"When people get sick and stop doing the things they lived for in the first place, they only get sicker." - Delmond Lambreaux in "Treme"

I fundamentally believe in the idea that every person needs things in life that bring them joy regardless of circumstance, constants you can do no matter what's going on in your life or how you feel. For me, writing is one of those things that is sacred and transcends circumstance.

After college, I tentatively want to be a teacher, and then hopefully a doctor, but a question I'm often asked is why I don't want to be a journalist or at least a writer. I often respond with a brief "I don't know" because although I have considered it, the impulse has always been no.

But it's not for the expected reasons. I never want to write professionally because writing gives me too much joy for me to do it as a profession. I often can't describe what it's like when I write. Time stops, and the thoughts I've had for weeks become clear. My path in life and God's plan for me are shown.

There's a quote from "The Wire" that stands tall as my favorite quote of all time: "A life is the shit that happens when you're waiting for the moments that never come." Writing teaches me to be comfortable where I am instead of wishing I were somewhere else in the past or the future. It allows me to appreciate this exact moment in time, as a checkpoint where I can take a break from the struggle of daily life or whatever I need to do, and just stop and thank people, just stop and appreciate everything I've been blessed with, a condition I frankly don't have in other situations.

I have said it before to my friends that any kind of hobby or thing you do where your enjoyment relies on a result will vary with just that: the result. No one is so holy in that adverse circumstances has no effect on them, but to stick with something even when it all seem to go wrong means that that thing is special to you, and you are practicing unconditional love for that thing. To grind it out and not give up means that you truly have passion for it.

I didn't always see writing as something like that. It took a journey of toil. For years, the articles or papers I had to write did not come naturally, They felt forced and most of the time, I did it because I had to. Reading my past writing is sometimes one of the most cringeworthy things I do. I've looked at my first Odyssey articles and been repulsed, but I shouldn't have been. I realize that I had to be there before I could be here, and if writing is something that I'll stick with my whole life, I will likely have the same feelings of repulsion years from now at my own work that I thought was the best thing in the world at the time.

What that whole experience made me realize, however, is that what it takes to be good at writing isn't natural talent or what people might normally expect. Yes, I have been given a gift from the Lord, but a noteworthy and profound body of work takes time. It always takes time. The quality of my writing started to take a jump as soon as I started to set a timer for one or two hours and just use that to dive into some work, and that's a life lesson I learned for a lot of things. Usually, you just have to spend time with something to be good at it, or at least comfortable with it. To be comfortable is half the battle.

So if I were to write professionally as a journalist or anything else, I don't know if that joy for writing is something I could sustain. The sacred nature of just letting my thoughts and emotions flow on a page would be gone. Writing on my own terms is a major part of what makes me fundamentally and unapologetically myself. It allows me to control my own narrative and tell my own story, and try to do that for other people as well.

I realize few things can bring me in the mode that writing often can: I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of emotions that I simply have a difficult time expressing. Frankly, I usually suppress them and say "I'll deal with this some other time." Writing will often give me healing and break me from that suppression. Writing brings me closer to God, for it's in the hour I devote to writing that I finally have the key to those emotions, that I allow myself to be vulnerable and needy for God's love.

And hence, I don't want to write professionally because I want to follow Robert Frost's words: "To be a poet is a condition, not a profession." To write professionally would mean denying that condition of joy, and that's not something I think I can nor want to do. At least not now.