Bhava Communications.

As the Content Specialist at Bhava Communications, I have the joyful task and responsibility to create meaningful content all day long in myriad and colorful ways. It rocks.

Alas, this was not always the case. I will now tell you my tale of woe and triumph.

I love to write and I love to draw in equal measures. This has been my way since I was a child blatantly drawing illustrations in my mother’s novels and adding captions to my coloring books. Both sides of my brain want to communicate and I refuse to let one side win. To fulfill my passions over the years, I’ve cobbled together lots of small jobs and experiences, which culminated in a master’s degree in the field of design, many years of writing for magazines under my belt and a business on Etsy making greeting cards.

I became “she who has many jobs” and settled into the life of a marketing coordinator by day, social media manager by night and a freelance illustrator on the weekends. In my free time, I also picked up writing for a few local publications in San Francisco. My friends thought I worked too much and my family thought I was “finding myself,” but little did they know I was just feeding my voracious love of words, pictures, storytelling and communication. Try as I might, there was no single job that let me do both —or so I thought.

When I did apply to an open position that looked promising, my “diverse background” was often confused as multiple-job-personality disorder. CEOs, hiring managers and recruiters routinely took my eight years as a freelance designer, 10 years as an editorial writer and one year as a web designer as a sign that I was still testing the waters as to who I am and what I am actually interested in doing.

I can’t really blame them. If my professional skill set were illustrated as a pie chart, it would look less like a pie and more like a kaleidoscope. But, I didn’t want to give in to one skill set or the other. I am interested in the larger umbrella idea of content in all its various forms: animation, website, e-book, contributed article, infographic, blog post, cartoon, email blast copy, slide show, etc. Oh, and I want to do it all.

After a few years of unsuccessfully searching for a single position that would allow me to draw and write, I was almost resigned to life as a freelancing content octopus.

Then I had my first phone interview with Elizabeth Zaborowska, founder and CEO of Bhava Communications. The conversation was going well when she said the dreaded phrase, “you have a diverse background …” Uh-oh. I was gearing up to explain all of my various reasons when she finished her sentence with, “I think you’d be perfect for our content team. We need someone who can think in both words and pictures.”

My heart did a flip. And another flip.

Liz had put a filter on the kaleidoscope, an order to the madness and a label on my passion. There was a place for me at Bhava and it was called Content Specialist.

In the six months I’ve worked at Bhava, I’ve learned so much and applied myself more in this short time than I ever could have as a piecemeal freelancer. Every day is a delightful parfait of content production—web design, contributed articles, infographics, etc.

Now that I am working on content projects from beginning to end, I also have the opportunity to dig deep into content strategy and explore ROI through marketing analytics. I would never have had that opportunity on my own. I am finally doing what I was trying to do all those years—telling high-impact stories through words and pictures. Also, I get to illustrate fun projects like my octopus self-portrait above.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is this: keep doing what you love. Someone out there needs you. I’m so happy that Bhava found me and I’m looking forward to the adventures I will have here in my new life as Content Specialist.