The road not taken

I'm at a cross roads or perhaps I've always been at these choice points. I have a decision to make...yet I've always had them to make. I see, with all the amazing clarity one has right before waking from a dream, "what I am supposed to do with this life" but...that change, that prospect of pursuing my little pet dream is alarming. Pursuing that dream means letting go of others.

This doesn't mean that I am at this moment a perfectly good writer, one sans the usual character flaws and nagging neurosis. A writer without the the twin states doubt and despair, a writer who's got a trust fund fist full of money stashed in her banks' back pocket. No. I am not not that writer. Instead I am a mid-career civil servant who is predicably bored and mediocre at her job. I own a small home on an immoderate parcel in a vulnerable inner-city suburb. I am also a woman of a certain age whose grown tired of hiding an obsession for a profession I have not dared openly acknowledge. I know, as sure as I canceled my women's writer's workshop because I hadn't made room in my life in it yet; as sure as I have been underworking at my day job for the last year and a half (or more); as sure as I will certainly do no work at all today related to my job description until most of the day has passed, I know, I know if I do not commit my life to writing in some full measure soon, I shall re-commit my life to being a "safe" second-rate, slack and flaccid functionary within the bowls of a bureaucracy.