quote "Imagination is more important than knowledge" suddenly seemed to say "English is more important than medicine."

So I declared my major – English – and took what non-fiction writing courses I could. The university where I'd landed didn't have a journalism school, but it offered a non-fiction specialty within the English curriculum.

And then, sitting next to my friend Brett in a Victorian Literature class, I noticed that he was taking notes on Chicago magazine letterhead. I asked him about it. And he told me that he was doing an internship there.

That seemed cool.

So I wrote a letter. And got an internship there.

I had already worked for a summer at the Chicago Sun-Times, so Chicago magazine seemed like a complement.

And then, once I was out of college, oh-so-useful English degree in hand, a friend at the university told me about an opening at the Chicago Tribune. The job market was awful, so I thought I'd land that gig – it was part-time – stay for six months, slap it on my resume, and then get a real job.

It didn't work out that way. I ended up staying at the Tribune for nearly five years. Which was just as well. As I never knew what that real job was going to be.

And then, just about the time I was getting fed up with life at the Tribune, a former Tribuner offered me a job working for a division of another newspaper company.

So I tendered my resignation at the Trib and started the new gig.

That lasted three years, until the entire newspaper division was sold off or – in the case of our little company – shut down.

And then, in need of a job, I took a position as an editor at an IT company. And eleven months later, that ended.

At this point, you may be thinking, "Beth, were you really that clueless? Could you not appreciate that you were constantly being kicked out of the nest?"

Yes, I could see that. But there's a lot to be said for being able to pay one's bills. And so, having worked for one IT company, I eventually took a job with another.

And three years later, that ended, too.

So, here we are.

I really do like my life these days, except for the issues with income. I'd like to continue this life, to get up and put on coffee and fire up the computer and write for a few hours and maybe have meetings now and again with interesting people about things related to my writing or some other fun, collaborative project. And many people very kindly tell me that I'm a very good writer, thereby reinforcing the notion that I could have a writer's life.

There's just one thing missing at the moment: an idea.

Taking freelance assignments isn't my dream. I take them, and my editors seem happy with the results, and sometimes I get a really good gig, like interviewing Melissa Etheridge last month.

But if the process of elimination is valuable, and it is, I know that I don't want a career as a freelance writer in the traditional sense of that word. Yes, I can take on assignments about a wide variety of topics and do research and find folks to interview and write up 1,000 words, but is that my heart's desire? No.

Somewhere in me is a book. Or a screenplay. Or some longer-form project that I'll write from the inside.

Sort of like this blog. I've been blathering on in this space for nearly five years.

Others have suggested that the key is contained in these posts. Somewhere, in all this rambling, is the germ of an idea.

So far, I haven't found it. But I have years worth of material to review.

In the meantime, I would like a large bag of money to fall from the sky, please, and land on my front stoop.

Or, perhaps slightly more realistically, I would like to find a job that pays enough to cover my expenses.

I can feel the possibilities swirling. In addition to the Melissa story and interview, earlier this week I applied to be part of series that's in development that will highlight amateur bakers around the country. I recently fell in love with the next song I want to record. I'm making changes to my home.

Ideas and creativity are returning to me, nicely aligned with the arrival of spring. And I am following the paths that appear before me. I'm anxious to see where they lead.