I Am, Therefore I Write

Off and on over the years, I’ve tried.  I’ve tried to give up on the idea of writing for a living, on writing much of anything at all for anyone other than myself.  But it was like trying to turn my back on a lover whom I longingly ached for, but who wasn’t always there for me when I needed him most…yet who would suddenly come back into my life when I least expected him, and totally reclaim me.

 

“You can’t really make a living as a writer,” I grew up believing, or had someone really told me that?  “You need to get a real job.  Something dependable, reliable…something that will be there to take care of you in your old age.”  I felt torn in half, one part of me grasping for the security, stability, and the middle class lifestyle I’d been raised in, and the other half yearning for the uncertain, the exciting, and the freedom with which I imagined artists and actors, musicians and writers lived.

 

I have lived with that dichotomy all of my adult life.  Unlike Robert Frost, I took the road more travelled by, but always feeling like a bored schoolgirl gazing out the classroom window on a warm spring day, wishing I had the nerve, the courage, to play hooky, to break the rules I’d been raised to accept.

 

And yet I can smile at that life choice I made so many years ago.  For if I hadn’t travelled that beaten path, think of all the experiences I would have never had, the places I would have never seen, the people I would have never met, laughed and cried with, loved.  I took the only path I dared to take at the time, even though it never felt quite like I was going in the right direction for me, even though the shoe that I purchased never quite fit.

 

All the while, writing never abandoned me, even during those times I tried to leave it behind.  And now the internet opens new doorways and markets for me, new ways to give in to my passion for pulling words out of thin air and planting them on the page.  I write, and I love it.  How can I feel even the slightest regret about that?

 

Besides, I think with the hint of a smile, one is never too old to play hooky.  Or to continue to pursue a dream.

Here’s to your writing success.