Life & Wisdom Quote by Kate DiCamillo

Busyness usually reads like a complaint; DiCamillo flips it into evidence of arrival. The first clause carries the familiar modern cadence of overwhelm, but she refuses the prestige-brag version of being “swamped.” Instead, she frames work as alignment: not simply having a career, but recognizing a vocation. The word “blessed” does quiet rhetorical heavy lifting here, smuggling in gratitude without turning the line into self-help. It signals that the payoff for all that busyness isn’t fame or productivity, but a rare clarity about purpose.

The subtext is a corrective to the romantic myth of the solitary genius. DiCamillo is describing authorship as service and exchange. “What I am supposed to be doing” sounds almost ordained, yet the second sentence grounds that spirituality in craft: telling stories. She’s pointing to the unglamorous truth behind children’s literature in particular: it’s labor-intensive, deadline-driven, and deeply collaborative with editors, teachers, librarians, parents. The blessing is not the schedule; it’s the role inside a larger ecosystem of listening.

Then comes the real emotional center: “have people listen to them.” Not “buy them,” not “review them,” not even “read them,” but listen. That verb foregrounds attention as the scarce commodity and positions storytelling as an antidote to cultural noise. For a writer whose work often treats tenderness as a serious force, the line gently insists that the oldest transaction still matters: someone speaks honestly, someone else makes room for it.