Thoughts

Nurture

I wish things I love had been explored more as a younger man.

My inate desire for knowledge, my fascination with the world, my urge to create, all of that (it feels, anyway) was stifled for so long that I struggle to think how I ever survived without thinking there was nothing to life but work and money.

How it is that my parents ever had kids to begin with is beyond me. The fact that I was a chance occurrence for a woman who never wanted to have kids to begin with will never leave my mind, no matter the time that falls between me having heard it from her lips.

How it is that a man so analytical and logical, who can build with his bare hands pieces of beautiful carpentry also lacks understanding of his son's desire to create?

And how is it both of those people, then, had a child and combined their life experience into a doctrine--nay, a speech that I heard so many times?

"You'll never make it as a writer."

"You're not a writer unless you're published."

"It's impossible to make a career from writing."

While the argument could be made that setting up a child with an outlook of the world that will make them successful is indeed a positive, I would argue that constantly telling them they will never be able to successfully create what they desire is not a great way to raise them..

But hey.

According to a woman who pours her time into AA, it's my perspective that's the issue; it's how I see things based on my knowledge of the past that's the problem.

But...

Isn't that what we call trauma?

Isn't that, like, bad?

And subsequently, why is it so difficult to make them understand that the reason I would rather die poor, homeless, bruised and battered is because I have a crushing need to create and share that creation?

Why is it two people, both creative in their own right, cannot understand their son's desire to create?

Why is it they lied to me?

And why is it I listened to them?