Hobbies

My previous entry seems to have struck a chord. A sweet, strong, harmonic chord with some. A clunker with others.

Just goes to show you what the misuse of one tiny word can do. "Mere." That was the word. "Mere hobbyists." After all, journaling IS a hobby. A hobby to which many of us are passionately dedicated. That little adjective—"mere"—dismissed a whole segment of the journaling community. Myself included, actually. Often, when I start to accuse myself of spending too much time writing journal entries, I think, "Other people knit, or scrapbook, or put together hot rods in their garage in their spare time. I write. It’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do."

But I look at it this way. I love music...have always loved music. I sing all the time. I even played the guitar in my younger days, sang in the church choir for awhile. But I was not given the talent, the zeal, the passion for music that a true musician must possess. I will sing, and I will play guitar, if I darn well want to. It makes me happy. But it doesn’t make me a musician.

Writing, however, is something that bubbles up from a well in the depths of my soul. Something I have to do, as much as eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom. It’s part of who I am, and who I will always be. There have been times in my life when I didn’t write; crazy, busy times when I did not use my God-given talent for anything more than love letters and birthday cards. In retrospect, those turned out to be the times when I was simply playing at being someone, something, that I am not. I may have even thought I was happy, that I had "made it." But I was not being true to myself. I ignored my talent because it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t always fun. And it didn't put food on the table. Truthfully, if I was still working full-time, I probably would not yet have "rediscovered" myself.

But you can write, and not be a writer. You can write perfectly legitimate, wonderful, worthy things. You can even do it for a living. Many people do, I suspect. I don’t mean to disrespect people who want to use this forum, or any forum, in any way they choose. And I don’t mean to say that the product they produce is somehow inferior because it doesn’t come from the pen of a "writer." If I was sitting on a street corner, playing my guitar and singing my heart out, and someone came up to me and said, "You can’t perform here because you are not a musician," I’d spit in their eye. Please, my j-land "hobbyist" friends, feel free to spit in mine if I ever again dismiss you with a single, poorly chosen word.