PAVEMENTS

On writing seriously

I have always wanted to be a writer since I was little. Writing has been a passion, a compulsion, and a necessity—a natural fact of who I am, really. I have never questioned it, whether I wanted to do it or not, in all my years.

Despite that, I have consciously avoided all professional pursuit of it. I have always reasoned that I didn’t want something that personal to me, to be muddled up with the drudgery of a day job, the frustrations of making money with it. And whenever I attempted to do it as a semi-serious hobby by getting into school publications, the fates hardly ever allowed it.

I was already happy, practically skipping all the way home when I found out that some (people who have been in this writing business for years) read my article, the one to come out this month, and was impressed by it. Now, to be suddenly faced with the prospect of writing regularly for a new section in a prominent magazine—I am simply floored, in a good way, of course.

I did not expect to feel the way I did then. Maybe I don’t know exactly how I feel about writing, maybe because I have never done it seriously enough.

For all its worth, I am glad of it. In my heart of hearts, I do feel like this is a long time coming, if not to realize one of my dreams, then to finally see and know it for what it is.