It started out as a tweet.

I take my writing very seriously nowadays, and being laid off, I treat writing as though it were my real job, clocking in every morning and spending hours at the cafe around the corner typing on my keyboard. So when I made the statement on Twitter, “I’d rather be an unemployed writer than an employed anything else,” I meant it. I still do. I’m doing exactly what I want to do at this point in my life. It just took me a while to figure out that this is what I wanted to do.

I was a business major in my undergraduate. I have a B.A. in entrepreneurship and may one day use it. But my graduate studies are in creative writing, something people find to be a complete 180 degree turn from business. It took me some real soul searching to get me to enroll in this program. I had always written in my spare time. I have a few screenplays under my belt and a few unpublished short stories that will most likely stay unpublished. The thing that really pushed me over the edge and take the plunge into getting my M.F.A. was my father’s death two years ago.

I don’t feel a need to have children any time soon. It’s not that I had a bad childhood myself, or that I have any kind of problem with kids. I just want to live the life I’ve always wanted to before I have to be responsible for others. My dad was always working menial management jobs, working hard to support us, and we became his life. I think his dreams got pushed aside, and I’d hate for that to happen to me. I don’t think he ever resented his kids for that, but I doubt it’s what he pictured when he was younger. I know it isn’t, actually. He wanted to be a game show host. The closest he ever came to that was when he quizzed me on spelling words.

When he died, I took a long, hard look at all the things he told me he never got to do, and I vowed to try to do all that I want to do in my lifetime, to be able to say to my kids (if I ever have any) that I am now raising them with no regrets. I had been working the same types of jobs he had been, and was so unhappy about it. So I enrolled in that January’s master’s writing program and am now at a place where I feel satisfied with my life. I’m not just writing anymore – I am a writer.