On Writing

Has there ever been an identity as fragile as that of "writer?" 

I have "been a writer" since I was in middle school, and my mom, exasperated with my daily habit of abandoning my nightie on the bathroom floor each morning, assigned me a page of writing every time I did it. Exasperated right back, I churned out nonsense stories about fairies and dolls come to life, a magazine where the cover model was a pig, and other from-the-brain-of-an-eleven-year-old masterpieces. I kept writing in high school, when I took Writer's Craft twice, earning a 95% in the class each time; I also journalled frequently, using loose leaf paper to try to figure out my friends and myself as though we were case studies in a psychoanalyst's training manual.

In university, I turned in papers that smelled a lot like the ones I'd written in high school—chatty, observational—and got barrel-scraping marks. No one told me that you weren't allowed to say "I" in university! No one told me that original thought wasn't done, and that any idea I had had to be cited from a previously published source. As someone who'd amassed a great deal of knowledge over the years about relatively obscure topics—Fatty Arbuckle, European graffiti—I was in the habit of being a voracious reader, synthesizing everything, and letting the source material fade. Plus, I was disappointed that university libraries didn't have a ton of texts on things I was into, yet seemed to have many linear feet of bookshelves devoted to, like, German Expressionist cinema, or Catholicism. Snore. 

But it was also in university when I started this blog. I finally had a place to install all my snarky thoughts and ramblings. Not trying to mold myself to the unversity-essay voice—striving for intelligence, and utterly devoid of jokes—I let my run-on sentence freak flag fly. In 2013, I wrote a fairly bad first draft of a science fiction murder mystery (!!) I have not yet had the heart to revisit; more recently, I've been trying to sort out my feelings about ritual in human life. At this point, my process includes long and animated shower discussions with myself, and precious little actual typing of words.

Despite the fact that I've never been formally trained as a writer (unless you count a lot of annoyed red pen from TAs who marked my essays) or as a journalist, I've done both and done them relatively well. I developed a real love of interviewing, which has introduced me to some fascinating people/characters. And I've been lucky enough to have some friends, editors, and clients who reach out and actually ask me to write for them, an event that never fails to both terrify me and boost me up. Writing has always kind of worked for me: I'm a much smoother writer than I am conversationalist, a much more organized thinker when I can get it down on paper, and I enjoy the process of turning "in here" into "out there."

I struggle with imposter syndrome, though. I struggle with the fact that for the last five years, this blog, and my writing career in general, has been a bit of a ghost town. Parenting, marriage, health, pandemic and, just, you know...life...has been overwhelming sometimes, and keeping 'er breezy on the blog has been a challenge. It's hard to be authentic and honest sometimes. Back n 2009, the biggest offense I encountered was Chuck Klosterman's book deals. Now, we've actually been through some shit. 

Every time someone else introduces me as a writer, I get a little squirmy. I haven't been paid to write articles for over a year now, and my professional time has been mostly administration and evaluation work—an area that I enjoy immensely, but doesn't activate my brain in a writerly way. (Again, very few jokes in those roles!) At what point do I stop considering myself a writer, or a future-writer, or a one-day-maybe writer? Someone with intentions to write isn't a writer, after all.

And then I think of the authors who take many years between books—decades, even. I think of all the writers who have day jobs, and there are legion. Of the many, many people who never make a buck off their writing and do it anyway: bloggers, fan fic authors, writer's-group members who produce work for a tiny audience. I think of the folks who write only for themselves, who finish a work, not by sending it to an editor, but by putting in a drawer. I think of my dad, who wrote haiku poems, and my mom, who writes beautiful emails. Those people are writers, too. They are my people.

Whenever I have an identity crisis about whether or not I'm a "real" writer, I try to remember that the vast majority of writers don't do it for money, prestige, or recognition. Their work is like drops of rain that nourish the soil of their lives, but are invisible on a sunny day. The garden grows regardless. In fact, it can't grow without it.

Even in fallow seasons, I'm allowed to call myself a writer. Even when I haven't been paid for it in a while—fuck, when I haven't done it in a while—I can understand that time as something that's still integral to the work. It's a period of gathering my thoughts, getting more experience, or paying attention to new ideas. It's reading time, which is incredibly important to writing. It's time to talk, to realize that my fumbling words need smoothing out. Even if the writing I'm doing is mostly on Facebook or letters, it still counts. 

Writing has never been my full-time job, but I'm not convinced I'd ever want it to be. I enjoy the loosey-goosey vibe I currently have with the process: sometimes it's a cyclone, and sometimes it's a drizzle. I can't rely on it to keep the lights on. But when it shows up—when I cultivate it to show up—I love the splash it makes in my life.