A dreamy little rambling on about what I wanted to be before bills, benefits, and sensible shoes entered the conversation of life…

When I was young, I did not dream in salaries. I did not sit around imagining direct deposit, retirement plans, or whether a job came with dental. Childhood dreams have the luxury of being shameless that way. They arrive barefoot and glittery, dragging possibility behind them like a blanket fresh from the clothesline. Mine was simple, though it felt enormous: I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to write.

I wanted the newspaper. Not just to read it, though I did plenty of that, but to belong to it somehow. I wanted my name tucked beneath a headline, my words folded into the morning, carried to kitchen tables and porch swings and break rooms where someone might pause over a sentence and think, well, would you look at that.

Back then, the newspaper felt like a living thing. It landed with a thud, full of weather and war, recipes and obituaries, scandal and school board meetings, comic strips and classified ads. I devoured it. I would sit with those pages spread wide, turning them with the reverence of someone opening a treasure map. By the time I finished, my fingertips were stained black with ink, as if the paper had left proof that I had been somewhere important.

I loved the stories, the news, the little windows into lives beyond my own street. I loved the insight of columnists, the way they could take something ordinary and tilt it toward meaning. Dear Abby made wisdom feel neighborly. Lewis Grizzard could make you laugh, wince, remember, and miss home all in the space of a few paragraphs. I read the letters to the editor too, fascinated by the idea that regular people had things to say and that those things mattered enough to be printed.

Maybe that is what hooked me… the notion that words could travel farther than a person could. A thought could leave your head, slip into print, and land in the lap of a stranger drinking coffee before sunrise. It could inform them, irritate them, comfort them, or make them laugh so suddenly they snorted into their mug. What a strange and holy little magic trick.

Of course, growing up has a way of walking into the room with a clipboard. Somewhere along the line, dreams are asked to provide references. Passion is asked about its hourly rate. Joy is expected to explain how it plans to cover the mortgage. And fair enough, most of us work because we must. We work for groceries, gas, insurance, repairs, emergencies, and all the unromantic little invoices of being alive.

But if money were not a factor? If the sensible shoes could be kicked off for a while and the clipboard politely set on fire? I think I would choose the old dream again. I would write. I would follow stories. I would ask questions, listen closely, and try to catch the small truths before they flutter away. I would sit at a desk near a window, with coffee going cold beside me, chasing a thought until it finally agreed to become a sentence.

At this stage of life, the dream has changed shape, but it has not disappeared. It is less about applause and more about resonance. Less about being famous and more about being read. Do I want the salary of a bestselling author? Well, let us not be ridiculous. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? I would not turn away the kind of success that comes with a book tour, a good hotel robe, and someone else handling the travel arrangements.

But that is not the heart of it. The heart of it is quieter. I write because my mind is a noisy room, and writing quiets it for me. I write to speak what my heart has been holding. I write to scatter my thoughts into the world like seeds, hoping something useful or funny or beautifully inconvenient takes root.

I write because I still believe in the power of a good sentence to turn on a porch light. I believe people are walking around carrying stories they have never told, griefs they have never named, memories they think no one else would understand. And then, somehow, a paragraph finds them. A line reaches out. A stranger’s words say, Me too. And suddenly the world feels a little less lonely.

That, more than anything, is what I would want if money were not standing there jangling its keys. I would want to be read. I would want someone to feel something because of something I wrote… to laugh, to think, to remember, to learn, to soften, to feel seen. I would want my words to stain a little, not black like newspaper ink on fingertips, but somewhere deeper. Somewhere lasting.

Maybe that is still the dream. Not the leather chair in a tall building, not the byline everyone recognizes, not even the bestseller list, though again, I am a dreamer, not a fool. Maybe the dream is this… to sit with life long enough to notice it, to write it down honestly enough that someone else recognizes it too, and to send it out into the morning like a folded newspaper, full of hope, humor, longing, and a little ink.