Mama, I Shouldv'e Been...

Despite everything, I consider myself to be pretty happy.

Despite everything, I consider the path that I'm on – the path that I have had the privilege to choose for myself – to be the right one. Whatever the 'right one' means.

Those close to me know that I am a writer through and through. I am a storyteller. By extension, I am a journalist. I know how to work people, and I know how to interweave people's stories into one big compendium of knowledge, and facts, and feelings.

Who are we if not walking stories?

I think back to being 10 years old, and asking my parents for my first guitar. A year prior, I had begged to be allowed a ukulele, the guitar's feeble cousin, and my mother – perhaps harshly – assumed I would never take up playing it. Up until that point, if I didn't get something right the first time, I would bin it off, but let's not be rash. I was 9.

With a shrug and a dismissive "let her learn if she wants to" from my father, I unwrapped my very first guitar on my 11th birthday.

And my mother needn't have worried – I played that girl every day until my fingers were bleeding, waited for the bleeding to stop, and then played some more.

I do have to commend my parents' patience while I learned to play; I don't imagine it was wonderful to hear broken renditions of Sweet Home Alabama or Can't Help Falling In Love day in, day out. But still, I played.

A month later, and I knew all my chords and my classics. A month after that, and I began to write.

When I say that the songs poured from me, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Nearly every day there would be a new song, and I often wondered where they were coming from. It just felt like something I knew how to do – as natural as breathing, as feeling.

The guitar became an extension of me as if it was an extra limb. I wrote, and I sang, and I wrote some more, and there was nothing better. To this day, I don't feel more like myself if I'm not playing or singing.

I remember having the first 'broken artist' conversation with my mother. I had been playing pubs, and in college shows, and I didn't want to take the musician stuff anywhere – not really – but I still wondered. She told me that getting anywhere as a musician was hard, nearly impossible, and it wouldn't pay the bills. Being creative wouldn't pay the bills, and what was a dream if you didn't have anywhere to sleep? Have anything to eat?

I shut it down after that. After all, out of so many people just like me, what made me special?

I've played and sang ever since, quietly, in the confines of my home. Occasionally, you can find me in a karaoke bar, of course. You'll hardly ever see me with a guitar anymore though.

Sometimes I lament that loss, and I wonder if taking off my rotating set of acrylics would mean I would have to deal with the stifling discomfort of staring at my latest guitar in the corner of the room. There would be no excuse then.

Now, I'm not trying to say that becoming a journalist was the wrong idea. I love what I do. But I'll always wonder what if.

Might change my LinkedIn status to 'failed musician', but I have a feeling that wouldn't make anyone else chuckle as it much as it does to me.

Mama, maybe I should've been a musician, but now we'll never know.