Somewhere along the way the realization hit me. How had I not seen the obvious signs? Were they tucked away, hidden in the depths of my soul? Confined to stay in the dark? I must have thought that one cannot embrace both sides of the brain: creativity and logic. I must have assumed that both cannot be embraced and that the one side of analyzing and studying business skills was the one that would get the job and get the career.
In college, I had to take two English classes as part of the liberal arts requirements, and I secretly loved them. While everyone else I knew used their AP credits to get out of taking English in college, I was glad I didn't. I loved analyzing poems in class and figuring out what the author was saying by way of words that I was attracted to, for some reason. I was like the other end of the magnet and I felt drawn to them.
It was my senior year that I finally realized there was perhaps something more to be discovered in my fondness of English literature. I started to wonder why I felt creatively dry when all I did was crunch numbers and balance sheets all day, and study accounting concepts. All the business jargon that was jumbling in my mind was not fulfilling my deep desire for story, words, thinking deeply about life, observing. That is why I signed up for the Tolkien class. I took it on a pass/fail basis because I didn't think I had the skills to write essays with the creative imagination and depth that the other students would have, and I didn't want to get a low grade at the end of my college life before graduation. Turns out, I think I would have gotten a low A, but what did I know?
Everyone else in class was an English, Art, or Music major. I was the only Accounting nerd, and my professor joked with me on the first day saying that his wandering around from topic to topic might drive my organized Accounting mind crazy, but his class was the change of pace and giant dive into the imagination that I'd been longing for.
It was in that class that I began to see that I could read the more difficult of Tolkien's works, The Silmarillion, and understand the story and enjoy it. I felt as it these kinds of stories were unreachable for me before. As if I didn't have the skills to read them, or something. I was encouraged that my essays received pretty good grades, and while my analyzing skills were not exemplary, I began to recognize the underlying themes and meanings of stories and characters. Before this class I did not think I had any talent in writing or reading. I knew that I had always liked it, but here is where I learned how to read more deeply and to see the connection of things in stories.
The grammar and general good English skills I always had helped me in reading and writing, and also in deciphering some of the tougher passages of Tolkien, with help from the professor. We even dabbled in Old English, and as the professor read some lines of Old English we had to try to translate it ourselves.
I would say that I have always had the passion for reading, words, literature, story, and imagination, but it was re-born when I took the Tolkien class because I realized that I could read all I wanted on my own, and still be the business nerd who wrote out all the accounting equations and notes by hand to study, because that is how I learn best. I realized I could co-mingle the two sides of my brain, melding the business sense with imagination, and that is what I have done evermore.
Perhaps it is to my advantage now that I focused so much attention on the business side so that I gained the skills and knowledge that aided me in my jobs, but I have found that my English skills/grammar/imagination/love of words has set me apart from others in that I take great care in how I write, which can be both professional and sometimes creative, because it is something I love.
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