For nearly a decade, my route to work involved taking Story Avenue exit to get to Payne Street to go to an office that once upon a time had been a catholic church. For someone who has started a blog dedicated to stories about being a working woman, it’s impossible not to see the metaphor in what was once my literal daily drive to work. Story. Pain. Church. All the fundamental themes are there.

The classic detail in this metaphor is that for years — seriously, years — I took Story Avenue off of 64 East just past downtown Louisville, Kentucky, morning after morning, and all I thought about when I saw the word Story (if I thought about it at all) was story as in floor level. As in, the building at the bottom of the exit was two stories tall, because it was. Somewhere towards the end of my eight years at that office, I saw the word Story on the exit sign and thought, “Oh wait — story, like a fairy tale.”

This happens with writing. You miss something that has been there all along or you mention an inconsequential pink cardigan in an opening paragraph and realize midway through the entire plot hinges on that sweater. The story you set out to write never being the one you end up telling.

Me, a writer, taking years to see the story right in front of me, is way too often how my life works. I need space to see things clearly, but instead, I have a habit of packing my days too tightly for any light to get in. I make schedules and set goals and keep ongoing to-do lists that spread across my daily planner. I procrastinate. I scroll Twitter (which is really just another way to say I’m procrastinating, but in the most unhealthy manner possible other than chain smoking). Sometimes things work out as planned, but often they just work out. And then, during that rare moment when I have an entire afternoon to sit in the sun and trade my phone for a book and a cup of coffee, a thought occurs and the thing I haven’t been able to let go of for years makes sense to me.

While I was working that job in a church on Payne Street, all I wanted to be was a writer. During those eight years, I had my first born. My husband and I moved out of our first house into the house I grew up in and gutted it, rehabbing every single room. I got sober. Once, I had to fly home in the middle of a work trip in Las Vegas when I started to miscarry our second child. I eventually had another baby. He’ll be 13 years old this year. We sold that house we renovated, but not after the first buyer walked out on the deal the day before the closing. So many stories. I knew I needed to to do something back then, to write something, anything, to get closer to my dream of being a writer full-time, to make it my career.

At the start of 2008, I launched a blog with a commitment to post every day for 365 days straight. And I did it. One of those blog posts led to an op-ed in our local newspaper, that led to a weekly column, that was then picked up by the publisher of our local daily and syndicated in a number of papers the publisher owned across the country. Being a syndicated columnist in numerous local daily newspapers never boosted my income, but it was key to landing my full-time role as a writer.

It has been eight years since I became a working writer, first as a business journalist and now working with businesses as a freelance writer. It’s not lost on me that it took eight years of taking Story Avenue to get to Payne Street and go to church before I finally was able to launch my writing career. Now, another eight years as a writer, and it’s time to follow a new story. I quit my full-time senior editor role last year, not because I no longer wanted to write, but because I wanted to go deeper into my writing and give myself the time and space to tell new stories.

So here I am, launching another blog and following the story as best I know how. I don’t know where it will lead, but that’s the magic of writing. The story you think you’re writing takes a new direction and ends up somewhere you never imagined it going. I keep reminding myself that I don’t have to know the end or where I’m headed. That my job is to simply show up and have faith that I’ll get somewhere closer to where I’m meant to be.

Follow the story. Get through the pain. Go to the church you build with words.