Remembering a long-forgotten dream

Life is funny, isn’t it? 

 

For Christmas, I got a gratitude journal. Basically, it’s 300 pages of the same prompts copied over and over. 

 

What are three things you’re grateful for today?

 

Why do these matter? 

 

What did you learn today? In what ways did you show kindness?

 

And lastly, one word to describe the day. 

 

Normally, I would say I don’t really need daily help to feel gratitude. I would like to think I am pretty good at appreciating things in life, but I guess we all need a good reminder. 

 

So every night, I pick up my purple pen and practice my cursive. Listing the three things I am grateful for is always pretty easy. I pick the things out of the day that were memorable, that I was grateful happened or grateful I got to be a part of. A person, an event, something in my life. 

 

And then the question that always gets me – why do these matter? I find myself always defaulting to thinking “Because they are part of my life? Because they are what makes my life, my life?” How am I supposed to answer that when they give me one line to respond? I could write paragraphs about why going to see SIX the musical was important to me, why the Broncos’ win was important, why being able to go to the gym is crucial in my life. 

 

So normally I respond with variations of "because it’s life.” They are the details in my life that bring whimsy, make the mundane daily routine less boring. The things I list are what make me stop and realize who I am, where I am, where I’m grateful to be in life. 

 

To the doctor that published this “book,” I need more lines. I could spill paragraphs onto the page and yet you limit me to one line. 

 

Jack asked me the other day if I would ever want to return to the dream of being an author. We were talking about our jobs and how we aren’t necessarily the happiest we could be, yet we have reliable sources of income, so here we are. 

 

I’ve dreamed of being an author since I was in fourth grade. I hand wrote 30 pages of a novel in an old spiral notebook no one will ever read because I realized later that it was just a knock-off Mulan storyline and that it’s been done before. There goes that book. In high school, I realized I could probably fairly easily crank out a couple of Harlequin romance novels that I was fond of at the time. Just over a hundred pages of cheesy couples going from enemies to lovers? Seems pretty simple. 

 

But then I remembered why I decided to take journalism classes in school and not English or creative writing classes – because I wanted to help people. And because it allowed me to satisfy, daily, the itch of my curiosity. Why did this happen? When? Who does it help and why is it important? I got to hear people’s stories, write them up, and pray my work was helping someone. Working at the magazine now, I don’t get to satisfy that itch. Most of the time it feels like I’m a fake sales person – you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. How many little stories can I crank out about things that either require no effort on my part to write up or don’t really mean anything important. 

 

Hopefully someday I’ll be able to go back to hard news, if it’s still there. If AI hasn’t taken over or if news outlets haven’t been shut down for one reason or another. And then maybe, if I’m either retired or have more time, I’ll get back to creative writing. 

 

But that’s how life goes, doesn’t it? 

 

My Determination: “Feelings are irrelevant. Indeed, they are responsible for this mess.” - Bridgerton