seabird78 | It's the little things that help

Had some lunch with a couple colleagues today. The topic of writing came up, and K spoke about how she's been feeling the need to find a genre that gives her personal satisfaction, so that the stuff she crafts for work is not the only way she wields her pen.

She referenced me as an example. To paraphrase, she said something like, "Yeah you write here during the day to pay the bills but really, you're a novelist. You have a higher purpose."

It's funny how I'm much more inclined to believe such a statement when it comes from someone other than myself. As if it becomes that much more true by virtue of someone else being able to see that in me and recognize and acknowledge it.

I wish I knew why that's the case. Why I'm so hungry for external validation. I guess it's because I've ingrained the wrong-headed idea that creative writing aspirations are frivolous and impractical, and because I've endured more than my fair share of eye rolls when I've tried to explain them to people in the past.

After so much of that you start to assume everyone is going to feel that way. You expect that everyone is going to laugh off your impossible dreams. Or if they don't, then they're gonna address them in a patronizing tone and make you feel like a silly little girl for having them.

With this in mind, I guess it's no wonder that it's such a wondrous thing when that doesn't happen, when people like K or D or D or even M acknowledge and accept and encourage novel writing as a viable goal. When they see it as a foregone conclusion, and refer to me as an author before I feel I've fully earned the right to use that label.

Any time that happens, I get that much closer to believing it myself, or if not, then at least closer to wanting to prove them right, so as not to disappoint. I've always felt my people-pleasing tendencies were to my detriment, but in this case I suppose I can use them to work in my favor.

Sorry for all this rambling. It seems that the only writing I'm capable of lately is messy stream-of-consciousness.