Live Your Dream

I love what I do for a living. Most of the time. Like any job, though, it has its challenges. Sometimes, the words don’t come when I need them. Or the story doesn’t work even when I’ve carefully plotted it. Or my co-workers (a.k.a. my characters) can be tedious and uncooperative. But somehow, someway, the knots unfurls, the story comes together, and there is peace; for a moment or two. And then it starts all over again.

Recently, I heard a psychologist say that the say that our personalities are formed, for the most part, by the time we are seven years old. He said that our true calling in life is whatever it was that we dreamed about being when we were that age. That made me smile, because it was in Miss Gustafson’s second grade class that I fell in love with writing. Not because writing came easy to me. It didn’t. I had plenty of ideas swirling around in my head, but I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with my brain and so my penmanship was atrocious. Miss Gustafson had us write ghost stories for Halloween, and said she would put the best stories up on the bulletin board. When mine didn’t go up, I knew why. Miss G. came to me and said if I re-wrote the story, legibly, she would be able to post it in time for Open House. So I re-wrote the story, but didn’t take as much time as I should have. I re-wrote it again. On the third try, Miss G accepted it. I have never been prouder of anything in my life than having that story up on the board for my parents to see as they came through on Open House Night. After that experience, I vowed a teacher would never again have to ask me to rewrite a story due to my penmanship. A year later, I had the best handwriting in my class. Even today, when I write checks or sign my name I will get compliments on my handwriting, and I send up a silent ‘thank you’ to Miss G.

I have been a writer all my life. First a journalist, then a freelance writer, now a children’s author. It was, I realize, my destiny. What about you? When you were seven, what did you dream of doing when you grew up? And more important, are you still dreaming or are you doing it?