On the flavors of writing

For as long as I can remember, people have told me that I should be a writer. Which makes it every flavor of ironic that I have never made any advancement whatsoever in such a direction. --I lie; there is a carefully-hidden plastic binder containing a number of scrawled pages produced at approximately age 14 that embody the worst type of Mary Sue-ified teenage crap you can imagine; and even at that tender age I couldn't re-read them without cringing. But other than that minor fit, no. Why should that be? I'm certainly a more-than-competent wordsmith; why have I never made a conscious decision to focus on that skill? ( Time to unpack. )