Thankful for my job

Have I told you recently that I love my job? I love the variety and challenge. I love the flexibility and the mixture of working with people as well as on my own. I also love that I've continued to grow in this skill that I've invested myself in learning—editing. And that the job offers endless challenge to continue to grow.

Editing, like most professions, requires a certain boldness in your own skills, knowledge, and opinions, even more so if you start out in it with little official training. But I've grown in confidence over the years and now, more than 10 years after I started in earnest in the editing business, I find that I'm relishing working in an area that I feel pretty comfortable in. I never got that far in my Occupational Therapy career. I moved onto motherhood and missionary work less than four years after starting work as an OT (and was employed in multiple jobs), so I never really gained the confidence that comes with experience. I can't say that I've gotten to that level of experience with many other things, so this is something to enjoy and be thankful for.

All that being said, I still have much to learn about editing, and indeed, if I didn't, I think I'd become bored and move onto something else! I'm currently enjoying dipping my toes in the world of editing a fiction novel in my spare time.

Mind you my current job involves a lot more than just editing words. I manage a magazine production team, which means managing schedules and the space in the actual magazine. I work with editors, fact checkers, a proofreader, and designer. I also work with a team producing social media content for our mission, which includes working with constantly changing technology, as well as visual and auditory content. I work with writers and people who don't consider themselves writers, but write nonetheless. My job involves a fair bit of writing too: from emails, to social media content and magazine articles. I'm also involved in mentoring editors as they learn and grow, and helping writers learn about improving their writing. 

One cool thing about editing is that you're constantly learning, not just because you intentionally go out to do that, but the content you edit teaches you as you go, and often you have to do research to do a good job at editing. For example, in recent weeks I've learned about Doraemon and NiziU, an anime character and recent Japanese pop group. I've watched videos about warfare in Afghanistan (for the novel I'm editing) and listened to a podcast about how Japan's exported its culture to the rest of the world. I had to look up the plurality principle and check references for the average size of a Japanese church. I love it how I get stretched by the different themes that we work with both in the magazine and in social media.

I this this is a great quote about the editing profession: (from the end of a book about magazine editing)

Editors will forever be burdened with the public perception that they are grammar nerds, cocktail-schmoozing glitterati, or tough-nosed autocrats.

Such is life.

But as you now know, editing is more than these things—and even more than these things put together.

Editors work with ideas, grappling with concepts that must prove themselves to be fascinating, enlightening, valuable, or necessary—or risk dismissal as the editor plows on in search of better ones.

Editors work with words, making them inform, making them amuse, making them sing.

But most of all, editors work with people. We work with readers, first and foremost. We work with writers a lot. We work with designers, publishers, circulations managers, and artists. We work with sources: presidents, janitors, movie stars, prostitutes, CEOs, victims, teachers, and everyone else we can find who will tell us great stories and make us feel something.

We spend too much time in the office, but we get out when we can: to parties, to conferences, to gatherings of people who might give us the next great story to tell...

Editing allows you to see things that other people don't get to see. But mainly editing allows you to think. You're paid to think and create and work with teams to build something new each month.

It's a great job. 

From The Layers of Magazine Editing, Michael Robert Evans, pp. 326-327. 

Personally things have been rough in recent months, for various reasons I can't go into here. I did start this week with a pretty heavy heart (but feel better today). But I have to say that it really helps that both David and I have jobs that we enjoy and that are meaningful. I am very thankful! 

Of course I'm also thankful that I can walk through each day remembering my rock, the unshakeable one:

He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. (Psalm 62:6 ESV)