A Poor Player Who Struts and Frets

Your major emotions of early childhood were boredom, frustration, resentment, and fear. These included the fear that when you were not bored, you would soon become so, when you were not frustrated, you soon would be. 

For the most part, fear and resentment could care for themselves and often did. What boy of that age is without the ordinary fears and resentments? Your problems at the time were the fear of boredom, and the need to find ways to set boredom aside with activities of nurturing interest.

Growing up has changed the nature of many of your fears, leaving instead a batch of responses and ways of seeing things best described as a sense of humor or, at the extreme least, an awareness of humor and what causes you to think things are funny.

This state of achievement does not rule out fear of any sort, but you have adopted strategies for fending off activities and encounters of a boring potential.

Things over which you, as an adult, have no control are funnier than they were when you were first wishing to strike out against the perception of unfairness that comes with being at an age where you still believe things ought de facto to be fair. 

Your life experiences to date have left you with the impression that life is still not fair, but within that framework of random unfairness, you've had more accidental advantages than unfair ones.

In a great irony, this attitude seems to you to cause you more effort when you construct concepts for development into story. You do not come into writing with the notion that life is unfair or that you have been unfairly discriminated against. You come into writing with the notion of life bringing about as many possibilities of amusement as outrage. 

A narrative voice that focuses on outrage becomes, in your judgment, more shrill and propagandistic, perhaps even to the point of sententiousness than an amused, ironic vision, where the nuances are more difficult to spot, require a bit more peeking under the surface of the shaggy corporate hide.

Considering all the bright, talented persons of whom you're aware, including a large group of individuals who you met when they were the same age as you were when you began your writing adventures,you note some envy, but not resentment. You are conspicuous in your lack of anger directed at individuals with greater talent and awareness than you.

For some time, you've been aware that your writing no longer has an anger base, rather one of determination and, even in the face of frustration, a base of patience to go along with the determination.

The need and desire to do what you now do may once have come from the pure anger of resentment and I'll-show-them, but evolution blunted that development. You are nevertheless horrified by class warfare, by institutional degradation, and by the many aspects of prilege and entitlement you see about you, but you look now to illustrate such offenses rather than destroy the individuals who cause them.