Finding My Purpose As A Writer

I started journaling when I received my first diary at the age of 9.

The practice of using words to document my thoughts, process my feelings, and weave a story was intuitive from the moment I set pen to page. Throughout my childhood I wrote pen pals and built friendships with kids around the world by sharing compelling narratives about my life on sparkly, carefully selected stationery (I think back to those days as OG social media).

At the age of 14 I decided I wanted to be a copywriter when I grew up, which eventually led me to graduate from San Jose State University’s Advertising program with a minor in Creative Writing. My career took the scenic route, from publishing to advertising sales to retail merchandising – and along the way I kept up the journaling.

When MySpace was all the rage I wrote blog posts to share my adventures, and in the years that followed I’d have multiple personal blogs across a range of subjects. Despite occasionally scoring small writing and proofreading gigs over the years, I kept honing my consumer product marketing expertise, co-founded a hardware product development consultancy in 2013, and helped launch multiple brands over the course of a decade.

After years of feeling happiest writing copy for clients’ websites, blogs, sales materials, packaging and other messaging projects, in 2016 I decided to turn it into a full-time business.

Writing has been my lifelong companion, my most reliable and sometimes only tool for expressing myself and making sense of it all. It’s been so integral for so long that it’s as necessary to me as breathing: I can’t live without it.