How knowing what I don't want led me to a writing career

10 years ago, if you showed me the word "copywrite," I'd tell you you wrote "copyright" wrong.

I also thought you couldn't earn money with writing because everyone and their cat would sneer and shout like Garth from Wayne’s World:

But that disdain and pessimism from people around me and even other writers made me want to bite into finding writing work even more.

You could say I was like Wayne, when he wanted so badly to buy that white guitar.

Because, you see, writing is the only skill I'm really good at. Yeah, I know it sounds a bit lame, but it’s the truth. Also, I love it enough to push through all the tough stuff that comes with it.
So leaving it before even trying to see whether it'll work out was out of the question.

I tried and I tried. Got my first job in marketing as a social media intern at a local theatre, cold emailed a book review site and got the gig (I still write there), wrote, edited and sent out dozens of stories to pretty much every literary magazine or website in the region. As time went by, the content writing jobs got better, but the fiction writing halted a bit. I was juggling the awfulness of working an 8-hour job, so that left me with no energy for fiction. But at least I read a lot and wrote sketches of stories that would later be a part of my first story collection, published in 2021.

10 years later, here I am, still writing for a living!
I also became a published and awarded author - 3 books in total. This also came with some money, btw.

When I look at it now, the recipe was "simple":
1 kg of "I know what I don't want to do",
500 grams of "let's find something closest to writing for a living" (for me that was digital marketing),
5 kg of patience and love,
1 teaspoon of pure, unfiltered luck.

I'm still not exactly where I want to be, but where I am now is way better than being somewhere I'd hate.

Other than hanging on to writing, what helped me the most was clarity on what I DON'T want to do. For me it was teaching Croatian and philosophy in high schools and working in tourism (both of which I tried and they made me miserable).

This is why I feel when you know what you don't want or where you draw the line, it's easier to find that sweet spot between "this makes me happy" and "this earns me money."

You may not make your wildest dreams come true, but maybe that next best thing is what you actually need.