A Writer’s Place

What is a man to think? What is he to be? What others say, what they think, what they do, does it even matter? Has it ever mattered? Will any of these questions get me useful answers, if I could answer them? Our society these days... no, it’s always been this way... gives people an aspiration to be something, but you must be what people expect you to be. If you deviate, you are looked down upon. But the joke is on those resistant to change, as people change, and always will change. It is in our nature to. Youth has always rebelled against wisdom.

I remember when I was younger. I worked all day and night at my schoolwork and was expected to become something great like a doctor or mayor or something else important, and when I wanted to become a writer... Well, I guess that set me too far apart from what was expected of me. I was pushed by my father to become something more. “Writers starve and live in small houses”, said my lawyer father. They have ugly wives and lazy children”, he would add. “No, you should follow in my stead at the firm after I retire.” He would say this regularly to me. I would bring up Steven King or Ernest Hemingway, how writing had made them rich and how they had prestige among powerful upper class society, and he would inform me that they were only the rare exception to those rules he had told me about writers. I remember telling him one day that, “I would rather live in poverty doing what I love than be rich and unhappy.” But it never mattered to him.

I grew up and went to college, became a writer, married a woman that I love, and bought a modest home. I’m not rich in money or things, but I am rich in happiness. There is one thing that most of society refuses to admit, no matter how much we change; that money and things aren’t important compared to love and happiness.