Writing

Ellen Gilchrist, who I have long admired as a writer, was on campus this semester. In an interview, she said that as she has gotten older, she’s gained more and more of an appreciation for all the many different kinds of work and vocations and passions that people practice.

“It’s all beautiful, and it’s all dazzling,” she said.

I got a lot of reassurance from her comments, especially coming from a writer I once wanted to emulate. If I had much budding anxiety about being a writer-turned-lawyer, she helped knock it down.

The thing is, I tried and I tried and I’m just not a fiction writer. I’m missing an essential skill, the ability to create whole worlds and other people in my head.

But I am a writer, so definitely and unquestionably a writer that I haven’t had any doubts about that for years and decades. I’m a good, articulate observer of the world I live in and of my own self. I can't not write--maybe it's not as necessary as breathing, but I'd put it up there with eating. I know I’ll always be writing something, someone will always be reading it, and with any luck I’ll always be making a few bucks from it.

I’m writing this at the Rue, watching boys watching girls. A cute girl enters the periphery of their vision and they are rendered helpless—their work is interrupted, they can barely talk. Hormones are cruel masters.