Please stop looking at me with confusion and pity when I tell you what I plan to do with my life. Yes, I want to be a writer. What kind of writer you ask? Well the kind that gets paid for stringing words together and calling it entertainment. That's all I can really offer you at this point. That doesn't mean you get to follow up your question with, "So what are you going to do after, be a teacher?"

No. I am not going to be a teacher.

I love to write and if I can somehow manage to live the rest of my life just writing and convincing someone to pay me for it, anyone could safely call me more than content. That, to me, sounds like a life worth living.

Now, if you choose to doubt my career choice, then I can't really control that. Even if no amount of doubt can ever stop me from pursuing what I really want to do. Yet what I cannot seem to grasp is why those who have chosen to go after more "conventional" paths, such as medicine, technology, law or education are never doubted. At least not as much as those who wish to pursue the arts or humanities. It is very normal to tell someone you want to be a doctor and for the person you told just to smile and congratulate you for having such big dreams. For us writers, dancers, artists, singers and such, it is a constant painful explanation about how there is really nothing else you would rather do then the thing you love.

So if you love medicine and want to cure the world of all it's diseases, that's great! I support you, as long as that's what you really want to do. I recognize that it is a legitimate passion to pursue so go forth and do good. But if you want to paint portraits for the rest of your life or spend your days playing an instrument, if you want to inspire people with your dance moves or if you want to write to bring a little more joy into the world, I need you to know I support you too.

This is a call to stop treating my (and everyone else who has to deal with this) career choice like the hobby I will do before I start doing "real work". Writing will be my real work and I hope you pay attention long enough to see me do just that, make writing into my real, tangible work.

So stop acting like what I love to do isn't important. Or that the world doesn't need it. Yes, we need healers and protectors and educators. We also need music and dance and literature. Why is that? Couldn't we just survive with the necessary stuff? Yes, we could just survive. But I want to do more than just survive, I want to live and it is writing that has allowed me to feel just that much extra alive than if I didn't have writing.

So to my future artists.

To my future scientists.

To my future attorneys and accountants.

To my future ballet dancers and circus performers.

To my future policemen and policy makers.

To my future writers.

I ask you one simple thing, go out, and do what you love the best that you can do it. And when you come along someone with a different passion than yours, embrace them. You never know when what they offer the world, is exactly what you need.

Stop treating writing like a hobby. Writing isn't only my career choice, it's the way I choose to live my life.

To all the people who have never doubted my abilities to become a writer.

Mahalo and thank you.