You Are Already Moving

Tuesday, June 16, 2026 — Orlando, Florida

I don’t usually build blog posts around WordPress’ Daily Writing Prompt, but today the universe nudged me. Sometimes it leaves a note on the kitchen counter, and this one had my handwriting on it.

Today’s Prompt:
What is something you wish you could tell your 20‑year‑old self?

Mid‑June in Florida never tiptoes in. It arrives with its whole chest — heat that feels inherited, humidity thick enough to lean on, and clouds that gather like a committee preparing to vote on whether to drench the peninsula again. After half a century in Miami, Tampa, and now Orlando, I’ve learned to read the sky the way some people read sheet music. The notes are always the same: Brace yourself. Drink water. Don’t bother with the hair.

It was like this when I was an infant in the early Sixties, before Mom and I moved to Bogotá. And it was waiting for us when we returned to Miami in the spring of 1972, as if Florida had been holding our place in line. I’ve escaped June’s grip only twice: once in 1974, when I spent the summer in Bogotá’s cool, high‑altitude hush; and again fifty years later, during my brief, ill‑fated relocation to rural New Hampshire — a detour Florida corrected four months later, probably with a smug little thunderclap.

Today is the 43rd anniversary of one of the strangest in‑between days of my life: the day after my last final exam at South Miami Senior High and the day before the Class of 1983’s commencement ceremony at what was then Miami‑Dade Community College, South Campus. The weather was the same as today — heavy, watchful, undecided. Whether it actually rained, I can’t say. Memory doesn’t always leave puddles.

I was 20 years, three months, and 11 days old — technically an adult, practically a draft version. Graduation didn’t feel triumphant. It felt like standing in a doorway with the lights off, listening for instructions that never came. Everyone else seemed to know where they were going. I felt like a misplaced page from someone else’s yearbook.

I had a vague, stubborn hope of becoming a writer, though the specifics changed weekly. Journalist. Novelist. Screenwriter. I had ambition, or at least the starter kit: a few dreams, a few notebooks, and absolutely no idea what to do with either. I didn’t ask my guidance counselor, Mrs. Anderson, for help. I didn’t ask my teachers. At 20, I mistook silence for strength and confusion for something I should hide.

Home wasn’t a refuge. My mother was dating an alcoholic, and the atmosphere in our small townhouse felt like weather, too — unpredictable, charged, waiting to break. I had already crashed and burned in the romance department at least once, which didn’t help my sense that everyone else had been issued a manual I somehow missed.

So on Commencement Day Eve — and for much of the year that followed — I drifted. Rootless. Restless. A tumbleweed on the Llano Estacado, except with a diploma coming and no idea which direction the wind wanted me to roll.

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If I Could Talk to Him Now

If I could step back into 1983 without unraveling the timeline or triggering one of those science‑fiction paradoxes where I accidentally become my own grandfather — no, thank you — here’s what I’d tell that young man:

First: Apply to Miami‑Dade now, not next year. Yes, the math learning disability will complicate things. It may even threaten your graduation. But go anyway. You need the structure, the rhythm, the sense of belonging that classrooms give you. And you will find something unexpected: student journalism. A newsroom where you matter. A place where your voice sharpens, your confidence grows, and you begin to recognize yourself.

If you want to be a writer, stop treating writing like a distant country you’ll visit someday when the weather improves. Writers write. That’s the whole secret. Years from now, Stephen King will say it plainly in On Writing: “Read a lot. Write a lot.” He will be right. Read widely. Write daily. Write badly if you must. Write privately if you prefer. But write.

Advice to my younger self

And while you’re at it, sign up for that Semester in Spain program with the International College of Seville. You will thank me later — possibly in Spanish, possibly over coffee in a plaza that will live in your memory like a postcard you never mailed.

Second: Stop worrying so much about girls and relationships and the mysteries that seem to orbit them. I know loneliness feels permanent at 20, like a climate rather than a passing front. But don’t turn every crush into an audition or every disappointment into a verdict. Life is not holding open casting calls for your future happiness. Someone will like you just as you are. You don’t have to earn it.

Third: If you want to be a writer, stop treating writing like a distant country you’ll visit someday when the weather improves. Writers write. That’s the whole secret. Years from now, Stephen King will say it plainly in On Writing: “Read a lot. Write a lot.” He will be right. Read widely. Write daily. Write badly if you must. Write privately if you prefer. But write. A paragraph, a scene, a memory, a letter you never send — anything. The habit is the passport.

And because you were raised on movies, novels, television, and the occasional borrowed wisdom from a galaxy far, far away, remember Yoda’s line: “Do or do not. There is no try.” It’s not a complete philosophy — swamp hermits are not known for career counseling — but for writing, it will do.

So go to school. Keep writing. Stop measuring your worth by who does or does not love you yet. The future will still be messy — apparently that’s one of adulthood’s subscription features — but it will not be empty. You are not as lost as you feel. You are already moving.