Over the past year or so I have noticed that I have had more people tell me that they are proud of me, then the sum total of times that that phrase has been uttered to me throughout my life. When it first started I was somewhat taken aback. I didn’t feel as if I was really doing anything that was all that different from what I had been doing before. As the trend continued I started to suppose that maybe I was simply spending time with people who were more liberal with their praise. Upon closer inspection, this wasn’t true. Some of the people who were saying this were people I had known for years. So if the people weren’t different, than clearly I must have been doing something different.

It was then that I realized that this trend started right around the same time that I had embraced my dream. I’m a writer, and as such I have always written, but for the majority of my life it has been in a casual way. I would write our family’s Christmas letter, poems, short stories, papers for school, etc. I had never looked at writing as a profession. As something to pursue as a vocation. It has only been in the past two years that I have changed that thinking. That I have started to pursue writing as a career.

In that pursuit I have acknowledged, what I must have inherently known all along, that to be an author is not just my dream job, it is my calling. It is what I was meant to do. The more I have embraced this, the more prolific I have become. The more prolific the more open I have become in sharing my work. The more I have shared my work, the more confidence I have gained in my work. One leads to the next and with each step it feels less like a dream and more like reality. The more it feels like reality, the more pride I feel in myself.

I am proud of myself, so ipso facto other people are proud of me. It makes a certain amount of sense. Although, perhaps the better line of inquiry is why I was questioning people being proud of me . . .