Wanna come with me?

       I have a job that doesn't necessarily do the best with PTO. It's not their fault, really. They laid off four people from my department leaving us with three, so the three are overworked. Even more now because I broke my foot and there's no such thing as light duty at my job. PTO is difficult but when we travel for our job and come back, we get days off on the back end. There's been times where I've done two trips in a row, and have had two weeks off at the end of it.

    The entire time I've been working with my company, I was under the impression this would be the way to travel. When I first interviewed, they told me each trip gets a day off. When I was hired, this policy was gone. So the day off was nixed. I go somewhere, do my job from sun up to sun down, fall asleep in a hotel room, and repeat that for 11 days.

    My point is that with my job, I was using the weirdness of not getting PTO as an excuse to not travel. I had time with two weeks off, and I was using it to stay at home and twiddle my thumbs. I wasn't even writing, which is so not how someone becomes a writer.

    With this broken foot, I've had some realizations. This foot has been broken the entire last semester of my grad school, and as a result of all this free time and packets due, I was spending hours on my edits. I mean I sat down at my computer and toiled on that shit for hours.

    As a result, I have the best 80 pages of writing that I have produced, ever. Seriously. 80 pages, all of them usable. My mentor had me combine every piece I'd written into one document and revise them heavily and they all turned out usable. Our thesis is supposed to be 120-150 pages. I'm at 80 something, since I've written more since then. I'm also 3 semesters away from my thesis defense, so I'm way ahead of where I should be.

    I am doing what I used to do before my life fell apart. When I was feeling restless yesterday, instead of reaching for a vice, I reached for my keyboard. The piece I wrote was messy, needed work, and inadvertently hurt Nick's feelings, but it was raw and honest, and I'm so proud of it. 

    The key to writing is consistency. I've known this all along but I doubted it anyway. Who was going to read my work? And honestly probably no one will. There are artists and authors whose work will only ever be seen in local contests because we slave away in jobs that take us away from our passion. I don't think anyone will read this, but I need to hold myself accountable if I want to be a writer. Especially if I want to be a travel writer.

    I spent the last 25 years afraid that if someone saw my work, they'd laugh and tell me it was so bad and that I wasn't meant to be a writer at all. People see my work now and tell me there's value in it. It's good. This is something I can improve on, etc, etc. And so here I am again. Baring my soul to the 4 people who might see this and skim it. Baring my soul every time I submit something to a magazine. It's time to put my shit in the world and see where it falls. See who doesn't like how I perceived them in a story.

    It's really difficult to have someone in your story read it. But your perception is your perception. Don't apologize for it. If they have issues, they can write their own POV.

    Anyway. I leave for New York in six days. While I'm there, I plan to explore the city more. There's a lot of dreams that I dusted off while this foot is broken. You can come with me.