I Had To Work For My Dreams, One Terrible Job At A Time
And the destination got lost in the journey
My first jobs were silver service at a hotel, wrapping haddock in a chip shop, and scooping coleslaw into pots with my bare hands in a cold foods factory. The glamour was real.
It only fueled my writing!
I wrote about all those things. I wrote my way into work experience at the Lincolnshire Free Press and Spalding Guardian; my local rag. They published my first poem when I was 11!
My mum submitted that without me knowing. I was mortified.
I didn’t consider that poem about a sad tadpole my finest work. I had some excellent prose in my notepad about a talking owl, that mum didn’t even know about.
But you know what happened?
The newspaper remembered me three years later, when I asked for a job.
I was so excited for my first day of work experience. I assumed I’d write the front page news and get a by-line, and that the New York Times would be on the phone before tea time.
As I sat hunched in their draughty, cavernous storage room with instructions to file more papers than I’d ever wrapped that haddock in, back in the chippy, I tried not to let the underworld of journalism steal my light.
I was the best damn filer that place had ever seen. iCloud could not have competed with 14-year old Becky. I was so good at putting things in the right folders that when I begged for a story, they let me write about…
A tulip parade.
A haunted pub.
A school performance of Bugsy Malone.
Years later they called me, knowing I was in New York on 9/11. It wasn’t as researched as my piece on Bugsy Malone. But I finally got my front-page story.
I was fired from a few jobs, too. The McDonald’s breakfast shift was one. Serving pints in a pub was another (I may have given a few too many Buds away to my buddies).
For a while, I made cold calls for a window installer. The lonely old people I spoke to daily had the BEST stories!
I’ve been a jello shot girl in New York. A morning radio assistant in Sydney. Once, as a uni student in Lincoln, I landed a job packing Walkers in a crisp factory.
I had unlimited Square crisps in my dorm for a month.
It did not make up for never getting paid.
My point is, on the path to becoming a “real” writer, I was writing the whole time. Probably more prolifically than I do now. From chips shops to serving jello shots, the destination got lost on the journey.
It was one and the same. Those experiences lit a rocket under me; gave me inspiration on a daily basis for a blog that grew… and grew… and eventually scored me a book deal. I didn’t stop then. I wouldn’t have stopped, even if my dream had made me rich.
Which it didn’t.
I discovered the fun was writing up the dark times as well as the good. Finding the people who could relate; gathering my tribe.
Every single bad job was a good one, in that respect. Except maybe the coleslaw one. Dunking my gloved hands into vats of it for hours on end left me with a chilling aversion to creamed cabbage and carrots.
I will always pass on the coleslaw, thanks.
Of course, I consider myself lucky, as a person of relative privilege. While I don’t come from money, and neither have I ever had too much, I had a Care-Bear-smile kind of childhood with a supportive family who, while shocked at some of my decisions over the years — like when I announced I was moving to Dubai to work on an Arabic magazine — were always there with a bemused smile and a nod of encouragement.
I learned to look at life as a series of experiences that can always be re-written. And maybe learning that was the most important job of all.
So what did you do, on the path to where you are now, that didn’t seem all that meaningful at the time? What shaped you, changed you?
What job have you left off your resume, that really deserves top place?
Hi sparkling rainbow-soul — I’m late to the Medium party. But I’m here now. Please follow me if you like my stuff. Thanks!
