If one wants to catch me off guard and make me feel nervous and embarrassed, one needs only to ask: can’t you write for a living? I usually have two different answers to this question, both of them unsatisfactory to say the least.
My first answer is simple and silly: I don’t know how to do it. Friends are kind enough to support me whenever I write something here, but this blog is mainly a conversation between me and someone who isn’t there. The one time I tried a film criticism course with the vague hope of becoming a member of the team behind the magazine the teacher was the director of, I felt out of place. The teacher was pleased enough with my assignments, but I wasn’t going anywhere with my film reviews. My writings sounded all very similar to me and I wasn’t really saying anything particularly interesting about the films we were asked to comment on. It was the same feeling I had experienced some years before, when I had tried my luck reviewing music records. Whenever I am constrained I struggle and can hardly deliver, an obvious sign that writing professionally is something way bigger than me. Furthermore, music and film criticism don’t pay the bills in Italy. Just ask anyone who’s been doing it since before I ever dreamt of writing for a living.
The second answer is even sillier: Work gets in the way. For one reason or another, I’ve always been a software developer. I started as one twenty years ago and, beside a brief period within a language school my partner and I built, it’s always been software developing for me. Undeniably, I’ve also been very lucky, because it’s been eight years now of me using the only software I still care about every day: Emacs. However, work is the first thing I blame for my lack of success with writing. In terms of hours I feel like I could be creative with, I often say my job steals the most valuable time of my day. But this is nonsense, of course, especially if we consider that nothing stopped me on my way to a BA in philosophy, not even office hours. Ten plus years of this blog speak for themselves as well, I guess. So what, then? Is writing the one and only thing I wish I could do for a living and I’ve been postponing since forever? What’s actually stopping me? Again, this makes me uncomfortable.
One of the reasons I keep writing every day is that the urge to do it is impossible to resist. Journaling helps me reflect at the end of the day, for instance. When I read a particularly interesting book, I need to write down whatever it makes me feel even if only to record those precious moments. Moreover, writing is my way of keeping track of myself more than anything else. This is why every now and then I browse the archive and go read some old post of mine. Do I still believe what I wrote back then? It’s a useful exercise. Just like journaling, it puts things into perspective, showing me how I’ve changed thus far. Besides, it gives me a sense of the quality of my writing, at least from my own point of view. I don’t like my early writings, for example, since it’s pretty obvious that I was struggling to find a way to translate my thoughts into English. And yet I like this blog for this reason as well, because it shows that I’ve not given up and I’ve never intended to.
Maybe this is the most important lesson I should take away here. In spite of all my fears of not feeling that good at what I do, and likely not being that good either, I’ve kept doing it. I should treasure this persistence. I should thrive on the mere fact that I simply love writing and forget about everything else.