Just putting it out there

I just finished my very last assignment for my very last semester of my very last year at university. It was a career analysis about my choice to try and provide a living for myself as a writer. As I sat there going over journal entries I'd written over the past four months I got to thinking...

What on EARTH is the point of being a writer?! I went to school for four years and absolutely loved it and fell in love with writing and reading and discovered my own voice and loved it the moment it popped up on the page and in my head one of those days in my Creative Non-Fiction class. And now that I'm almost done I'm looking around at the world saying, "Hey there! Here I am! I'm excellent and I'm useful and worthwhile. Hire me! Hire me!" But the world only pauses momentarily to glance my way with incredulous eyes that say, "Are you really that naive?" and then rushes past and keeps spinning its dizzying race around itself, day after day after day.

The world has no jobs to offer me. Except of course those important looking "technical writing" jobs, which I honestly don't think are really writing jobs. To write is to paint and to take the beauty of what sits in front of your open eyes and put it down for the record and strike a chord in your readers who aren't so lucky to see it for themselves. Technical writing is a necessity, done because information that is needed once must get to another person who needs it for the time being, and who will then promptly discard it when version 2.0 comes into stock.

I want to write! I want to do something with what I love, with what I've devoted myself to on a daily basis for the past four years. But no. There are no such jobs. Instead I have to find something that doesn't require any formal education and will pay me enough to get by so that maybe at some point in my week I can stop for even a moment and jot down the fuzzy little feelings I get from watching the rain hit the rocks outside the window at my day job, that is if I'm so lucky to be granted a desk by a window.

Perhaps someday, and this is foolish blind optimism popping up again for a quick bout of encouragement, the "perfect job", the one that lets me love it and wake up every morning excited to get there and write my little writer heart out, will show up and I'll be able to run to it and hold on for the rest of my life and stop having to worry about paying my bills and just rejoice in the fact that I am living the dream and that I have finally, FINALLY, reaped the benefits of devoting myself to the ridiculous idea of writing for a living.

I shared all these thoughts with a friend of mine from out of town and he told me something outrageous. Maybe, if I write a blog people will start reading my work and eventually I'll get some sort of readership going. Then when it comes to kicking off my career, I'll be able to prove that I've got some sort of talent or skill and they'll have some incentive to hire me. Plus I love to rant, and everyone loves to read a good rant. So here goes...