Maybe it's not silly

Every once in a while, out of curiosity and deep longing and hope, I’ll scour job postings for writers.  Silly right?  

I’m not really sure what I’m looking for, or how a story-loving, writer-aspiring woman like me would even fit in to that world.  I have no credentials, no degree and no editing expertise.  Any experience I have would date back to an award-winning essay written in the seventh grade about water conservation and my sophomore creative writing class that led to a silly published poem about how a woman died under an apple tree from a broken heart.  And of course, there’s this little blog I’ve come to pour my heart out to for years telling stories and writing down memories of what I’ve wanted to capture and keep for always. 

Writing has been a constant over the years.  It’s the thing I’ve returned to again and again since I was a young girl.  Next to my passion for sitting with others and hearing their stories and pointing them to Jesus, my greatest desire is to write something.  If not for anything else, simply the mere enjoyment of it and how it makes me feel.  It is without a shadow of a doubt something that I was created for. 

It feels silly.  It tell myself that it’s silly all the time.  It’s silly to think that I could be a writer.  It feels silly to pursue it or go after it.  After all, it seems like everyone wants to be a writer or claims to be one and how silly of me to think I’d actually be one of those people.  Everyone has something to say.  This is everyone’s thing and what would make me any different?  These thoughts have silence me and I’ve allowed myself to feel defeated.  Like I’m not special or unique and I have nothing valuable to say or to offer because I don’t write like her, whoever that her is.  I envy those who can compose these beautiful, rich sentences dripping with so much imagery and beauty that I lap it up and am left thirsty for more.

I sit a job every day, and have for years now, where my main job is keeping the books.  You know, reconciling accounts, paying bills, filing taxes and sending invoices.  As I do this every day, I stare out the window to my Texas blue sky and green live oak trees and I’ll catch myself writing a sentence in my head about what I see or what I’m feeling at the moment.  As I watch dark rain clouds come in, or fierce winter winds that blow everything into chaos, or watch a doe chase her fawn in the fall sunlight, I know in those moments deep in my gut that I was made for more than the living I have made for myself.  This living that came as a result of a broken heart and a great series of tragedies and giving up on a dream I once had to sing opera.

Most days I feel like opera was a dream I was meant to let go of.  And most days, I am grateful for the skills I have developed and taught myself and how working hard over the years has enabled me to help support my family.  I like the security of knowing that if something happened to my husband, I could still take care of myself and our boys.   

Even so, I constantly catch myself day-dreaming, thinking if I only could be writing.  When I’m not working and not mothering and not off somewhere, I am writing.  I am journaling, I am writing down thoughts and lists and memories.  I write almost every single day of my life.  And I don’t glamorize in my head what life might be like if that’s all I had to do.  I know it’s not all fun and glorious or easy.  I’m sure it’s full of deadlines and edits and gut-wrenching emotions and disappointments and criticisms.  I am very aware though that the job I do day in and day out often times drains and dulls me. Don't get me wrong - I’m thankful for my job.  I’m thankful I’m good at what I do.  I'm beyond thankful for what I have.  But sometimes, a lot of times, I wish I weren’t so good at it.  Most days, and most every day, I hate that I’m a bookkeeper.  I don’t want to be a bookkeeper.  Probably because I am much more interested in a very different kind of book-keeping.

Seeing as I am on the eve of my 33^rd birthday, perhaps there is more growing and maturing to do.  I keep telling myself when I’m older and when my kids are older, when the world is older and when all the things are older…..When age and wisdom and more life has been lived and more experiences tucked under my belt, maybe then I’ll be qualified somehow.  But that sounds ridiculous too.  Silly even.  Because I’m not guaranteed living to the older and I don’t want to wait that long to let myself dream or see my dreams become reality. 

So here I am on a cool Tuesday in March, writing about writing and thinking how silly it is to do that very thing.  Staring at this screen, my fingers on the keyboard, surrounded by notes and scribbles, knowing, believing, feeling that I was created and made for more.

And it’s not silly to want to do this.  It’s simply time.