Write? Right.
I always wanted to be a writer, but I never thought that I could be a writer.
To be a writer, there’s a requirement, I had thought, that you had to be one of those people who always need to speak their mind, who always need to be the loudest or the smartest (or both) person in a room, who believe so infinitely in their own opinions and voice that they are compelled to share it with all the world.
I’m not one of those people.
I’m an introvert, shy with people I don’t know, who felt the need to minimize myself as much as possible and perform a role totally contrary to who I actually am. I’m anxious and have doubts about what my life looks like, the decisions I make, my blind spots. I’m always worrying about inadvertently hurting anyone with my words and actions.
And my older brother, for his entire life, has always been writing and creative. We’ve never been rivals in the traditional sibling way. I always minimized the creative parts in myself, though, because I thought Rob had already planted his flag in that territory and that I needed to find my own.
For most of my life, I never saw myself as a writer but as someone who likes to write.
I thought I was too practical to ever be a writer because, as our capitalist system reinforces every day, it’s so much harder to make a living as a creative than it is to just compromise and settle for a corporate 9-to-5.
So I was an Econ major in college, learning about predictive models and handling data, because learning about the world excites me. And I thought it was a very practical thing to do, given the job prospects of Econ majors. Becoming a communications consultant after graduation married the analytical skill set I had developed in school with the love of storytelling I’ve always had. Perfect, I thought to myself, I’m set.
When that job crumbled along with everything else in my life in Atlanta after the pandemic hit, the most sane thing I felt I could do in an entirely insane situation was to sit down in front of my typewriter and journal. I initially wrote to open the release valve, to let out the anger and terror and confusion and hopelessness I felt in that moment. Keeping those emotions in or letting them out with other people were not healthy options.
I wrote to see what I felt, at first; then, I wrote to see who I was. Through the release valve poured a 40-page personal essay, along with a new, more authentic me. Writing had given me a new, richer life.
The power of that has really stayed with me over these past few months. I have to pinch and remind myself; I did that. I wrote that. And I trace that power and fulfillment back to trudging my depressed and anxious self into the chair, pulling out the typewriter, and writing day after day, week after week, month after month.
I realized those moments were the ones that felt the realest and the most genuine to me, that I wanted to spend my time doing that over team meetings and putting out fires with clients and going to networking events. So I took up the banner of Writer and went out as a freelancer to peddle my wares and get paid for doing what I love.
As I was editing my website and looking through my past work to build my portfolio, I realized that I always have been a writer: I found poems and rough drafts of short stories I had written when I was in middle school, and reports and articles I had written when I was in college, and client work I had done in Atlanta.
I’ve always been a writer. It just took me this long to accept that.
I think part of the reason that I repelled away for so long was because I know that, in order for me to get to the place where I can tap into that powerful writing I have within me, I need to remove myself from the world.
I’ve developed a routine where, before I even sit in front of my laptop or typewriter, I get in my comfy IKEA chair and meditate for 25 minutes, listening in my headphones to ambient sounds, imagining that I’m gently swaying in a hammock by a running stream, birds chirping around me, looking up at the sun or the stars through the space between the green treetops. Then, I turn on some white noise of waves crashing, set a Pomodoro set in Tiimo, turn on “Do Not Disturb” on my phone, and start writing.
Anything short of that, I’ve learned—trying to casually write with the TV on, or music on in the background, or at a coffee shop—and the release valve doesn’t open. No water drips from the faucet.
That’s a big hurdle to jump over every time I want to sit down to write, and it’s one that taps into my fear of just shutting out the world, closing my life inside the four walls of my apartment, and becoming a hermit, completely divorced from the world and its terrors and dysfunction.
But I’ve learned that fear, that voice in my head trying to dissuade me from doing what I need to do, telling me I’m not worthy to hold the banner of Writer, that it’s impossible to live as a creative, has a name: Resistance.
That’s what author Steven Pressfield, in his book, The War of Art, calls the “self-sabotage, procrastination, fear, arrogance, and self-doubt” that gets in the way of being creative.
But I’ve committed to overcoming Resistance, to fight it tooth and nail, to plunge fearlessly into that space removed from the world where I do my best writing, my only good writing.
I remind myself of that requirement I thought I had to fulfill to be a writer—to be a blabbermouth, arrogant, self-aggrandizing—and that, though I’m quiet and aloof and perpetually unsure, I do have something to say. I do have something of value to offer.
So, I sit down, and I write, as writers do.
Back when I was kidding myself that I could write with music in the background, I made this Spotify playlist—which holds up pretty well if I’m doing anything else creative or focused, so long as it’s not writing.