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Writing and Being A Writer 1/24/2012 9:11:23 PM
What have I made of myself? I sat at my usual place at Greater Trumps and contemplated on it, wondering what I would have been if I did this or that; if things and luck would have been different; and if life would have guided me to something I don’t know. Would I still be the same person?
Would I end up in Chicago or have stayed in the Bay Area for the rest of my life? Why am I in Portland, right now? Will I live the life I am now living or will it change, still?
Life was indeed funny. One time I am headed a certain way, on my way to success (whatever it means) and suddenly, life took a wicked turn and success was defined in another way. In college, when computer science was still in its infancy, I took up computer science in the hopes that I could learn something about the computer and succeed in being a computer scientist; never mind what I had aspired to before college. College was the starting block for life as it should be, anyway. But in my third year when funding in college was getting tighter, the department head of Government asked me to major in his department. I could have finished my degree in computer science but it would take me a semester longer. I opted to shift my major to Government so that I would finish my degree in exactly four years. So, I did get out of college with a Bachelor degree but not in the intended major I initially pursued. My former manager at the bank asked me to come back and work for her. But, I declined. I started my post graduate endeavor by working at another bank.
Although I worked at different banks, my career seemed to be in banking and finance until such time that a colleague asked me to work in sales, selling education. This career was the most rewarding, so far. This move gave me mobility and relative financial wealth. I was not poor by any standard but the rewards were rich enough for me to live a life above the norm. I spent over a decade here. Here, I began to have the high life. I treated friends, relatives and some friends to the blessings I have gotten. Although I traveled internationally before, I traveled more intensely. I began to have a taste for the good life. I ate at good to excellent restaurants, dressed more expensively and entertained myself more lavishly.
But my economic situation suddenly stopped amidst the U.S. economic situation. For two years and two months, my financial situation deteriorated. My health deteriorated, too. (This was caused by the high life I led during the boom years.) Now, I was starting life all over again at a point in my life when I should have obtained security in my growing old age.
But one thing did not change, I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote poems, essays, letters (yes, it still is an art form), novels and blogs. I loved writing that it seemed to be the air I breathe. It was that cathartic event I engaged in at any time, be it good or bad. It was the story of my life. One time I wanted to be the pope, then a doctor; I wanted to be a computer scientist and then ended up in banking and finance, and sales and marketing. Then it occurred to me that in the throes of my upheavals, while I was wallowing in the two years and two months of financial hardships, I realized that writing was where I ended up in. Wasn’t life funny, then?
I am still the same Paul Cuenco I was but I did not realize that in my younger years what I wanted to be; now, I am who I am supposed to be, a writer. It was not too late to pursue the love of my life, isn’t it? That what I am right now, was in the very career I have been pursuing all throughout.
So to be rich or poor, writing is it…or maybe so.
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