Trying Not to Be a Writer.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to become almost anything except a writer.

I’ve always loved writing. I couldn’t tell you where that love came from or when it started, but ever since I could type, I’ve always returned to it.

The funny thing is that no matter which career I chose, writing always seemed to find me.

One of the careers I loved most was public speaking. At the time, I thought that was because I enjoyed standing on stage. Looking back, I think I was just a writer with a more palatable job title and a somewhat clearer career path.

I mean, becoming an author, a blogger, or whatever we were calling ourselves at the time just sounded like a lot of hope and hard work. As a person with disability, the idea of saying I wrote for a living felt ridiculous. Like, sure you do, sweetheart.

Writing was one of those careers that people seemed to put in the same category as becoming a rock star or a professional athlete. Sure, a few people made it work, but for everyone else it was something you did around your “real” job.

Public speaker. Consultant. Advocate. Those sounded like real careers. They sounded practical. They sounded like jobs people could understand.

I mean, I also spent years trying to become an elite athlete in a sport most people have never heard of, so it’s not as though I had a history of choosing sensible careers. The difference was that boccia at least had a pathway. There were state teams, national teams, funding, coaches, competitions. Writing just felt like shouting into the void and hoping someone eventually noticed.

I’d tried to turn writing into my job a couple of times before. Years ago, I’d started a blog, convinced that if I kept writing people would eventually find me. After a while I gave up. It was a huge amount of work, I had no real plan, and I couldn’t see how it would ever become a career.

I kept looking for careers that fit. Sometimes they almost did, until I ran into another requirement my body couldn’t meet. The path into AAC, a field I’d spent years working and speaking in, wasn’t as straightforward as it looked. Loving the work and knowing it wasn’t always enough.

I spent years looking for the career I thought I was supposed to have. Then, slowly, those options started disappearing. Some weren’t compatible with my body. Others weren’t compatible with my life. Some simply weren’t realistic anymore. Eventually, I stopped asking, “What job do I want?” and started asking, “What can I build that will still work in ten years?”

I loved public speaking, but there was one problem. It was always dependent on someone else. Someone had to invite me. Someone had to have a budget. Someone had to decide my story was worth hearing.

Most of the time, I was invited to tell my AAC story. I was grateful for those opportunities, but I was more than one story. I had opinions on disability policy, technology, sport, independence, and a hundred other things that never quite fit into a one-hour keynote about communication.

The other problem was that I was still in my twenties. I simply hadn’t lived enough lives yet to build an entire speaking career from personal stories alone. Public speaking can be an incredible career, but it’s also one that’s largely controlled by other people. You wait for invitations. You hope someone has the budget. You spend a lot of time convincing strangers you’re worth putting on a stage.

I also learned that admiration doesn’t always translate into income. One organisation spent weeks pursuing me about a speaking engagement. We talked through ideas and what they were hoping I’d present. Everything seemed to be falling into place. Then I sent what was, frankly, a fairly modest speaking quote. Suddenly, silence. It wasn’t the first time I’d discovered that people could genuinely value my work right up until the moment they had to pay for it.

I realised I didn’t want my livelihood to depend on whether someone else decided I was worth listening to.

I then spent about a year at university, trying to stay on the typical career track because, obviously, I needed a legitimate career. I wanted a job title that even the most ableist fucker would have to respect.

And writer wouldn’t exactly give me that credibility.

Around that time, my body decided it had had more than enough and my shoulder sustained an injury I could never fully recover from. That forced me to confront a question I’d been avoiding for years. How much longer was I going to keep chasing careers that were becoming harder and harder to sustain? That was when I decided to stop looking for the perfect job and start building a writing career instead.

Making the decision and following through turned out to be two different things. It still took me several years to stop chasing more legitimate career paths and commit to writing properly.

Once I’d made the decision, I didn’t start with essays. I started with a book. For years I’d wanted to write one, but it had always lived in the same category as “maybe someday.” This time, I sat down and began.

Ironically, even though I’d always dreamed of writing fiction, it was non-fiction that finally gave me a writing career.

Funnily enough, starting to write my first book taught me something unexpected. I realised I didn’t just want to write books. I needed to build a writing business that would allow me to keep writing them.

I realised my website wasn’t where I wanted to build my business anymore. I wanted somewhere built around writing, where I could publish regularly and let my work build on itself over time.

So I shut it down and started building the publication I’d wanted all along.

This time felt different. I wasn’t just writing because I enjoyed it. I was creating something that might last.

For the first time, I wasn’t looking for a job title. I was trying to build an asset. Something I owned. Something that didn’t disappear because someone changed budgets or stopped inviting me to speak. If I could build an audience that trusted my work, then every essay, every book and every project would add to something bigger.

Writing gave me something public speaking never could. It let me be a whole person. I wasn’t limited to the version of myself that fit neatly into a conference program. I could write about disability, technology, sport, home, politics, burnout, or whatever else had occupied my mind that week. For the first time, I didn’t have to ask whether a story fit the event. I only had to ask whether it was worth telling.

I also stopped worrying so much about whether “writer” sounded like a real job. I’d spent years trying to find careers that other people respected. Eventually I realised I cared far more about building one that worked for me.

Looking back, writing was never the backup plan. It was the thread running through every career I ever loved. I just kept introducing myself as something else because I thought those titles were more legitimate.