Did I Predict My Future at Eleven Years Old?

I was finishing my last year of elementary school in the Netherlands, and my family was preparing to immigrate to the United States. Before the big move, my sixth-grade teacher assigned an essay: imagine your life twenty years from this moment.

I wrote an essay titled “Over 20 jaar: een dag uit mijn toekomst” (“Twenty Years Later: A Day in My Future”). I pictured my future self writing “adventure books and such” in my home office with a two-month-old collie named Lassy to keep me company. The colorful illustration that complemented my essay shows me sitting behind a massive wooden desk with a poster on the wall that says “I love boeken schrijven!!!!!” (“I love writing books!!!!!”) and a note taped to the door that reads “Sst, niet storen” (“Shh, don’t disturb”). A winged bicycle flies by the office window, and a golden trophy is proudly displayed on a shelf. Apparently I won a book prize in 2020.

I loved to read and write when I was young. By the time I was ten years old I had notebooks full of stories, poems, and comics, many of which I had created in a collaborative effort with my older sister. We even illustrated and bound our own book by hand, making sure to include the publisher and book blurb on the back cover.

Accuracy in writing has always been important to me. (I’m a bit of a perfectionist.) I vividly remember when a fellow seventh grader wrote “Deleware” in huge block letters on our group poster in social studies. I was still learning English at the time, so I had trouble explaining the vowel problem to my classmate. She ignored me and continued writing. Soon after, the teacher came by and corrected us; her tone seemed to say, “You should’ve known better.” I felt embarrassed and frustrated, although now it seems a bit silly to care so much about a misspelled word on a school poster.

A decade later I was introduced to copyediting in graduate school. I joined the board of a student-run scholarly publication, and I acquired a whole new set of skills: using digital editing tools, applying a style guide, and communicating with student writers. After all the hard work was done, it was immensely satisfying to hold the published journal in my hands and flip through the end result. The following year I was nominated as the managing copy editor, and I navigated the challenge of leading a small team of other editors remotely.

My studies led me to work as a school psychologist from my midtwenties to early thirties. During this time, I kept being drawn to editing in my work, such as revising a district-wide psychological report template and suicide prevention handbook. I loved the challenge of carefully considering the wording, organization, and formatting of documents that would ultimately help school psychologists write stronger reports and navigate stressful situations.

Now it is 2022, and it has been twenty years since I wrote that essay. I’m not a published author, and I didn’t win a bestseller award. But in some ways, life is oddly similar to how I imagined it when I was eleven years old. Looking back, maybe life has been gradually leading me exactly to where I had envisioned myself to be one day.

This year, I transitioned to working as a full-time freelance editor, copyediting and proofreading nonfiction books and academic manuscripts. I write this post in my home office at a big wooden desk with one of my dogs by my side. Apparently even flying bicycles are a thing these days.

I should probably write a new essay so that some of my predictions may manifest themselves over the next twenty years. Or at the very least, I should buy a poster that says “I love editing books!!!!!!”