Changing careers is like living a double life.

As you can see, I find it difficult to find time to update this blog regularly. This is because I don’t like to blog while sitting at my desk at work (just seems like a conflict of interest, and I try not to mix any of these elements). And when sitting at my desk at home, homework assignments dominate most of my time. After spending a day writing for a profession at a computer all day – when I get home, the idea of pumping out a researched blog hardly tempts me.

Despite this, I know I am a decent writer, and thoroughly enjoy it. I have been writing fiction since I was 6-years-old, which has slowed down dramatically since entering my current profession. I have been a journalist for going on eight years, and have been editor of a small town newspaper for six of those eight. I know the business. I know how to write. I know what makes a good story, and pretty much have free reign to write what I want.

So, as I’ve tiptoed into the realm of nutrition and health, I knew I had no other choice in life: I knew I would find a way to incorporate writing into my next career incarnation, however that would develop. Although I thought I’d be teaching creative writing by now at the college level, fate had something better in store for me. I have acquired a great amount of interest in teaching through information, and learning how to use social media to disseminate that information has become a fun passion. I am poised to take my new career to those arenas.

For some reason, though, I never felt comfortable enough to bring the little bit of education I’d garnered into the professional realm I am currently in. I kept my musings to blogs with a limited following, gathering up my courage. I dreamed of landing a ready-made health or nutrition writing position in some magazine or online news media outlet, employing three of my biggest passions: Food and nutrition, writing, and teaching/informing the public. I thought once that happened, I could finally stand proud and say, ‘Ah, at last. Someone has deemed me a nutrition writer.’ Days, weeks, months went by, and I was still caged to blogs.

And then, one day – it happened.

Last month, an opportunity came up to write a food or nutrition-related article for a local magazine my company puts out quarterly. As a favor to a coworker, I threw together an article about something I had become familiar with recently: Gluten-free diets.