One of the more interesting parts of life lately has been looking around and realizing I’m doing a thing pretty far from any activity that used to be my daily. Yesterday I helped Dennis paint the trim on my dad’s place. This was an activity that I’ve done exactly zero in my life up to now. The closest I’ve come to the painting of household surfaces was about a decade ago when I swabbed the walls of my old apartment white right before I sold the place. I used a roller on the end of a stick and at the time thought it was damn difficult and was glad to get back to my desk job. I was reminded of that yesterday when pulling on the same pair of jeans that had been suitably splattered during my first go-round with (oil-based? water-based? honestly not even sure) paint. Soon after I’d worn those jeans and someone asked me where I’d gotten them because at the time—before the manufactured-rip look was in—the manufactured-paint-splatter look was in. I was damn proud to know I’d had something to do with making the mess I was wearing rather than paying for the experience.

Experiences. Funny things those. At some point yesterday while trying to be patient and concise with the paint so as not to let big globs of gray drip onto places it wasn’t meant to go I thought about the things I’d done that seemed far from the life I thought I was supposed to be having. Currently I’m feeling fairly solid about where I’m situated, but there were absolutely many times I’ve looked around and thought how in hell did I get here?

There was the time after I’d left my record company job—the one where I was director of video promotions and had a staff of two under me and knew I’d made a wrong career choice because my days consisted of convincing MTV and VH1 to play videos of people whose music I 92.9% didn’t like—when I worked the phones for a focus group. A real clarity moment during that time was when I was standing on a NYC sidewalk trying to interview people about whether they enjoyed cleaning (their clothes, their bodies, their spaces, their minds? I’ve blocked out those details). It was cold. I was miserable and very freaked out that someone would recognize me from my music biz days and think what the hell happened to her? Obviously I was already thinking that about myself, so I didn’t need anyone from my past to say it. At one point I wanted to scream out at all the passersby as I stood with my clipboard “don’t you know who I’ve been?” I didn’t do that. I mostly just hid inside a bank machine vestibule and darted out to talk to women with rolling carts figuring they might be more willing to answer my questions seeing as how they were possibly on their way to shop or do laundry. At the very least they were moving slower than everyone else. I was also mostly wrong about all of that and I came back to the workplace having woefully underperformed. A few weeks later, I found a way out of that job.

What I’d wanted to do after leaving the music industry was write. Stories, articles. Long-form and short-form. Sit with a topic and spool out words. So naturally I became a teacher. Why, you ask, did I not write and write and write? (I asked myself that too.) I could say it was because I needed to make money. That was true. Or that it was because I was crap-ass at pitching myself. That was also true. So I taught writing workshops in the public schools. I’m not gonna lie: There were times I’d stand in a classroom full of kids yelling and screaming and thinking writing was a punishment and I’d want to scream out “don’t you know who I’ve been?” I did once say I knew Eminem in a desperate effort to shut them up. I don’t know why I thought that would work and as I remember it, no one cared. Plus, I didn’t know know Eminem. I’d just been at some kind of MTV event with him and we nodded at each other because he probably thought I was someone else.

So there I was still not really doing the thing I wanted to do. But, I said to myself that I was gaining life experience. And this was in fact true. By the time I returned back to magazines and was able to understand how a human is capable of holding a few different things in their life at once, I’d begun to understand that what we do is not an either/or. I’d become a journalist because being a writer of fiction was never going to pay my bills. No matter that my dream was to sit in a room alone and write stories, I would go out into a crowd and write stories. In the last few years, discovering that I can be just fine at doing the management of people bits in a job that if you’d told me in my youth I’d be doing, I would have been very sad for myself. There was no sadness there. There was enjoyment to learn I was capable of doing a thing I thought I was bad at: the management of people. I also learned to make time to do what I love, which is, yes, writing. So I did that on the side. Wrote a book. Whether that piece of writing is read by anyone other than me and the handful of friends and agents I’ve shared it with, who knows. And sort of, who cares.

What I’m saying here is that I realize nothing ever looks like I think it will. So I paint the trim. I start a new story. And I know who I’ve been.

What things do you look back on and think yeah, I did that!