Why I Will Never Be a Copywriter

I admire those who can; I’m just not one of them.

Photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash

When I was ten, my parents bought my siblings and me a computer.

We didn’t have the internet, and the only things you could do on that computer were to read things on Encarta (the Microsoft encyclopedia), paint, play solitaire or Minesweeper, or use the Microsoft Office package as your creativity would allow you to.

My creativity and boredom led me to use the computer to write. So, I wrote a fantasy book about a girl who was trapped in a magical house and had to solve puzzles to escape.

Every time I came home from school, my entertainment was to see what else I could think of to add to my little book. I spent hours and hours working on it, and I was proud of my creation.

For me, writing was a hobby—something I did to play and entertain myself.

So when my parents fixed their budget to allow us to have internet months later, I forgot about the book, and it was lost, along with all the things we had left in a forgotten folder for years.

When I entered university, despite having chosen engineering, I had to take electives.

At that moment, I wasn’t passionate about anything beyond money (and my college didn’t have any financial courses), so I decided to take speech writing because it seemed easy, and I didn’t want anything that involved a lot of thinking.

In the course, I was exceptionally talented in the assignments. The teacher always congratulated me on the texts I created, and my confidence about being a writer increased considerably.

However, one day, I mentioned to my father that the teacher recommended that I change to journalism, and he simply responded, “In this country, that career will take you nowhere.”

So, after I finished the course, I forgot about writing again. It was just a hobby that helped me with my boredom, and that’s it.

But life takes many turns, and writing came back to me four years later.

During the pandemic, I found myself with too much free time. I spent hours and hours on YouTube, and my work was too monotonous…