The urge to become a writer is growing on me. After three score years on this planet, something approaching an idea of what I might want to be when I grow up is beginning to take hold. The problem is that having pursued a variety of careers and occupations, all with – more or less – a sense of joy and fulfillment, all my mental neural highways seem to be telling me that I have to now start seriously considering earning my living with my pen. Or at least, with my ideas.
Of course, the very thought excites me. For one thing, the world of writing seems to be limitlessly open upwards. In other words, there’s no natural end, or enforced termination of the activity. In my previous existences, there always appeared to be a path ahead, assuming I could modify my behaviour, overcome my boredom, stifle my curiosity, and allow the passage of time to lift me upwards, compensating me with prestige and material rewards, in return for me understanding on which side my bread was buttered.
When I was younger, I left my homeland in search of adventure and with a great spirit of curiosity. It wasn’t really about money or finding my fortune – I was just craving to learn as much as possible about the many things that interested me, and they were a lot. Over the years, as I proved my worth for reputable companies in the sales and marketing jobs which I performed for them, I was offered several opportunities which would have led to higher compensation and more responsibility.
As I had left my homeland, with a one-way ticket in my hand and the knowledge that I probably wouldn’t ever be coming back permanently to live, so it was with the job opportunities which I had earned for myself through my own sweat and toil, and which I turned down. Close friends said I was very courageous to be making these moves, to be rejecting the tried and trusted and taking another leap into the unknown on the strength of little more than a whim, and a sense that I needed to be going somewhere else.
Knowing what I know now about how life and organisations work, I have to grudgingly accept that their logic had much to recommend it. I was being offered chances, but they were not what I wanted to do. So, I never felt in any way that I was demonstrating great courage in taking the steps I took. I was driven more by the fear of doing something for which I would be unlikely to find the same enthusiasm again as I had when I didn’t know so much – or indeed anything – about it. Courage had nothing to do with it. Arrogance and self-belief might describe it more accurately, accompanied certainly by a fear of professional boredom.
And now, I’m trying to think of myself as a writer. Even to me this sounds a bit strange, as I’ve just written and published the 200th issue of a business newsletter which I started over 15 years ago. Apart from a few guest columns, and a handful of commissioned articles, I’ve written every word of every issue myself, frequently going into deep submersion at the end of each month to grind it out before the deadline. I have, I know, plenty of reason to feel proud of that achievement. Those are all written words, right there. And some of them were pretty darn good, I seem to remember.
But now, for the first time, I really feel the need for courage. Courage to become a proper writer, to reach out and try to pin down deep, personally-held convictions and allow those to seep through me, down my arms, into my fingers and onto the keyboard. New, other ideas, that have been patiently queueing up in the nether reaches of my consciousness, while I’ve been churning out business news and economic ruminations, and are tapping away at the inside of my brain reminding me that they want the same treatment, and maybe more.
I admit I’m afraid, perhaps for the first time in my life. I don’t really know what’s going to happen, and whether it’s a good thing to even entertain that deep personal side of my life in some form of writing. Like everything else in my past, I know that in the end I will simply have to succumb to what my inner self tells me is unavoidable.
I know I probably have no choice, so again it’s probably placing courage on too high a pedestal. But the fear factor suggests to me that this time, it really might be different. For the first time, I am hoping that I will find the courage to allow my real dreams to come true. Because, now, nothing less than courage will get me there.
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Charles Kingston is the publisher and editor of the REFIRE Intelligence Report, a financial newsletter. He lives in Berlin, Germany.