I’ve always been a writer. Some of my earliest memories are of writing, as evinced by my graffiti on my own toys and on objects around my childhood home—just as much as the page long epics I wrote around the 1st and 2nd grade.

I am one of those fools who has been sitting on an unused gift. I did not try to make a living out of my writing until last year. I finally leaned into my gift while I was finishing graduate school, when I spoke with a career counselor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I told her that I had gaps in my resume, inter alia other issues that make me look risky on paper. The field that I was trying to return to, I explained, had high levels of accountability in its hiring processes: public administration, local government, and nonprofits.

The career counselor asked me, “Is there anything that you just like doing? Like something you do and you just enjoy it?”

I said, “I like writing. I write every day.”

“Maybe you should try applying to writing jobs.”

I stammered about my excuses. ~”I don’t have the right degree for that. Employers wouldn’t see it in my resume. I don’t have a lot of things published.” Etc.

But then I realized what was going on, and I saw the fallibility in my thinking. I said, “I’ll try it out.”

Part of the problem is that pursuing gifts was not modeled for me, though I did have other support. In my family, passions were things that you did in your free time, not for self support. I was supported toward the practical, but what is practical to one generation is a mere ideal to the next. Practical pursuits left me chasing my own tail, and they had no practical use in my life, hence the gaps in my resume, and my struggle to be practical based on conjecture.

I applied to several jobs. I was interviewed for all of them. I was hired for one.

I became a writing tutor at San Antonio College, the community college I attended from 2005 to 2008. It was my first job related to writing, and I fell in love with it, and my life changed forever, for the better.

Did you know that when you lean into your gifts, your life stops unraveling, and it starts unfolding? When we run from our gifts, when we avoid our calling, when we think we’re tying things together, and we think we’re grabbing and biting on practicality, we’re merely tying slipknots, that give way to our own tension.

Go on vacation. Pop. Get sick. Pop. See others living for all moments, and you just getting by in this moment. Pop. All those little slip knots come undone, and you start to unravel.

But when you lean in to your gifts, and when you see that those gifts are not for you, but for a kingdom, and for the betterment of all creation…

This is when a new dimension opens up, and those silly slip knots you were tying were flat ideas on facets of other worlds. Like a flower blooming, like an egg hatching, like marine life breaching water, like a bird diving under, like the night sky revealing the stars, and the dawn revealing the atmosphere… your gifts open a whole new meaning for your life, and whether you use them or not, is a choice given to you, and made daily.

I am returning to my website, this blog, after a long hiatus. I finished grad school, I settled into my new job and other pursuits, passions that provide the scaffolding of who I am, rather than as the appurtenances to some feigned practicalities.

Cheers to a new era for Dom the Writer.