Theme Week…What do I consider my greatest strength?

I am choosing to do a theme week and, ironically, the theme is most apt for the reason I am doing a theme week, instead of just writing.

What do I consider my greatest strength? My perseverance, despite all odds, to accomplish my goals, whatever they may be.

However, this is also my weakness. I am a people pleaser, for everyone but myself. I will do everything I can to help someone, and I can accomplish much when I am helping people, or to make them proud (yay family pressure!). But I always seem to give myself less than half of what I give others.

Attend: As a child, I had no greater aspiration than to be a writer. I LOVE to create. I love to dream and imagine fantastic new adventures. I am now 34 years old, my greatest aspiration, is still to be a writer. What do I do now, you might ask? Well, it is actually quite interesting.

I am an historian and an archeologist (yes, you can do both–also note that archeology is a subfield of anthropology, so technically I am an anthropologist as it consists of more than just archeology, but I digress…). More specifically, I work in public history.

Public history is the act of making history accessible and relatable to the public (vague, I know, there is more, but that is it at its most basic level).

Public history can go in many different directions, but the niches I fit best in are interpretation, research, policy, and historic preservation (this includes a lot too, I will not get into that now, maybe another time). I take research and develop a narrative and interface in which the regular public who are not historians can connect and better understand their history. Ironically, this involves WRITING. A lot. And it has to be interesting, otherwise people are not engaged in said history.

I have to be clear, I LOVE my job. I love history and archeology, and researching and learning, and interpreting that information for people. I totally geek out. Even more, I get to study architectural history (this is more for fun 🙂 ). And, in that sense, I am a writer, I write all the time for my job. I enjoy what I write, and it does involve some significant creativity.

Additionally, the skills I had to learn to become a historian and anthropologist are very helpful when it comes to writing fictional stories of my own. However, I do not make the time to sit down and actually, really, WRITE these stories. I have like six solid different stories swirling in my head at any one point, and they are FANTASTIC tales (I promise I am really quite humble, the stories tend to tell themselves), but I never give myself time to work on them.

This being said, I am working on it, everyday. I think about it everyday. I remind myself (yes everyday) that I have accomplished 99% of my other goals that I have set my mind to. This IS something I can do. I just have to make myself do it. Like I made myself go to grad school (torture–pure torture–but so INTERESTING…those profs are sneaky like that…).

So again, my greatest strength, apparently, is perseverance. Regardless of the fact that I have not yet finished a novel, I will continue to work towards it. I really have no excuses at this point…

And in case you are wondering, writing here is meant to help get me into the habit of writing everyday.

Cheers–