to be a writer
I can’t sleep so I’m writing this at 4:52am exactly !!!!
For as long as I can remember, writing has been an integral part of my life. Like breathing for me, as important to me as a limb on my body. I don’t exactly remember when I picked this up, but I remember how much I loved telling stories as a kid. It excited me that I could create these worlds, build them from the ground up and make something that only I was capable of fully knowing and understanding. This was when writing was the most fun for me. I would have these grand ideas for a novel - I was 11 years old when I promised my English teacher and school librarian that I was going to publish a novel that year, and of course, it probably sounded funny to them, but they treated my dream as seriously as I took it. Every week when our class would visit the library, I would tell them more about my grand plan. To me, writing a book was the pinnacle of achievement.
This was before I developed the fear of being perceived (welcome to adolescence!!) The older I got, the more my writing became diaristic. I needed a place to talk about my real life as it was happening, express feelings that I was feeling for the first time, really. Embarrassment. Heartbreak. Shame. Pride. Love. I would skip lunch and go to my school library and write everything on loose leaf paper, not planning on sharing it with anyone or publishing, just a vessel for what felt like the scariest time of my life: growing up. I realized then that I really loved this thing, and I didn’t just want it to be a dream. I wrote on everything - loose leaf paper, in the back pages of class notebooks, napkins, receipts, my notes app, Google docs, Pages, journals, to do lists, notepads, postcards, everything. I have a stack of all the work I’ve accumulated over my life and it’s all a jumbled mess of scribbling and books and worn pages, just how I like it.
Despite writing so much, one of my biggest fears was sharing it with other people. This made it difficult to write obviously, because sometimes I would have an idea for a story or a direction for an essay, but I would put it off for so long, an untitled google document sitting there on my laptop for weeks, months at a time, because I was afraid of disappointing this imaginary audience. Instead I listened to music and marveled at how these songwriters were able to capture feelings I was so afraid of putting into words and telling others about. Taylor Swift, Maisie Peters, Lorde, Gracie Abrams, just to name a couple. It didn’t feel embarrassing when they did it, so why did it feel like that for me?
I’m almost 21 years old (in 3 days) and I’m still quite scared of sharing my writing. It takes courage to stop performing for an imaginary audience and I can’t say that I’m fully there yet. But I think I’d really like to try. I always thought that being a writer meant fitting a certain archetype, and it was one that I just couldn’t embody. I struggled with this for a long time, always pushing this thing that I loved to the side as a frivolous hobby when it was my life force. It helps me make sense of the world, survive what feels unimaginable in the moment, remember moments that I want to bottle up and keep in my back pocket forever. And it has nothing to do with whether it’s published or not, whether it’s beloved by others or not, whether it’s correct or virtuous or smart and self aware. It has everything to do with what it means to me. And I’d like to keep it that away.
That’s it for now. I’ve been listening to “The Secret Of Us” by Gracie Abrams on repeat since it came out. Happy early birthday to me!!!