I was thinking, trying to reminisce, to remember words I had heard that I found to be profound, life-altering, anything that stirred emotions that could not be ignored. Those words that keep coming to mind, come from those who were closest to me. That is not truly a surprise, it is more wishful thinking that they would come from a very different place. From someone with a positive, dare I say, uplifting message.

I have heard Al Gore’s impassioned speech on climate change. I have been in the audience listening to Maya Angelou as she read her poems and spoke empowered words of encouragement to the crowd. There are of course some of the greats in history, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” neither of which I was alive for, obviously. Yet these messages still resonate today. More recently, I thought of Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech to the U.N. on the climate crisis. I would love to say that any of these have had that life-altering and utterly profound impact on my life that many may dream of and few truly get to experience. I cannot.

None of these have compared to the words of my father. They have stayed with me to this day and altered who I am and destroyed the opportunity for me to be the better person I could have been. I cannot pinpoint one specific barrage of hateful words that came from his mouth. It’s really all the berating and demeaning comments that would come from him for an entire childhood. Words such as, “sissy,” “you hit like a girl,” and more.

It wasn’t so much the actual words, there are much harsher words that could be used. I recall my father cursing, but not necessarily directed at me. The thing that was the harshest of all was the message in those words. The constant reminders that no matter what I said or did, it was never going to be good enough. A “B” in school always brought about disappointment. It was impossible to live up to his expectations, and he let me know it.

I’d like to say there is a silver lining to this story. A message of triumph as I overcame adversity and became a better person because of it. The reality? To this day, I struggle with believing in myself. Everything I do, I don’t believe is good enough. I don’t believe I do enough at work; I am constantly second-guessing myself. I question my capabilities as a parent, and a husband…as a human. The reality is that others see things differently. Professionally, I do very well for myself. I have been married for nearly 25 years, not a small feat nowadays. Yet, I can never rid myself of that nagging in the back of my head, spoken in the voice of my father, telling me that it’s still not good enough. I suspect my death won’t be good enough either, and in my dying breath, I will hear the echoes of my father reminding me how much of a failure I have been.

I am procrastinating. I’ll be honest, right upfront. These words spew forth from me in an attempt to avoid completing the business proposal I must complete for class by tomorrow. I am a college dropout. I am not afraid to admit that. My circumstances, being raised in a family of five boys with parents who did not make much money, led me to fight for an opportunity to attend college.

I made it but accumulated a lot of debt and ran out of the ability to pay for college before graduating. That, at least, has been the excuse that I’ve used all these years as to why I left. To be honest, that was part of it, but there were other factors. When I left, I took an IT position, getting paid more than I thought possible right out of college, yet I was making this money without my degree. Why did I need college?

I spent my entire childhood tinkering and breaking computers, then forced to fix them before my dad found out. I had on-the-job training since I was five. I don’t want to imply there is no value in college; I think there are a lot of young adults in the world who not only benefit from it but actually need it. I just don’t think that person was me. In fact, I found college boring. It failed to engage me.

I originally started out as an Aerospace Engineering major but was persuaded to change to Computer Science. The problem was that the introductory courses offered very little to me that I didn’t already know and moved too slowly. The failure of these courses to engage me, and the failure of guidance staff to identify this issue despite my erratic grades and mediocre performance, ultimately resulted in a counselor accusing me of being a drug addict, pushing me to decide to leave.

Stepping into my personal time machine, here I am, a father of three daughters, and a decision faces me in how to support their decision to go to college. Don’t misunderstand me; I will support their decision and offer them the best guidance I can, hopefully, devoid of my bias. The question is, how do you tell someone to go to college even though it may not be right for you and will leave you saddled with debt. There is no way to really know if college is right for you until you have experienced it for yourself. I thought college was right for me. It wasn’t.

Despite being comfortable with the decision that college was not the right choice for me, here I am back at it again (for about the fifth time), all due to a sense of needing to complete college so that I am not a hypocrite telling my daughters they should strive for college when their Dad has not finished. The crux of the issue now is that I miss spending time with my daughters because I spend every moment when I’m not working doing classwork for a degree that really will do nothing for me career-wise and not much more personally. I am stealing time from my daughters in order to set an example that I don’t really believe in myself. What kind of an example is that?

I was sitting at my desk when my daily writing practice prompt beckoned me to no longer ignore it. I have become quite good at ignoring all manner of reminders. Some have called this the digital age, and although my career has been deeply entrenched within the digital sphere, I find it quite annoying. The information overload is taxing on my nerves. The beeps. The LEDs. The droning fan of electronics. The overtly warm touch of computers, tablets, and phones. I don’t believe I would complain too much if they all stopped working one day. Yes, I get the irony of writing this on a computer, with a fanciful keyboard flashing its lights with every keypress; that, however, is not the point.

I pulled up this site with the intent of writing something, anything, just to get some practice. As I hit the enter key and stared at my browser’s address bar, I really didn’t like what I saw, MichaelHernandezAuthor.com. How presumptuous could I be? I have no published works. Well, nothing printed on dead trees since I was a child. But is that a requirement to emblazon the title of Author next to your name? Must your work be printed with ink upon a physical medium and a mundane UPC code attached? Is it fair game that the work presented here, regardless of how mediocre or mundane, counts as a published work and thus warrants the title of Author?

If all who write words broadcast across the internet can claim to be an author, does that not devalue the title? Am I an author because I say I am an author, or do you become an author when someone recognizes your work? Damn these LED lights! I have spent my entire career in the software industry, and I would argue that just because you code, that does not mean you are a programmer. The influx of people who flocked to programming jobs after taking a six-week BootCamp course on programming and called themselves a programmer do nothing for me. So, I must argue that writing words will not make you an author.

I think it matters what you do with those words. An author is a conductor weaving together words in a musical tapestry. An author tells a convincing story that a reader can get lost in. An author teaches in a way that the reader does not feel like they are working. If you can write that…if you can cause the reader to lose track of time or put themselves in the shoes of someone so unlike themselves but feel as if they really are a part of the story. Perhaps, maybe, you have earned the title of Author.