Musing on an Interview Question

This shouldn't be so hard. It's not a trick question. The answer can't be googled It's not something I can read somewhere else and then memorize. But why does it feel impossible to answer? The question is simply:

What is your dream job? What would it take for you to actually try to attain your dream?  Answers can be anything, you want to be a chef, pilot, designer, dancer,etc...  Do you feel that there is anything that would act as a barrier to you chasing after your dream?

This was the question I got at a recent interview. I was supposed to do a writing sample on the above question and for some reason, I found it really hard to answer. So I'm back here on my blog, sorting through the various threads I could use to answer this question. Here is a draft of what I would write. Please feel free to comment--

My dream job is to write professionally. I dream of writing essays, reports, evaluations, and fiction as a full time job--perhaps multiple part-time jobs. I know there is an industry of writers and editors who do freelance work. I have friends who write full-time, authors, and would-be authors who constantly develop their craft. I understand writing as a life process, like breathing, eating or crapping. I know that everyone writes. Despite all this information, my desire to be a full-time writer has been relegated to merely a dream. 

The single greatest barrier to writing professionally is fear. The primary fear leads to secondary fears: fear of poverty, fear of rejection, fear of social discontent. There is a fear that my writing is not good enough, that others will have already said what I wanted to say, that my voice is not unique and adds little value to the saturated world of opinions and ideas. I fear that someone who is clearer, more concise will be better able to speak for me and my ideas. The fear of writing metastasizes into a cancer of doubt, in which I no longer trust my voice. 

The only way to fight the cancer of self-doubt is to put myself in uncomfortable situations. The very premise of therapy is that I will FIGHT. I will fight the inner demons, the ones that are slowly eating away confidence, because without the will to try, I have already lost. If writing is truly a life process, I must engage in the work that allows my creativity to flourish, my mind to remain curious, and my heart to be free of material attachments. So if writing means eating cereal for dinner 5 nights a week, instead of creme fraiche and caviar, then in a long term cost- benefit analysis of life, that is okay. 

For me to attain my dream job, I would need to discipline myself to write daily, to share my writing publicly, and to challenge the fear. 

-------

In order to accomplish great things, one must possess the requisite drive, or even the adaptability to develop a skill when needed. My strength is working with information, usually research, and sharing that information with others. A secondary strength, I hope, is adaptability. I will learn whatever I have to to get a job done. When I learn something, I like to share my insights with the world vis-a-vis Twitter, Facebook, even Blogger. I share information readily because I love systematic organization. 

I love ordering chaos. In fact, I feel that writing is the best exercise in ordering chaos because I take my thoughts, which are random, chaotic, ill-tempered infants and I develop the language and craft the sentence to convey meaning. I create meaning through language. I revel in the logic, and beauty of a sentence. I enjoy the analysis of deconstructing a sentence, a word, reducing letters to semiotics. My love of aesthestics is tempered only my a will to keep things logical, rational, systematic. I see aesthetics and the discipline to order and structure beauty as imperative. I think these competing forces may allow me to excel in design. I won't know design until I try to learn it, and so I am trying.