What Am I Going To Do Next?

Since Ricardo got sick, three and a half years ago, I started thinking about the future in a different way. My main question was ‘what am I going to do next?’, without a clear answer until very recently. I jumped between getting another degree, in Psychology, to work in the retail industry, but nothing resonates as much as writing.

A friend was surprised when I mentioned that I was going to attend a writing course. ‘Writing? Like writing books? Like famous writing?’, asked my friend. It sounds like a funny question when I realized this is what I do best but most of my friends in Canada know nothing about it. And I’ve been doing since I was a teenager, first experiencing with poetry, evolving to school assignments and letters to friends. Tons of them.

At the university, when I was getting my Communication’s degree (Journalism), it was probably a daily task specially during my trainee years, first in PR, then working on a local newspaper, on a sports’ agency and back to PR for many, many years. PR writing was not exactly what motivated me so I did reach some editors trying to sell my articles and learned a whole lot with them, mostly in Photography when I didn’t get published because of crappy photos to accompany a good story. I ended up being published – not once or twice, but many times, including a cover, complete articles with text and photos, and monthly columns in some of them.

All this in Brazil, in Portuguese, my mother tongue. In 2005, I moved to Canada and realized that my phone was going to be silent for a while. Accustomed to be known in the industry and have work offered to me on a monthly basis, I found myself in a new country, new language that I almost didn’t speak, and a whole new future that I had no idea what was going to bring. After almost nine years in Canada, I am ready for a challenge: work as a writer, using my second language for a change. And to flex my writing muscles, here I am, ready to write a blog post as often as I can and see where this will bring me.