Writing is… getting over yourself.
I started coming back to wanting to write in earnest, in 2007. That’s 17 years ago. Wow. I’m a little shocked by my slow and not so steady progress. But, they were right, the time passed wether I was writing or not. My heart breaks a little for the torment I enacted upon myself, making too hard of terms for the girl who simply wanted to know what she had to say. I think that lands me in the company of many other creatives who can claim they, too, have been denying themselves the pleasure of creating, under the guise of keeping themselves safe from the imagined judgments and scrutiny their heart and soul could fall victim to if they dared live fully into that desire.
What hinders me and my writing, even now, are these old stories I have, specifically, around my competency and my deserving. We all have a unique origin story for our own particular brand of self-doubt and self-suppression. Most of my work in these last 17 years has been about finding ways to re-pen those narrative into ones that actually serve me.
For too long I believed that there were external bench marks one must ascend to be classified as a real writer. The distinction of being a writer was saddled with the expectations of being favorably received, well compensated finically, widely distributed and aggressively quoted. I added on the need to also be a household name. If I did not meet this criteria for “writer,” I did not allow myself to publicly or even privately claim to want to be one. I was, noticeably, too far from meeting my warped understanding of the gold standard. A standard I alone had set for acceptance in this pursuit. An evaluation system I continuously upheld that shielded me from ever having to take the first vulnerable step of simply writing and maybe being not as skilled as I imagined I had to be. I had decided I must be the best or waste zero time trying. Does this sound familiar?
It’s tough to own up to this delusion and how long it held me and my voice hostage. My inner critic is meaner than sin and more punishing than time. But it claimed to do it all in the name of “my own good.” No good ever came out of self directed banishment. Rebel! Revolt!
I’ve since been working with adopting a more generous definition of who can call themselves a writer. A writer is a person who writes. Period. End of sentence. If you write, you are in essence just as much a writer as the first author who comes to mind. Hierarchy is a tool of oppression and has no place in creative self expression. Good and Bad are false moral binaries that have no place in creative self expression. If you are a writer, write. Write now. You don’t have to write a lot to be a writer. You don’t have to write well to be a writer. You don’t have to write one kind of thing to be a writer. Writing is a practice of listening. It is primarily for you. What other people make of our writing, is for another conversation. It is none of our concern whilst writing. The writers job is simply to do it and forgive ourselves all the times we couldn’t muster the courage to learn what we needed to say. Courage, turns out, is also a practice.
The best way to prove our well worn critical narratives wrong, is to write anyway. Say, f you, silly story about needing to x,y,and z. I wrote yesterday, I’m writing today and I am committing to myself, to write tomorrow. That makes me a writer. Get a writing friend. Join a writing community. Share your work with someone. This is the writing life.
Count the rewards by promises kept to your inner knowing, trust built in your attention and unique sensibilities, delight taken in the mundane task that can enrich your writing tomorrow. Write yourself into being and tell others how it is working out for you. Let yourself off of the hook of transcendent masterpieces and find simply writing was the point all along. If any part of you is trying to tell you writing is a waste of y’alls time, thank them for their concern and for their diligent protection, and write anyway.
