Do you ever wish you could be anyone but who you are?

Wish you were incredibly good at math. You could study computer science. Become a tech nerd.

Wish you had a passion and skill for saving lives. Feel this calling to spend 10-15 years studying to become a doctor.

Wish you had a knack for public speaking. A love of policy and debating. And you could be the one at the podium making changes.

Or maybe you wish you were just a little bit prettier. Thinner. Like you weren’t always looking at photos of other people wondering what it would be like to be them.

To be anyone but you.

So, you turn it all off. You unplug for a while. You go silent. And you hope that in this silence, something will speak to you. Loud and clear like a lighthouse in the distance on a cold, dark, dreary night.

Maybe you will become a psychologist. You have always loved talking with people about their struggles.

Or maybe you can become an innkeeper. Move to a little cabin outside the city and run a pub and B&B for locals. How nice, this slow and quiet life would be.

Or maybe you could become an actor. Or a singer. They’re the cool kind of artists, right? The kind of artists who everyone appreciates and admires.

But writers? What good is this little story going to do to impact someone’s life? What meaning are these words supposed to bring to anyone but me?

It would be easier, you think. If you just kept quiet. If you kept this “little hobby” in your notebooks, on your laptop, only for you to feel some kind of catharsis.

The world doesn’t need to read this.

“I am no longer going to be a writer,” you write. Thinking this will absolve you of all the confusion. There, dust off your hands, file it away.

Maybe you could become a movie director—make it all the way to the red carpet…

Goddamnit! I thought we were done with this?

Fine. Okay. Here. Happy?

I give up. I’ll do it.

But not for me, okay? Not because I like the sound of my own words, or I want to tell my story, and not because I even think I’m good or talented. No, because maybe, somewhere out there, someone else needs to hear this.

Maybe because I am never going to be a doctor, but maybe, just maybe I can save lives in a different kind of way.

Maybe because I don’t think I could be anyone else if I tried.

I don’t think the words would let me.

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