It was my junior year of high school, and, like most 17-year-olds, I had no idea what I wanted to pursue as a career. I had always loved reading and writing, but last time I checked, nobody gets paid to lounge around enjoying novels all day. (Well, maybe someone does. Sign me up!) And the idea of writing for a living always seemed too intimidating to me — I enjoy writing, but I have no desire to experience the pressure of staking my livelihood on my ability to churn out quality creative content before a deadline.

Then, somewhere between a peer-editing exercise in English class and another friend asking me to look over her essay, it clicked: I could be paid to do my favorite hobby of all time! I didn’t know exactly how, when or where, but I had found my “what”: editing.

Yesterday, I spent three hours helping a friend revise his essay, combing through every word to clarify his ideas. He seemed pretty grateful, but I felt equally grateful to him for allowing me to work with his writing. The glee that washed over me when we finished expanding his thesis to fully articulate his thoughts can be paralleled only by the joy I derive from a select few experiences — sunsets, ballet, good wordplay, a new pint of Ben and Jerry’s the Tonight Dough. I take selfish pleasure in toying with word choice, fishing around in my mind’s thesaurus (or, when my brain fails me, thesaurus.com) to pluck out a perfectly precise term. Refining sentence structure and polishing bits of close reading don’t feel like chores to me — rather, I find them delightful.

Back in junior year, when I first had the epiphany that editing is, indeed, a career, I began to enthusiastically share the good news with everyone who wanted to know about my plans for the future. Some people thought it was cool, but few understood the depth of my passion for language. I remember describing how I loved editing other people’s writing to one family friend, who responded, “OK, that’s pretty weird.” So maybe I can’t explain to you why a well-placed semicolon or a perfectly alliterative phrase send me over the moon. But I can say that I’ve found my niche, which is why I’m working at the copy desk for another semester — and why I might seem a little too eager to help you with your essay. I can be sure of one thing: When it comes to art, words are my medium of choice.