Desire and Her Doubts

I read nearly anything, but especially Hermann Melville, Joan Didion, E.B. White or Virginia Woolf, and I am urgently compelled to be a writer.
What if being a writer is my true identity, and all this time I’ve just been distracting myself from myself?  (Then, write and see if the universe opens her arms.)

I go to a museum of contemporary art, and I am compelled to be an artist.
What if I completed every visual art idea I’ve ever written down in my little black book of ideas?  (Perhaps that’s all there is to being an artist: doing, making.  Perhaps it really is as simple as that.)

I see a film or a good TV show and I am struck with an overwhelming desire to be an actor.
What if acting can be both my strongest dream and an intellectual pursuit?  What if I can pursue acting and feel that I am doing something of worth?  (Maybe that is the motherlode of fulfillment.)


What if I can stop doubting whether all of my interests are both creatively and intellectually estimable, whether I am living up to my own potential, and whether all of my dreams can be achieved in one life?  Can I be a writer, an actor, and an artist? (Word on the streets is that to succeed at any one craft, a person must singularly devote themselves to it.)  Can I get published, book a role, and have a gallery show? Will I ever get anything done? Is there time?

And what of family, travel, relationships, security, the marks of a life well lived?  What of living?

What of living?