Hello!

 Do people still blog? I hope so, because here I am.

The first post is always so awkward, though. Hello, welcome to my blog where I'm going to blog and it's going to be very interesting content here... later. But for now, here's my obligatory first-post-life-story.

I'm K, and I'm a writer. I've been writing my whole life. Since I was a kid, and I understood how magical reading was, I've wanted to be a writer. All through junior high and high school, I was reading and writing constantly. Even earned an award for a short story I'd written (now lost to the ether). And then I went to college and had literally the worst writing professor that ever professed. Her job was to train college students to write college essays, not to write, you know? She sucked every drop of joy out of the entire experience. Little anti-establishment rebel that I was, I got as far away from academic writing as I could. Unfortunately, that meant that I was put off of the entire writing program. Baby out with the bath water and all that.

I often wonder how things would have gone for me if I'd simply gotten a different professor for that freshman class. Because instead of reading and writing obsessively--as I'd done my whole life prior--I just stopped. I said, "If that's what's expected of writers here, I don't want any part of any of it. I'm out." Rather than cultivating what had been a passion, I let it slip away. I thought that all writing classes would be the same, that all the creative writing professors would be the same, and it was all just one academic paper content farm. And while I think there may have been a nugget of truth to that fear, I wish I'd at least explored a bit rather than running away and becoming an ~accountant~.

I'm saying all this not because I think I'm unique or interesting, but because I think this is a very common story. I think that lots of people had the writer beaten out of them. Or the artist, musician, whatever creative endeavor you were interested in as a kid. We hear from our parents, academia, the workforce, the government, and everyone around us, that while it's nice to have creative hobbies, you definitely should have a real job.

And that job should be your main priority, and you should probably stop spending your free time on frivolous stuff like creativity because that's not going to earn you a paycheck or fund your retirement. If you happen to have any free time, you should try to get ahead in your career or start a side hustle.

Well, honestly, eff that. The whole sentiment. Capitalism ate my creativity and now here I am at *checks watch* thirty-two years old trying to start over before it's too late. Trying to unlearn all the hustle culture and biases I absorbed along the way. I've been working like hell to get that feeling back, to recover some sense of wonder and excitement about reading and writing. Creativity is like a muscle that you have to work out. It never goes away, but if it goes unused for a long time, it takes real work and dedication to be able to flex it again. And that's work and dedication that society is actively telling us is a waste of time because it's not earning you any money. Go figure.

So, like many people, I got sucked in by the rabid fervor of NaNoWriMo and 2019 was the first time I'd done any kind of creative writing since I left school. It'd been over a decade! And boy howdy, did all those words suck! I was like a toddler at the gym, trying to bench press with everybody else. So since then, I've been practicing flexing that muscle. I'm still not, like, a professional weightlifter or wherever this metaphor is going, but I'm certainly better than I was back then.

And I'd like to keep that going. More than that, I'd like to get back to that place where I felt passionate, excited, and confident about my writing. My ultimate aim is to become a published author (I'm working on editing my second novel right now), but in the meantime, I'm just out here tryin to show up at the gym. I'm hoping to share some of this experience along the way for accountability, for support, commiseration, and encouragement.

Also, if you relate to this story, maybe some of this can give you the push you need to pick up your old hobby from before the workforce beat it out of you. Just give it a shot. You're not going to be good at it after all these years, but you weren't good at it when you first picked it up as a kid either, right? You've gotta practice. And you've gotta get over the notion that that's not a worthwhile way to spend your time. It is worthwhile to do something that you only do for yourself. It makes you a better human, and that's worth something despite its obvious lack of monetization options.

Anywho, here's my first awkward intro post, more rambling to come. Sporadically. Probably.