The Road Ahead by Laura J. Oliver

This is the story of how I didn’t become what I might have been. And for once I’m not talking about my effort to be a fully evolved spiritual human being. (I look at that this way: not dead, still time.) I’m talking about more concrete aspirations. 

A more versatile voice, and I might have been a singer-songwriter. (Sorry, everyone in my dorm. Sorry, Carole King…Carly Simon.) But I didn’t major in music; I majored in drama. I intended to become an actress who could inspire empathy and goodwill on the screen, but several early experiences derailed that ambition. 

Freshman year, I was cast as Gloria, a young, fresh-faced international model who later reveals she has worked as a prostitute and is rejected by her boyfriend. The play was The Sign in Sydney Burstein’s Window. In the scene where Gloria gets dumped, she reads a note to that effect, then uncaps a bottle of fake pills, downs them all, and fake dies. 

Unfortunately, the male upperclassmen in the cast started a contest with the stagehands to see who could substitute the most graphically suggestive note for my stage prop. I needed to look like I’d just been rejected by the love of my life for the audience, but I was such an insecure people-pleaser that I felt I had to simultaneously acknowledge my castmates’ creativity where they were doubled over laughing in the wings.  

I switched majors. 

Which has me wondering about how you became what you are.  

I graduated from college with a BA in English on a Sunday in May, got married that Friday, and was immediately transported to Norfolk, Virginia, where the Lt. junior grade I had married was shipped out to the Med a month later for the better part of a year. Searching for work in this lonely universe, I discovered my degree was virtually worthless. Only two questions were relevant at every interview: 1) How accurately and fast can you type? Answer: v–e–r–y…s-l-o-w-l-ee and 2) Are you a Navy wife? The prevailing theory being that Navy wives would follow transferred husbands out of state in short order. 

Eventually, I was hired by a real estate company as their receptionist-switchboard operator primarily because I made an impassioned speech to the woman interviewing me about how much I loved work. Pile it on! Pay is secondary. Pleeeease. Give me something to do. I made work sound like a religion I was advocating or a drug I needed. Thinking about it now, I have this picture of myself prostrate on the carpet of the agency, grasping Dixie Donohue by her ankle during my interview, but I’m sure that’s not true.

What I remember most about the job, besides chirping, “Goodman, Segar, Hogan!” into the phone incessantly, was that there was a short in the switchboard, and every time I plugged in a call, I got shocked. No one cared. 

After moving back to Maryland, I entertained the idea of applying to graduate school to become a therapist, but there were too many therapists in my family, and it felt copy-cattish—besides, who needs a license to listen? To search for insights?

 Ha ha. That’s a joke, all you therapists. 

(We know that’s called coaching.) 

Ha ha. Still joking, all you coaches. 

Really, so many people needed representatives of both professions during the pandemic you couldn’t even get an appointment. You don’t need to know how I know. 

Okay, I’ll tell you. I can’t even get an appointment now. I just tried and got an email saying, sorry, as of yesterday, I’m fully booked. Yesterday! Timing is everything, as you’ll see. 

Finally, I applied to a pastoral counseling program at Loyola, and the week I received my acceptance, I got a call from a magazine for which I’d been freelancing, offering me a full-time staff position as associate editor. 

You can always go to school, but to be offered an editorial position 10 minutes from home working on a glossy magazine? That was a rare opportunity. And I guess once I started editing, feature writing, essays, memoirs, and fiction were not far behind. Instead of a Master of Social Work degree, I pursued a Master of Fine Arts. 

And I never looked back. Until now.

I have frequently pictured my life like gold coins cupped in my hands and sometimes I think about what I have spent them on. There are a limited number, and I think about the ones that slipped through my fingers unspent and about how to spend what is left. 

I wonder if I was always meant to write and you were always meant to do what you have done with your life, and our routes were planned, guided, or influenced in some way. I wonder if, from a bird’s eye view, it would have been evident at every turn we were moving closer together—even on opposite sides of the same mountain. I wonder if you were nudged at every fork in the road so that no matter how circuitous your path, you were always going to arrive where you are at this moment. Were you prompted at each intersection? Turn right on Franklin Street. Take Route 302. 

Why did that magazine editor call the very week I was sending my tuition to graduate school? She changed the trajectory of my life in that instant. Instead of listening to stories, I began sharing them.

And because of her, I found you. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.