So here's the truth - I love talking. I love telling stories. I love debating. I love words.
Once upon a time, when I was about 15, I wanted to be a journalist. I really didn't know what being a journalist meant, but I did know that it would let me wrap myself daily in the English language. I didn't grow up with a career passion, like many of my friends, that would lead me to a life as a doctor, or a physicist, or a politician. But there were always words.
Words were my friends. I knew exactly what to do with them, how to whittle off a little over here and trowel on more over there, and end up with fully realized thoughts. I assumed everyone came equipped with this. I could never figure out how my elementary school pal Ricky could look at a face and capture it with a pencil, but I could do the same with ideas, never thinking for an instant that these skills were elementally the same. I shrugged it off. I shrugged it off for a very long time.
Then, a few years ago, my daughter pushed me to do something I'd always yapped about doing but never actually did - I wrote a novel. It's not a bad novel. I may even clean it up, give it the ending it deserves and publish it someday. But that's not important. What's important is that writing the book reminded me that this is the one thing I'm truly passionate about. I don't have to make a living doing it; I don't have to publish a novel. I feel good when I write. It's cathartic, cleansing, painful, frightening and altogether the one thing I know I'm good at.
So starting today, as Helen Popkin says, I'll be going blah blah blah about something in this space regularly. It may not be art, and you may not agree with it, but it won't be boring.
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