I just posted two essays that I wrote for work.

I’m not a writer at work. The only writing that I must do for my job is writing emails, that’s it. I never wrote anything for work nor shared any of my personal writing to anyone before, besides this little blog of mine.

So, this is a first for me.

How this came about was a few weeks ago, while helping the assistant in the HR department, our HR VP stopped me and told me that she heard that I bake and was wondering if I would mind writing an essay on baking or an essay about why I bake. It doesn’t have to be complicated or simple and I thought, okay, I’ll think about it.

The more I thought about it, I realize that I couldn’t write the baking essay without having to write one about cooking first. I ran into her a few days later and told her my plan to write two essays for her and then I went on thinking and then writing the weekend after.

The cooking essay was easy. It’s been inside me for so long that I was genuinely surprised that I hadn’t written or blogged about it before. I love to cook and it’s such a part of me and my identity and that’s what I wrote about. I wrote a little about my family history, my father being a cook, and how food and cooking is a part of my culture. I wrote about how now cooking helps me relax and Zen out.

Again, it was an easy essay. Took me roughly three to four days to write it and then I shared it with some of my friends at work and they all loved it. One even thought that it would be a great introduction to my future cookbook. She also said that I wrote like how I speak, from my heart and that it was me. They are too kind.

I turned it in and the HR VP praised it also.

These essays will be on my company’s newly revamped website. People First. I still don’t know when it’ll launch.

With this essay done, it was now time to write about baking.

I had the most trouble with this one. Maybe it was my hubris again and the expectations of my audience and their love for the first essay. I also wanted to make it personal like my first one and a little more fun.

I would start and scrap it over and over again. I think I had about four or five different starts on it before settling for what it is now, a treatise on baking and learning patience.

Originally I wanted to tie in patience in a different way, about how I know that it is my fatal flaw and that I have a scroll hanging up in my apartment to remind me that I need to be patience in all things in my life and how that ties into baking and where I am now in my life.

It would have been great, but as I wrote it, it didn’t feel right. It felt very self-indulgent and I was smashing together the two thoughts when they didn’t want to fit in.

So, I scraped that idea and started again. Scraped that other idea and just made it simpler, made it about the process of learning and failing and learning and failing and learning and failing and the patience that I had to have for learning something new and different.

It worked, but not the way that I wanted it to work. I was happy enough and just so done with the essay that I gave it to the same friends to read and they thought it was good and different from my other one.

So, I turned it in and the HR VP enjoyed that one also.

Now, I am finished and these essays are just an afterthought and it is now back to my normal routine.

The HR VP thinks I should write more.

Maybe I should. I think I write enough, which I told her, but I never formally wrote essays before like these. Maybe it’ll be something I’ll do, or starting a cooking blog. Who knows.

We shall see.