I’ve been writing for what will be twenty-seven years next February.

I worked in pharmacy for twenty years.

It’s a strange thing looking at those numbers. When I was younger, I met people who would describe the businesses or occupations they were in, in this way. It was insane to me that anyone could do anything like that for this long.

And now I’m one of those older people. I’m going to be forty next year. I’m looking back at half a life time in pharmacy and more than half a lifetime pursuing the dream of becoming a writer. The closest I got was someone asking me to give them an extra thirty pages of one of my manuscripts.

So, do I look back at those years with regret?

Not in the slightest.

It would be easy to do so. I’m not rich in a financial sense. I’m not a writer in the acknowledged sense of someone offering me money for my works except for the time I got twenty-five bucks for selling a story where Teddy Roosevelt had sex with a male yeti.

(You can do that by buying my book of horror short stories here: https://books2read.com/u/3nJPzP my plugs are nothing if not shameless)

The reason I don’t have any regrets is because in those time periods I haven’t wasted my life. I have loved two women with everything I had. Kissed a fair more than that. I have climbed mountains and seen both shores of this great land. I’ve eaten delicious meals and made some too. I’ve laughed to the point that it hurt and erased hurts of the past with my friends. I have felt loss so deep that it scars my soul.

See, defining yourself by the money you earned or the time you spent doing a certain thing, it erases everything else. It makes it sound like you’re a robot in a tube waiting to go back to work. It’s just a piece of everything. All those other things are what make me who I am. And I’m proud of them.

Now that I’ve written this out, I look back at the times people have told me who they are and I didn’t ask followup questions. I should have been more curious and tried to round out the person I was talking to. I still have a fair time on this world, hopefully. I’m going to take that lesson with me and be more curious.