In the fall of 1998, I spent six weeks as an intern at Ohio Magazine. I was seventeen. My parents had just bought me a car — a gold, used Saturn that I loved (leather seats and a sunroof! A HUGE upgrade from my 1985 Honda Accord) and named her Sally Saturn, early evidence of a love for alliteration that has never left me — and a downtown Columbus parking garage was brand new territory. I’d practiced the drive the week before. My friend’s mom gave me the shortcut for remembering the street grid: it takes a long way in, but you can spring right out. I still think of that sentence every time I hit Long or Spring Street, almost 30 years later.
I printed the directions from MapQuest on the family desktop. I wore something I thought made me look like I worked there. I was going to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the Manolos. I was going to write.
Except — and this is the part nobody tells you at seventeen — magazines don’t actually employ that many writers. They employ ad staff. Editors. Graphic designers. The writers are mostly freelancers, scattered across their own kitchens, waiting for assignments that will half-pay them. I looked around that building and did the math fast. Huh, I thought. I don’t want to be self-employed.
Reader, I was self-employed by twenty-seven. I have been self-employed every year since. At this point I am, I think, the most unemployable human on earth. I am 44.8 years old and I have never had a resume in my life.
I moved on from the magazine dream quickly. I had already landed an internship at an ad agency in my next rotation during my senior year, and never really looked back. I built a career. I built a company. I learned that a spreadsheet is a love letter to a future version of your business, and that bills get paid on time when you stop flinching at numbers.
I wrote plenty during those years. Manifestos. Decks. Emails that began with attached you will find, which is not what I’d promised my bright-eyed seventeen-year-old self I would ever write
And now here I am, with a Substack and the exact wrong font in my browser bar, writing a thing I’m calling a column because I can. The women who were on the mastheads I once coveted are mostly doing what I’m doing now — newsletters, essays, something slightly off the map of what we once thought writer meant.
It turns out you don’t miss the magazine scene. You miss the girl who wanted to write for it. The kindest thing you can do for her is loosen your grip on the life she planned — and sit down at the one you do have and write anyway.
This one’s for her. Seventeen, one hand on the wheel of Sally Saturn, the other smoothing the MapQuest printout on the passenger seat, a handmade mix CD spinning somewhere in the trunk, sunroof cracked, idling at a light on Long Street with a plan she hadn't quite finished forming.. She became a writer, eventually. And sometimes, I think, better.
