Dad At Work

I'm starting something today. Because "someday" isn't a day of the week, as a FB post so recently reminded me. And because I'm languishing again - on the downward slope of my career's many ups-and-downs. I had a somewhat sustained uptick on that front this year, with promises from management, encouragement from co-workers, and productivity increases on my own. But alas 'things fall apart'. What do we do when things fall apart? We pick up the pieces and build something new. As too often in my life, I let things happen to me because I have a hard time making a choice on what I want to happen. As a web developer by trade, I'm expected to move along with the challenges of the digital ecosystem - tacking on new skills and knowledge as fast as I can. Meanwhile, I'm asked to maintain antiquated systems and fulfill orders even while my expertise, skills and knowledge is ignored. My fault as much as theirs. I'm not a dynamic personality. I can become one - but have been unable to sustain it for long in this environment. Either it's just not me, it's just not the right place, or I'm just not up to the challenge. So I think - what do I really want to be doing? I've told myself over the years - on college, after, when I became a father, when I was let go at my last job, and now - that I should be a writer. I love words. I love to create. I love the feeling of sculpting words, fashioning their sounds and meaning into something more than the words themselves. It's poetry, really, that I loved. I wrote tonnes of it in college. Fueled by my LDR and my loneliness. Then I seized on novel writing - as so many do - as a way to make something out of something that seemed otherwise so disregarded by the world. I've yet to complete a novel. I grow tired of sustaining the action. I was close - by NANOWRIMO standards - one year and then the month ended and I lost steam. I have stumps of others, protruding from the vacant fields of my mind and I wonder - should I let them grow and then either flourish into something grand or even just coppiced for other things, or should I pulled them out roots and all and let the land die? To be used for something else, to be sure, as that landscape represents so much time dedicated to these dead things... Well today I'm choosing life. To be a writer means to write. And I must therefore write. More than ever before - or at least more regularly. I'd like to do it twice - 2 hours a day. Lunch and post-bedtime, I think. Then the fears creep in - what about the time I should spend on health, spouse, kids, home, pets, family, career? Well - solving the last one now. Because I'm choosing this career. I chose another one because it was something and I feared my abilities. And I made something out of it - 14 years of something, damn it. Now I have more than 40 left... I should make the work of my life as important as the rest of my life. I'm a writer. I shall write.