Honestly, much of my adult life feels like one long series of alternative career paths. Teaching is an alternative.
After college, I pursued journalism and landed a job at a daily newspaper as a copy editor. I lasted exactly one year. I really wonder what it would have been like if I’d been a reporter instead. I told my editor I only wanted to write, and he threw me a bone now and then with a feature story. But after getting passed over one too many times to move up as a writer, my “alternative history” began.
I moved to Atlanta and spent more than a decade writing and editing a nonprofit magazine—good, meaningful work that still let me tell stories. Then came another turn: I joined a more traditional journalism magazine for a year and a half before catching the wrong end of an economic downturn. So, I shifted directions again.
For seven years, I was the administrator at a small church—about as far from the newsroom as you can get. But it was during that time that my life shifted in the most important way: I married Daryl and eventually moved to Jacksonville. By then, journalism as I’d known it had dried up, and it had been eons since I’d been in a newsroom. So, I tried my hand at teaching—and it stuck.
This is my ninth year in the classroom, and I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I weren’t doing this. I’m kind of too old to restart again, and the only other thing I’d rather be doing is writing full-time—just like I wanted to do when I started. Now, my only option for that seems to be as a self-employed writer, hopefully a successful novelist. But isn’t that what millions of people dream of doing—writing the “Great American Novel”?
I still have that hope. But until then, I’ll keep doing what I can to awaken young people to the beauty of the written word. Maybe that’s the career I was meant to have all along.
Copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt.
