How a plumbing problem helped me find a lost dream.

Life has a way of telling you something you need to know. And it all started with a bathtub that wouldn’t drain.

When I realized I needed to call a plumber, I knew I had to clear out my coat closet; the access panel to the bathtub is in the closet, tucked behind a heating shaft. It’s a horrible design, but I was just glad I wasn’t going to have to contort myself to get to the panel.

I took everything out of the closet: coats, gloves, scarves — and the boxes. I had almost forgotten about the boxes.

Shortly after my father passed away nine years ago, my mother decided to completely clear out the attic. The attic was where she stored childhood for me, my brother and my sister. Mostly toys and games; much of it was too damaged to keep. But she also saved just about every school assignment we ever completed. There were boxes and boxes of “school stuff,” as we called it.

Being a former museum employee, I knew I had to stabilize these items for long-term care. No one was going to care about this stuff, except me, but I knew the conservators I had worked with would be so proud of me. And then, after I bought acid-free storage boxes and lovingly labeled each box with the contents it held, I never looked at them again.

So when I pulled the boxes out of the coat closet, I had to go through them. The call of the past was pretty powerful.

And in those boxes I discovered something I didn’t even know I had lost: how much I enjoyed writing.

I’ve only just recently made writing my job. But never in my 52 years did I ever consider writing as a profession. Those storage boxes reminded me how much I loved it so long ago.

In second grade, I earned the Mary Malafouris Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in the field of creative writing. I have no idea who Mary Malafouris is, and I certainly had no memory of winning the award.

But it reminded me that creative writing was my favorite subject in 6th grade. My teacher, Ms. Schmidt, had a little metal box of 3 x 5 cards with writing prompts. I can still picture her classroom and leafing through the cards to find something to write about.

I remembered the short story class I had in 9th or 10th grade. I remember learning all about themes and reading “The Most Dangerous Game.”

I can still remember the words I misspelled in the spelling bees in 6th, 7th and 8th grades: opportunity, envy and counterfeit.

Something of the dream remained. When I decided to finish my bachelor’s degree, not surprisingly, I chose to major in English. I wasn’t the slightest bit dismayed when I went to my advisor’s office and saw a sign with the average starting salaries of all liberal arts majors; I was almost proud that English was on the bottom of the list. I would starve for my art!

But by the time I graduated, the biggest thing on my mind was getting a job. My first position did, after all, deal with words: I was a proofreader at an advertising agency. I enjoyed it for a few years, but quickly grew bored.

I moved from job to job after that. Almost all of them had some element of writing. Usually when someone figured out that I knew what a dangling modifier was and whether or not to use the Oxford comma, I became the default copy editor. Sometimes there were more challenging assignments. But dealing with words all day, every day, never really entered my mind.

Even after I “won” National Novel Writing Month back in 2012, not once did I think that writing was something I could do that people would pay me for. (And I won again this year too.)

It wasn’t until I started working with a life/business coach early last year that the dream re-emerged.

When I finally realized it for it was, I couldn’t imagine why it had taken me so long to find it again.

Why do we lose the dreams of childhood? Not everyone does. My brother knew at 12 years old that he wanted to be a computer programmer. And that’s what he is. It’s never been anything else.

Did I consider writing impractical? Maybe. For all the bravado about that low starting salary, when you’re done with college, you need a job that will pay the bills. Perhaps I didn’t think I was good enough. Perhaps I believed that something I hadn’t thought about in years must not have been that important to me.

I certainly don’t regret that I didn’t find it sooner; I’ve had wonderful experiences, learned many things, made lifelong friends. But now I’ve found my true purpose in life. And this time, no matter what, I’m not letting it slip away.