In childhood I had always wanted to become one sort of writer or other, sometimes a playwright, other days a novelist, and then much later, a poet, but in any case, I was going to become a writer whatever kind of writer I was. I wrote my silly four line verses and my equally childish treasure hunting stories, invented tales about alien worlds and used them as themes in the games that I played with my twin sister, wrote poems that used to come to me then through lyric and melody in the form of the song, imagined other bizarre and fantastical beings and conversed with the spirit of trees and tree-dwellers knowing somehow that these were the prerequisites to a writing life. I was definitely going to become a writer. I wrote and it was easy, and above all things writing was an enjoyable experience, like playing in the sandbox or

Dual Purple Writer
eating ice candy.
I do not know what I was looking forward to as a child. Did I expect that someday I would receive a plaque where it said Congratulations we have identified based on your childhood scurrying here and there that you are indeed a writer. Now write!? But somewhere along the years I was growing up something must have happened, I cannot tell exactly what. I ended up in a different endeavor altogether, in a cause that commits me to the transformative education of humanity. Where did the dream of becoming a writer go? In the last few months of my senior year in high school taking up a creative writing degree had not even crossed my mind. I only knew I had violently discarded the thought of journalism from my future. I was disgruntled in those last years of high school disillusioned by writing and how rhetoric could so easily be constructed without sincerity. As it turns out I was disillusioned by one sort of writing, and this was writing with its pretentions of objectivity and non-bias. Perhaps it was this that made it clear to me I was never going to earn my bread and butter from writing. I was going to hate myself if I became a speech writer. I would feel trapped if I assumed the strict rigor of journalistic writing. I did not foresee nor even had an inkling that I would pick up the desire to become a writer again midway into college.
All that time, of course, I had never stopped writing. The short fiction and the poems, especially the poems, had always been a persistent writing endeavor in that long stretch from childhood and on to adolescence. But becoming a writer had slipped from my mind. Writing “stuff” did not make me a writer. I was just playing around as usual. I was just thinking out loud on paper. I wrote as part of my personal reflection, not because I was a writer. I had looked to other causes to define myself in the world. I was going to become a teacher. There were a lot of things in the world (I mean this in the sense of society and reality) that I wanted to change and I took it up as my personal cause out of frustration and angst from the many disappointments of a teenager. Yet as I emerged from that long depression, the writing had accumulated into two volumes of poetry and short stories. Many of them were juvenile, of course. Only a handful, to my mind, hints at potential, and however faintly, the ambition of brilliance. But what was important to me was that the writing I had ignored had never been silent. It had always been there with me during those difficult awkward years (which have not stopped being awkward and difficult, by the way). Perhaps somewhere along the way the sensibility had been formed. Or I had been born with it. The answer as to whether writing is nature or nurture is of little import. In whatever fashion it came, the sensibility was there, and I recognized it finally after such a long and convoluted search for an explanation of my difference, my inability to be satisfied, my restlessness, the strange way I saw the world for which many people have marked me odd (or silly). I have my childhood to thank and whatever else. I am a writer. First before anything else, I am a writer.
Now that I am older, writing while it may still be a pleasant experience, is not enjoyable in that childlike way, is not easy, is no longer just a game of uniting sound and sense, or a simple play with words. Some writers may still experience writing in this way even way into adulthood, but this innocence has escaped me. Writing is now a focused and deliberate effort, and most importantly, a gesture towards some sort of meaning-making, at grasping hold of something whatever it is, being human perhaps, or at least something as close to that like dignity. As a child I was determined to become a writer. Now a decade later, it is something that cannot be helped. Being a writer is now a constant becoming furiously reinvented and recreated in the different writing endeavors that I am always, and at times simultaneously, undertaking. The sensibility that makes one a writer makes all the aspects of life, all that may be witnessed, all that is thought and mulled over, a material for the writing life. It is a certain kind of lens, a filter, and it is all there is to it. There are no plaques.