As I have alluded to from time to time, I have pretty much been a writer since my teenage years and before.
When I describe myself with the term of "writer," what I mean by that is that the written word was my preferred form of expression, as opposed to sitting down with a group of people and talking.
Which is not to say that I wouldn't sit down with groups of people and talk, but I never found anything particularly cathartic or creative about doing so.
Hand in hand with this lifelong desire to express myself with the written word has been the insistence of many around me that I was just "wasting my time." Or, at least, whenever I made any sort of intimations that I would like to write seriously, I was assured that trying to do so was a waste of time.
It's sort of interesting and ironic that my own mother often told me that I was a very good writer and that she was impressed with my writing skills… and then in her next breath she would assure me that I shouldn't try to make it anything more than a hobby.
As life stands today — all these years later — I suppose writing never really did become much more than a hobby.
Do I feel sad about that?
More than anything I feel a bit resigned. The bottom line is that my writing wasn't a place in which I was prepared to be that much of a risk taker. And by risk taker I mean I wasn't somebody who was going to cash in on my chips and gamble my life on writing the next great novel that would become a bestseller.
The closest I got to writing "seriously" was spending a couple of years in the IT industry being a technical writer… and that mostly consisted of writing software manuals and documentation for intranets in large corporate settings. It wasn't really "writing" as I liked it; actually it was a bit of a cop out calling it that because it was the only way I could think of having a reasonable chance of getting paid to write.
At least a living income.
Personally, I don't think I'm wasting my time because the value I derive from this particular form of creativity is not really monetary. It's really more of a catharsis, than a source of income.
Bringing the bunny back around... if someone really enjoys something, why do people find that it is their place to call it a waste of time?
Some aspects of humanity I may never understand!
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Created at 2026.01.13 12:57 PST
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