Finding my way

I’ve always known I was intelligent. I’m not saying this as an egotistic self-indulgence but as a matter of fact, neither complimentary not deprecating.

As a kid, I started to realise that having an inquiring mind was not unusual. Devouring volumes of encyclopaedias and other reference books to satisfy my curiosity was. Doubting the train of logic of common fairy tales was.

Up to my teens, I’d (almost) always be able to get away with last-minute preparation for exams. No matter how poor I was in a subject I’d pass the exam somehow, and often with only a night’s worth of studying. With each new step in my academic career, taking on more and more difficult and less and less likeable subjects, I managed to pull through, and even score more than decent grades.

That ended when I entered university. That was when I embarked on the worst, most dislikeable, most gawdawful difficult course of study. Worse than science.

Cosmologists have long theorised the existence of anti-matter as a logical have-to-be (sorry, the word eludes me right now). They say that for every thing, every particle, every atom, every sub-atom, there exists its anti-self, a negative version of itself. Theoretically, if you and your anti-you should ever meet, you’d cancel each other out of existence, leaving behind only a flash of energy to indicate that you ever existed.

I had finally met my anti-being, and it was accounting. That’s the way it felt anyway, to a less spectacular extent. I didn’t understand the least of it, and it didn’t suffer me to be alongside it. It was as if it drained the life force out of me as I was struggling to study it, and only after I’d forgotten most of it did I feel more fully alive again. No matter how much I mugged (which, frankly, was not as much as might have been necessary), I flunked just about half my way through the degree programme. After hurdling every academic subject I’d ever done, I’d finally hit a wall I couldn't go over or around.

In the end, I made it after all, but just barely, with a mere pass. Truth to be told, everything I studied for that degree flew out the window the moment I stepped out of the exam hall for the last time. And I actually contemplated a job in the line. I even went for interviews for auditing and accounting jobs. When I saw each of the interviewers’ faces when they looked at my university transcript, I knew I wouldn't be climbing up that corporate ladder very quickly. Yes, they all ask for your transcript and even question you on your grades for individual modules.

Then a window of opportunity opened, just a crack. But it was enough. A single company looking for an editorial assistant had decided to interview almost all candidates that wrote in. Hence, this fresh accounting graduate (with no portfolio) found herself explaining for the first time why she would make this drastic change in industry. It was the first of many, many times she would have to explain it over the years.

It was ultimately the writing test at the interview that did it. I finally found that a natural (and once thought of as useless) talent would become my money maker. I promptly dumped my young, dreary job in financial research and embarked on the start of my career in writing.

And I haven’t stopped since.