Writing as a Vocation
This is why I wanted to start a Substack.
For the last few years, I’ve worked full-time as a writer. Good writing jobs are scarce, so I feel fortunate that my career has led me in this direction.
I’ve been writing for a long time. As a high school senior, I started my first blog about basketball, and I continued as a freelance sportswriter throughout college and for a while afterwards. By the time I stopped, it had grown to feel tedious.
I also wrote privately, appraising life in my twenties and chronicling memorable vacations with detailed journal entries. Few people ever read a very long essay I titled “Alone in Space City” about the year I spent living in Houston. Time capsules for my future selves.
For a moment, during the pandemic, I moved into a castle and wrote about living there. That story deserves more attention on another day.
That was when I got my first full-time writing job. I’m now on to my second. It suits me. I enjoy the challenge of finding the right words and arranging them cohesively, even if they’re about topics I probably wouldn’t choose to write about if I wasn’t paid for it. I never quite made it as a sportswriter, but I found a professional niche in the digital marketing ecosystem.
Ever since I started writing for a steady paycheck, I haven’t written much for myself. Exercising certain cognitive muscles every day in your 9-to-5 makes you less inclined to do the same thing in your free time. It’s an idiosyncratic, repetitive exercise routine. You still feel fatigue.
I suppose that’s what happens when a hobby becomes a job. I enjoy cooking, but I would have a hard time as a line chef at a restaurant. I probably wouldn’t cook much for myself at home if I had to do it for work.
Writing feels a bit different than that, at least for me.
That’s because there’s a difference between a job and a vocation. The latter, derived from the Latin word for “calling,” implies something greater. It’s existential. More than a job or even a career, it’s what you’re meant to be.
When I was a kid, I was never quite sure what I wanted to be, occupationally, when I grew up. Now that I’m here, as an adult in my early thirties, it turns out that I’m a writer. My childhood self wouldn’t be too surprised.
Writing feels more like a vocation than just a job.
I wrote online for about a decade before it became my livelihood, and I was writing for myself when it was just a hobby. I was drawn to it. For a while, I wrote about sports, something I was passionate about. Eventually, I branched out into other topics that interested me. But, over the last few years, I’ve stopped writing for myself. (At least publicly. For the most part.)
Writing can be a very powerful form of self-expression. Exploring, developing, and articulating your own ideas requires deep focus and contemplation. It’s often very challenging. In the process, you learn something about yourself, however abstract it might be.
Sometimes, it feels like you’re creating something out of nothing. An empty notebook or new document has infinite potential, and everything starts from that blank canvas, in a sense. You’re really creating something out of your self — your experiences, perspectives, feelings, passions, dreams, the ephemeral thread of your consciousness. No matter what you write, and no matter whether anyone else ever reads it, you’re creating something.
Over time, you find your voice. Those constitutive parts of the self become clearer and easier to understand. Even your writing style — how you say things and not just what you say — comes into focus. That style alone expresses so much about who you are. The process of finding your voice is one of writing’s rewards.
Not many people think of writing on these terms. For most of us, work emails, text messages, and social media posts are the extent of it. We don’t need to write anything more than that. Why would we? What’s the impetus? We learn how to write in school, we’re forced to do it, and then we stop after that. Especially now that we can simply ask an algorithm to “write” on our behalf.
It’s different for people who are writers, of course. Writing feels like a vocation because I feel that impetus to write.
For some writers, it’s direct and straightforward, pointing confidently in a particular direction. It isn’t for me. More than anything, that impetus beckons inwards, reaching toward the subliminal. It also clings to external inspiration and chases abstract, elusive thoughts. Sometimes I seem to feel it more on the physical plane than the intellectual one. An idea gently pushing on the inside of my ribcage, marinating in my bone marrow, lurking behind the shrunken pupils in the bright light of my bathroom mirror.
That impetus is there, compelling me to write, to create something. It’s the seed of something. What it is exactly, I’m not quite sure. But I want to plant that seed, cultivate it, and let it grow.
So here I am, planting that seed. I needed a space to write for myself, so I started a Substack. This is my small patch of loamy soil.
I’m still not sure exactly what this space will look like. I intend to keep it open-ended, and I hope to carve out enough time in my week-to-week life to write something often enough to build some momentum.
I’ll write about topics that interest me. I tend toward the narrative first-person, which is a very Millennial style of writing. (The Why I’m Starting This Substack essay is a quintessential form of that genre.) In the past, I’ve written publicly about sports, books, West Michigan, history, politics… and a hideous castle. I have some ideas for what’s next here. It will be an eclectic mix.
Ultimately, more than anything, this is a space for me to write publicly outside of my day job.
I consider writing to be a meaningful experience on its own, but it’s even more meaningful when people read what I write. An audience, however small it may be, is a special thing. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read what I’ve written. After I published an essay about my experience with depression, some folks reached out to say that it had really resonated with them. That meant everything to me.
As I cultivate this impetus to write and begin publishing here, I hope that you, dear reader, enjoy following along.