Tia Giacalone on Her Journey As An Author
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I’m definitely not a life coach but I know a couple things.
For someone who had always wanted to be an author, I made terribly shortsighted yet well-intentioned decisions on my journey to get here.
I know that taking the long road is a well-documented travel plan, and I truly believe that asking a seventeen-year-old girl to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life before she’s even graduated high school is a bad idea, but still. My road wasn’t so much just a long one as it was a meandering Sunday afternoon drive to destinations unknown, and not always in a cute, coming-of-age, road-trippy way.
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The dream was always there, in the back of my mind, even as I segued out of college and into a trade career (albeit a creative one.) I wrote whenever I had the chance, even ran a blog for a few years, but I still thought of myself as a “writer” - complete with quotation marks. In fact, the quotation marks were the most important part, because they meant I wasn’t fully committed. I was still just... waiting.
It was after a conversation a couple years ago with one of my best friends that I decided I was ready. He asked me about a half-finished manuscript of mine that he’d read a couple months before, and I shrugged.
“I don’t have time. You know - work, and the baby. I feel guilty when I take time to write that I could be spending with her.” It was true but it also wasn’t. I didn’t have the time because I wasn’t making the time, and he knew it.
But all he said was “You have such an amazing opportunity to show her how big her life can be, and that it’s never too late to go after what she wants. Get it together.”
So I did. And here we are. Book 2.
It wasn’t easy, of course not, and I cried and stress-ate my feelings and still have guilt sometimes, but I don’t make excuses any more. There’s a whole second level of doubt when it comes to creating something and putting it out there for the world to read, but it’s more exciting than scary... it’s liberating.
I’m not a life coach. I’m not even usually a good example of anything but an incredible hair day. But I really believed my friend when he said I had an opportunity, and I wasn’t going to waste it on waiting for some intangible right time when I’d be ready to follow my dreams. I’d done enough of that already. We all have, haven’t we? It holds us back from what we really want, and it’s a hard habit to break, but it’s possible.
Now I am a writer - no quotation marks necessary.
About the Author
Tia Giacalone is a hairstylist, a former English Lit major, and blogger-turned-New Adult author. After many years of writing a now-retired personal blog, her work was also featured on numerous forums including Open Salon and Hooray Collective. She believes in eyeliner as a defense mechanism, equal rights, and Marc Jacobs. Her favorite things include One Direction, story time, and the overzealous use of punctuation. When not writing and reading, she binge watches only the best (subjective) TV shows. Tia lives in Southern California with her husband, daughter, and tiny dog.
