A Writer of Delightfully Off-Beat Children's Stories

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Beginning Part 2

Now that I have wet my toes in the water of blogging, I have decided to change my format slightly.

Maybe I just think that endlessly typing about writing tips, although fun, is not necessarily at my heart (however close it comes).

Truly, at my heart of hearts, is a desire to build a publishing career that I can lean on.  So I begin.

My name is Justin, I have a wife and a little boy, 6 months and two days old at the time of this post.  I have worked too many jobs, some of them in respectable, career-potential places.

However, I struck bottom this last fall.  I had exhausted myself trying to become a "good person" who went to work and school every day and held the traditional lifestyle.  I want dearly to provide for my family--they mean more to me than anything in the world.

But I just could not motivate myself to be a computer programmer, or to do any number of those respectable jobs.  I wholeheartedly approve of them; I just carry the extreme talent of berating myself for not loving them.

Maybe you have had the same experience?  Being told, or telling yourself, that you must be lazy or incompetent for it is the worst part.

Finally I hit rock bottom.  I don't drink, so there was no nasty hangover, but I was an emotional wreck.

The hardest part for me is to admit that I dropped out of college.

I knew it would be a let-down, especially since I began with a 4.0 GPA and held it for quite some time.  But somewhere along, I found out that I was fooling myself, and at the time I didn't know why that hurt so bad.  Beyond the regular pain you might feel when you drop out of the modern world's form of getting you into a steady job when you have a wife and a three-month-old baby boy, there was some small vein in my core that throbbed with an otherworldly pain. 

Here is a quick summary of my enlightenment:
Now, I am back in college with a will.  I have chosen a regular, bread-on-the-table career (child psychology) that matches me, not because I found it on a personality description page, but because I searched within my soul as to what fits my core values, and then moved on it, and best of all, I get to accept, for the first time in my life, that all-too-silly and suppressed fact about myself.

I write.

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