Am I a Writer?

I flipped through my first collection of stories the other day. I found them in the bottom of a Tupperware container, underneath a pile of yearbooks and the christening dress I wore when I was barely a year old. I pulled out the dress, crinkly like paper with age, and there it was. The blue notebook with Winnie the Pooh on the cover, metal spiral pulled halfway out and catching the edge of my thumb, dangerous enough to almost draw blood. I slowly pulled back the cover, careful to make sure I didn’t rip it entirely off, and saw the faded pencil markings of my third-grade self: large and confident, not an eraser mark in sight. Each page boasted a one-paragraph-long story about a friend turned animal — Tyler the Tiger, Carley the Cat, Mitchell the Mongoose, etc., etc., until all my friends were accounted for, all the white space used up.

These aren’t bad, I thought, and then I put the notebook back beneath the dress beneath the yearbooks, replaced the Tupperware lid, and returned the container to its spot in the hallway closet. I wasn’t looking for stories when I’d first hauled the container out, but that’s a good enough metaphor to leave on without telling you what it was I actually wanted to find.

Since third grade — since years before third grade, when I first learned to read — I had the complete conviction that I would grow up to be a writer. I loved books but, more importantly, I loved writing. When other childhood dreams fell by the wayside (oncologist, marine biologist, veterinarian, Air Force pilot), I held on to Being a Writer. And I read, and I wrote, all through high school. I went to college and majored in English. Then I stayed an extra year to get a Master’s in Creative Writing. And then, I went to grad school in Oregon and I got another Master’s in writing!

In that three-year span of graduate education, I wrote two theses chock-full of essays and stories. I even started a novel. I even started a memoir! I wrote like a maniac because I needed to bring something into workshop. I needed to bring something to my thesis advisor. I needed to bring something to someone, anyone, to justify leaving my dying mother three thousand miles behind to pursue this literal childhood dream turned compulsion.

When I came back home, my mother gone, my family irrevocably changed, I had three degrees, $500 in my bank account, $31,000 in undergrad student loan debt, no job prospects, and only one publication under my belt. I can’t remember just how many rejections I’d racked up to this point, but you’ll forgive me for not scrolling through my Submittable account to jog my memory. I was lonely, depressed, incredibly grief-stricken, and scared. My dad wanted me out of the house almost as much as I did, so I moved to Pittsburgh in November 2017, after finding a room on Craigslist and a front-desk position at a family-owned hotel on the same day just two weeks before. It was the first stroke of luck in a straggling series that led me from the front-desk of the hotel to the front-desk of a swim school in the suburbs to finally landing my first “career” job on a communications team in the corporate services division of a large company with headquarters in the heart of downtown. I proceeded to write blog articles, featured stories, ad copy, web copy, brochure copy, copy copy copy.

I stopped writing just about everything else. I halfheartedly penned one story or essay every six months, sent it out, waited for the inevitable rejection, got it, still felt lousy even after anticipating it, filed the story or essay away, and promptly forgot about it until six months went by and I’d start washing, rinsing, repeating.

Writing had slowly morphed from something that I loved doing and never wanted to give up, to something that I felt I couldn’t quit even if I wasn’t interested in it anymore — in fulfilling the idea of myself as an adult in the world that I’d cultivated as a little kid. When do you say to your third-grade self that you aren’t actually cut out to be the next Beverly Cleary? That by the time you go off to college and grad school, Beverly Cleary is just one of a hundred dear authors you think on fondly but haven’t wanted to emulate in a very long time?

“Listen, kid,” you want to say to the kid scribbling away in her Pooh notebook, so intently the sides of her palms are stained gray with graphite. “There are so many things you haven’t read, languages you haven’t learned, people you haven’t met yet to be dictating what I’m supposed to be doing right now! You don’t even know that you’ll despise J.K. Rowling by the time you’re 28 — let at least that morsel of blasphemy slow your goddamn roll!”

But you don’t say these things because, though you think you believe time is linear only because humans haven’t developed the technology to move through it in any other way, you don’t really believe that. You just want to believe it, because this belief leaves room for the possibility that your mom is out there, on another timeline somewhere, and one day, if you’re lucky and science is on your side, you’ll be able to find her again and say you’re sorry. Or, barring that, you’ll be able to find the kid with the Pooh notebook and tell her a few things so she doesn’t have to learn them all the hard way. That her heroes will change, or die. That her sense of self will go through a million iterations before she turns 15, let alone before she turns 30. That she’ll be so very unlucky and so very lucky at different points in her life; sometimes she’ll be both at the same time. That the end of the world will come, and it will be devastating, but she’ll still wake up the next day, and then the day after that, and then the day after that. If time is a line, maybe it’s one that does loop back on itself.

That’s tough to explain to a third grader. It’s probably impossible. So you start a blog instead.

Maybe I am a writer in the sense that I have something to say and a means with which to say it. That, for now, has to be enough. At least, until it isn’t. But I’ll cross that bridge when, not if, I come to it.

Thanks for reading.

X

Sam