Why I chose writing...

Sometimes, I have to remind myself of why I chose to pursue writing. Thus far, I have certainly not pursued it as a career - and perhaps I should as I develop my portfolio. I have pursued it as a hobby, but it has been a while since I have stretched my creative mind much less run a creative marathon.

So why did I choose to follow my college education into writing?

I wanted to be everything.

As a kid, I can remember wanting to try it all! As I found in notes from my junior high years, I wanted to be a senator and a lawyer. Very early on, I wanted to be a paleontologist, geologist, or astronaut. Anything I studied, I wanted to make my career. Reading was my life. I wanted to do everything all of my books talked about. I wanted to be a historian, an archeologist, or some other artifact seeker. This desire to do everything followed me even to my first years of college when I began my higher education in pursuit of an architectural degree - this turned into an art degree which I finally abandoned for English and Creative Writing in my second year. Writing it what felt right!

Going into my fourth year, I tiptoed through my creative writing. My peers made my writing much more restricted than I would have liked. The focus was narrowed, and I stopped writing for myself and started writing to please my classmates and professors - none of whom agreed with me for the majority of the time on what made a good story.

All of my English major friends warned me that linguistics was a killer class... Wary of the required class that all of my classmates spoke of with intense loathing, I saved it for my second to last semester when my load was lightest. I shouldn't have! I loved my one and only linguistics class. It was another study I would have loved to pursue! I could be just like Henry Higgins from Pygmalion, I thought. Yeah right.

Recently I revisited my choices in education, wondering what possessed me to take such a pinball approach. Now that I am almost two years out of college and have some real-world job experience (as a receptionist and administrative assistant) I have the distance needed to reevaluate what I want for my career - my life.

I want to write. I have no idea what I want to write. I have no idea where to begin writing. I jump from one project to the next, trying to get a picture of what I really want to accomplish with my writing. For so long I've considered a blog, but what to write about? Will I be consistent enough? Will anyone care what I write about? How can I possibly write about everything I want to write about and contain it in a blog that should have some thread of relevancy throughout?

I still don't know.

But I am excited to try. So. Here I go.