My brother thinks what I do here isn’t Writing (with a capital W). But what he doesn’t realize is that I’m not really a writer and if I wasn’t writing here, I wouldn’t be writing at all. I started this journal SPECIFICALLY to kick start my writing again, and it worked, and as a big fat bonus I also got a round of awesome people to become friends with and the whole Internet to ask questions of and get recognition and applause from. Score!
There simply isn’t enough time in the day to do all the things I’d like to do, (especially when much of it is spent mindlessly playing Noah’s Ark working or making food for the kids or cleaning house or folding endless loads of laundry. There isn’t time to be an artist and a writer and a singer and a healthy outdoor girl, not to mention a mother and a wife and a homeowner and a voracious reader and a Corporate Graphical Designer. So, you have to choose and you have to prioritize and you have to compromise, none of which things are very conducive to creativity and inspiration.
Frankly, I envy those who make a living from their talent, until I remember that I do, too. Though I’m not a career artist or writer or singer, I AM creative in many ways and I DO find the time to indulge them, just not as often or as much as I would like outside of the creative work I have in my “career.” In high school and college I seemed to have time to do everything I wanted (which often involved blowing off classes or staying up until 4 a.m. typing a term paper with no outline that was due the next day).** But I wasn’t, of course, wrestling great chunks of uninterrupted time out of my life, to do them. I didn’t have the responsibilities or the obligations that I have now.
But I also know myself and my limitations. I realized long ago that being a career artist slash singer slash writer wasn’t really what I was going to do with my life, that I didn’t have the obsession or drive for any of them enough for those hobbies to be anything more than that: spare time pleasures.
OF COURSE I could do more. I could write more or sing more or paint more, but I’ve never felt the need to concentrate on any one thing when I enjoy all them in their own time. It’s why I’m so good at what I do. I don’t have to ONLY be good at layout work. I can be good at that, and HTML, and presentations and Photoshopping and writing, and do a good job and have fun with all of them in turn. I don’t feel the need to specialize (it’s for insects, said Heinlein, and I agree) or compartmentalize.
I LIKE writing here, and I’m proud of many of the things I’ve written, essays that have sometimes taken much more time and effort and even research than you might think goes into a “journal post,” but for all that, I’m not a writer the way some of my friends are or some of the bloggers I read, or some of the published authors whom I admire so much. I don’t have any real desire to get published, or I WOULD HAVE by now. If I were a writer, I’d be writing. But I’m not a writer like that. I’m just me. I’m not great, perhaps, at any one specific thing, but I’m good at a lot of them, and they are all things I LIKE, things that I don’t obsess over or worry about; things I can have fun with and do when the mood strikes me (hey mood! why so violent?) or the muse descends.
Never having really been able to answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” has never much bothered me. I never knew, yet I managed to figure it out subconsciously anyway. I AM what I wanted to be when I grew up: well-rounded (shut up, John, I don’t mean physically) and happy with my little corner of the universe. I have the job that suits me best and a life that keeps me busy and happy and content and crazy. What more could anyone ask for?
*Henry Van Dyke
**And which I usually aced, which pissed off my roommates to no end, since they’d been preparing and writing theirs for weeks.