In some ways, or possibly many ways, I write for the 'wrong reasons.'
My whole life I've wanted to be creative. I've been painting and writing since I was old enough to dip a finger in paint or dictate a story (my parents still have some very strange "abstract paintings" from my pre-school years and yes I was purposefully painting abstract at the time being all of age 4). I "wrote" my first complete short story when I was in kindergarten (it was a slightly exaggerated piece of non-fiction about my dog the particulars of which have been lost to the chaos of my memory).
I did my first real piece of acting in the first grade (it was a one act performance at the annual 4H meeting, I was the only person to memorize my lines or assemble a costume-- anyone whose acted with me knows the ridiculous degree of seriousness I put towards costuming)
I want to be creative. I want to be
good at being creative. I want that to be what I do for a living. I joke about how if I had any sense I would move to Vancouver and get a job with a tv studio. It's really not a joke, I think I'd be really really suited for it.
But lets take a quick side trip to discuss parents and their wishes for their children. My parents really do want whats best for me. They both grew up in various degrees of poor in a rough part of rural Texas. My mum was the only girl in a single family home who took care of her brothers. My dad was one of five kids supported on their father's blue collar salary. Neither of my parents completed a BA degree, my mum finished what was approximately an AA and got a few lucky breaks in the retail industry. My father got certified in law enforcement and became a cop.
And this would have been a relatively comfortably tale only my parents moved up to washington so my mother could attend Evergreen (which she finally did about 1 1/2 yrs ago and completed her BA \o/) and my father was disqualified from transferring to the local PD because he is colour blind. Instead he's taken a string of different jobs all mostly related to hardware and repair until finally landing his current position at a local school (he's the head maintenance technician, essentially he and one other guy keep everything working) and he hates it. Not necessarily the work but the bullshit politics that come with the job and the fact that he's an incredibly intelligent person regulated to reporting to petty, narrow minded, weasels.
Moneys been a problem for our family off and on, especially putting two children through private school, but we've always managed to tow the line between actual poverty and lower middle class (a sucky place to be because we don't make quite enough to be comfortable in the middle class sense but too much to get a lot of aid).
So lets wrap this back around to me :) since this is my blog.
My father is an extremely practical person. and while he's always supported my creativity as a hobby (buying my musical instruments, going to all of my plays, and even occasionally reading some of my crappy short fiction) he's too practical to believe it's a viable career choice. I know he is deathly deathly afraid that I'll wind up like him, stuck under the thumb of people far stupider than myself and miserable. So he pushes me, academically, and frowns anytime I suggest a career thats less than practical, that isnt guaranteed to pay be a high 5 figures right off the bat.
Criminal Justice is our compromise instead of Law School. It's practical, there's tons of way I could take it, lots of jobs out there for it and generally it should make good money. It took a bit of convincing on my part for him to be ok with me becoming a cop (with a vision to become a detective down the road) but once we were on board for that he essentially drew up a plan of all the things I would need to learn and that we'd have to prep (ie joining the gun club and working on my shooting regularly, self defense and martial arts classes etc)
And this is not to say that I don't find criminal justice fascinating. I grew up watching crime shows
before they were popular.
The thing is, a part of me desperately just wants to be creative and be my own boss. And a part of my keeps trying to write, or thinks about writing, hoping that it'll click, that I'll finally find the way to finish something and polish it and that it will be
good enough. I keep waiting for one of my projects to come to fruition and validate my desire to pursue a creative career.
I don't believe in white knights. But in some ways my writing is my white knight. I keep waiting for it to save me from obscurity.
