Audi 5000: It Feels Good to be a Writer

This week I reached a remarkable milestone in my journey as a writer. I finally garnered 5000 reads. When I checked my vocal stats and saw that my stories had obtained 5000 reads for some reason I felt like I was legendary. It definitely went to my head. In that moment I felt I was as incredible a writer as Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe. It was definitely an egocentric moment. In all honesty I really was proud of myself, but you’d have to know the history bengind my journey to becoming a writer to understand why this is such a big deal for me.

If you could go back in time and ask a ten year old Joe Patterson did he see himself becoming a writer in the future, well he probably would’ve said no, but with a big hint of profanity added to the statement. I really didn’t see myself wanting to be a writer as a child. I remember one of my favorite movies from when I was a kid was Harriet the Spy from Nickelodeon. Though I really enjoyed this movie about a teenage girl who was aspiring to be a writer, realistically I thought it was nuts. I exhausted myself even thinking about it. My mind was like “bro why would you wanna be a writer? That is way too much thinking and pencil moving.”

If you didn’t know me before my pre adulthood days as a writer my origin might shock you. If you came into my life during my adulthood or you know me through the community of Vocal you might’ve thought writing was my favorite pastime, hate to ruin it for you, but you my friend would be incredibly wrong. When I was a kid I hated everything that involved writing, especially school work. I was incredibly lazy as a child and having Attention Deficit Disorder also didn’t help. I was always falling behind in school because I hated doing school work, it was like a prison sentence in my mind.

In addition to how much I loathed school, my parents were of course adamant about me doing well in school. My mother for a reason I did not understand as a kid was really big on reading and writing. Every week she would make me and my older sister bring home books to read in front of the family after dinner every night and nine times out of ten the kid who had to read was the one who was miserable. Whenever we got in trouble she would make us write a lot, not the most enjoyable form of punishment. By the time I made it to high school I slowly started improving as a student. This improvement was motivated by a desperate need to not want to suffer the unbearable consequence of summer school anymore.

During this stage of improvement I slowly started to discover that I had a knack for writing thanks to my work in all my English classes that seemed to impress my teachers. At the end of highschool my mom died and I ended up writing about it when I unprecedentedly entered the world of college. On the journey to obtaining my first degree I truly realized how great of a writer I am and on the night I earned my Associates degree I realized it was my destiny to be a writer. Thanks to some close loved ones I discovered Vocal.com and began to build my profile as a writer.

When I became Vocalized thanks to Vocal media I was not only able to grow and stretch my legs as a writer, but I also had a new found joy that was making my everyday life better. I started writing poetry, short stories and review and analysis articles about the topics that intrigued me the most. I also started trying my hand at writing things I never had much experience with before like haikus and limericks. As I shared these works with my friends, family and the Vocal community I started garnering dozens of reads. Dozens eventually turned into hundreds and hundreds eventually turned into thousands.

In all my time on Vocal I also garnered of 20 top stories and became very well respected among my Vocal peers. I also started reading a lot of their stories and I’ve become a better writer thanks to their knowledge and encouragement. This community is really inspiring. For me, there’s nothing like coming home from a long day’s work and writing my latest masterpiece. It’s fun, it cheers me up when I may not be in the best of moods and it gives me a real sense of purpose. When I now look back on my life I realized that I was always meant to be a writer thanks to the reading and writing that my mother imparted on me as a child and all the stories I loved that were told to me through my favorite movies, music and literature.

5000 reads later I wanna say a big thank you to everyone who has inspired me and supported me in my writing. Yep, it feels good to be a writer.