I don’t know whether to be excited or frightened. About a month before my 45th birthday, I signed up for a University of Chicago Graham school noncredit class — basic creative writing.

I have taken a few other continuing education courses, two on copyediting and one with Roger Ebert on film noir. In the late 1990s, I enrolled in an online course on short story writing, but for various reasons I didn’t become as involved as I should have and did not finish it.

So this will be my first serious (I hope) attempt to unlock my creative abilities. I admit it — I need help.

That’s really the heart of my problem; I am not convinced I have any abilities. If I do, they have been buried so deep for so long that they have probably atrophied, asphyxiated, and rotted away by now, leaving behind me, a shell of a human being with no talents to call her own.

Often I feel like I deserve no more than to be a corporate wage slave, and every effort to rise above that lot, to do something worthwhile, would be wasted. At other times, though, I feel like there are important things to be said or revealed, or contemplated, but I can’t think them all through. They, like so much about life, elude me.

I don’t know what this class can or will do for me. I don’t expect it to turn me into a good writer, or even a competent one. I do hope that it does, or at least that it helps me find my voice and perhaps some stories to tell. Finally.