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| The Problogger asks the question |
"What are you doing?" I will ask him, and he always replies with...
"Living the dream."
And I will roll my eyes. What a simpleton.
What a lucky man.
I rolled my eyes again yesterday when Darren Rowse finished the Problogger conference with a stirring presentation about living your dream.
What is your dream?
Fucked if I knew. But I knew that I must have one, I had just misplaced it.
And since then my brain had been in exploding, trying to find what my dream was. It is a curse of the undriven.
It was during the plane trip home. Sitting next to Bev, we started talking about our childhoods and what we wanted to be when we grew up.
Interestingly enough, we both wanted to become writers from a very young age. Bev even had her own Magazine called OUR WORLD TODAY and me, I wrote chapter books about ponies and mysteries. And then it hit me like a tonne of bricks.
Your dream is what you wanted to do as a kid, before obstacles get thrown up at you, setbacks present themselves and your dream gets cloudier and cloudier until you forgot what it was. Fireman, vet, singer, dancer, teacher. Derivatives trader?
I was an average student, and that is being generous, but I always topped out in creative writing. It was the strangest anomaly the teachers had seen, and was commented on at each exam time.
But then I went to uni and started on a different path which led to a different path and so on, until I was so far from writing it was silly. I was in management! And being not a very goal or focused driven person, I was completely crap at it because I didn't like it. I loathed it.
Then fate took its course when Jack was born with a hearing loss, which meant that I had to resign. I spent some time at home with babies and discovered something called blogging.
And that was it. The start of living my dream as a writer. I am doing it right now, and I didn't even bloody know it. Told you I was not that smart.
What is your dream?
What did you want to be when you grew up?
