I was born a musician. When I was little, my mom dressed me in musicians’ clothes. I played with musical toys. I learned how to play piano, guitar, and the recorder. I even sang a bit. I was a happy little musician, my parents’ pride and joy.
But as I grew older, I started feeling a wee bit off key and slightly out of tune. I kept that feeling to myself because I thought it would go away. But it didn’t, and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, how do you tell the people who love you, and that you love, that you don’t feel like the person they think you are?
Deep inside, I felt like a writer. Oh, I did all the things musicians are supposed to do — practice, memorize songs, get paid for playing gigs at the local church or saloon — but in secret, I wrote poetry, fiction, science fiction, and superhero adventure stories starring The Kangaroo-Man. I didn’t tell anybody, of course. I kept it all hidden. And year after year I felt emptier and emptier inside.
My high school English teacher knew. Well, she suspected. She kept wanting to give me A’s in her creative writing class, but I begged her to give me B’s or C’s so my friends and parents wouldn’t become suspicious. And she did. She was the first person who supported the person I was turning into — The Writer.
That’s when I started wearing writer’s clothes. Nothing fancy. Sort of Hemingway-ish. Aran sweater. Boots. Fishing hat. I put them on when I got home from school. Paraded around my bedroom thinking it was easier to hook a story when you were dressed properly. Took them straight off before my parents got home.
Fast forward to adulthood. Do you know how awkward I felt being a member of a music teacher association and attending their conventions? I felt I shouldn’t be there. I was a fraud. But I knew if I joined the association for writers and snuck into their conventions, they’d throw me out quicker than a synonym for quick. And what would I say to my wife? Oh, sorry? I wasn’t paying attention and took the wrong plane to the wrong city to the wrong convention?
And then the writer inside me came out one day when I absentmindedly put a pencil behind my left ear.
“Hey, get rid of that thing,” I heard someone say. “Do you want people to think you’re some kind of nut-job writer or something?”
I blew a gasket like a Ford without oil. You see, some of us are born dyed-in-the-wool musicians. Some true-blue writers. But life is played out on a beautiful spectrum where we all have a little bit of both inside us. There’s nothing wrong about being somewhere in the middle, or being sympathetic to those who feel they are stuck in the wrong body and only want to be who they feel like inside. Once I figured that out, the true me came into focus, and life hasn’t been the same since.
The first thing my true friends said was, “What took you so long? We’ve known you were a writer for years.” It took my family a little longer to come around, but now they’re happy that I’m a happier person.
Yes, I still hear people whispering behind my back, “It’s just weird. He was a musician and now he’s a writer. It’s just not natural.” I hear them, but I ignore them and remember these wise words from the great philosopher, Popeye the Sailor Man:
“I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam.”