I am a writer. I would like to write a book someday. Maybe many books. I have enough material, if I paid attention, to write a couple just about my life, if I thought it was interesting enough. I have lots of stories and a good memory, though it is sometimes hard to get it all down, to document any section of my life with a sense of completion. It is no surprise to me that a story or
a full length movie can describe the activities of a solitary day in the life of someone, for we come into contact with more potency than we often give ourselves credit. I have often taken more from these one day
vignettes than I have epic sagas of generations, since I usually can only think one day at a time. I try to see a few weeks ahead, maybe even months or years, but it's never easy. So much will happen between
then and now that I can't possibly foresee that it makes the entire attempt futile by comparison of
my everyday life, which seems in itself, full to capacity.
This is not because I consider myself as having a full life but having large chunks of it spoken for by circumstances. My job requires 53 hours of my day per week, my fixation on better physical endurance 6 hours, and getting about 5 hours a night of sleep, most of the other time is spent either recoiling, regrouping, and writing. The urge to write and/or talk to people online takes most of my waking hours. It calls to me the moment I get home. During those occasional spaces where I force myself out to a coffee shop where I can sit out somewhere and let my mind wander, I'm still grabbing for a pen and paper to catch any and all loose thoughts. Sometimes even when I let myself lay down on my bed and stare and the wood paneling of my walls and just be quiet, I can't. I either fall asleep or am so flooded with thoughts that I find myself swatting them away like blood thirsty mosquitoes.
My idea of a good time is either having a few beers and listening to music, watching a movie, or simple sitting out somewhere and watching other people stroll around on Saturday afternoons, people with things to do and places to go. Or it is going out and doing things with friends that almost always brings itself to rest on a fruitful and stimulating conversation about life. I would like to do more, be more, but I'm at a point where patience is required, where time slows to a crawl for many reasons. The heat here is overbearing, my life is overwhelming in the decisions it will soon have to make, and yet my brain keeps on trying to make sense of it all while my heart gets tangled up in the exchanges.
I know that it is pompous to assume that only people who consider themselves writers, as I do, feel these ways. But I just can't imagine myself being anything else but a writer. It fits me. I'm pretty good at it and it's something I love. And yet I've been so many other things in the interim. Above all I've been someone people feel they can talk to, which is always a privilege.
What would you say you are?