How I Went From Wanting to Write to Being a Writer

Photo by Liam Anderson

I have wanted to be a writer since I was a young child and at nine I decided to be an author when I grew up.

Then life happened. I was an abused child, got married on my 18th birthday, moved to the Oregon boonies and built a hippie house, had a kid, got divorced and the list goes on and on.

I wrote in my diaries as a teen but never kept them. I was a college drop out and then went back in my 30’s and took as many writing classes as possible for my AA degree. By then I had been convinced that being a writer was not a lucrative career so I decided to become a counselor. Then I got pregnant and life shifted again.

All through the years it was like a voice in the back of my head telling me to write and the voice in the front of the head kept stopping me. I had every excuse in the book and many of them were valid.

When I was 40 I married for the third time and I was determined to be a writer. My husband was on board and I set up a nice desk and somehow the next thing I knew we were buying a diner because that was my husband’s dream. Of course, I was all about helping other people achieve their dreams and again, mine went to the back burner.

It’s not like I never wrote because I did get a few poems, essays and articles published over the years. But it was a…