I should have been a writer!

Dear Cary,

I remember an afternoon, during my senior year of college, in a tiny hamlet in upstate New York, sitting at my desk, and writing a paper for one of my classes. I do not remember the class, or the subject of the paper. I do remember tip-tap-typing away, focused, with open books lying about on the desk and floor, passages marked with pencil, fluorescent sticky notes protruding from pages. I remember finishing a particular sentence and hitting the period key with emphasis. I hopped out of my chair, threw my arms in the air, and declared to no one, “YES! THAT is a spectacular sentence!” I remember feeling exquisite satisfaction and even joy, a physical sensation of happiness and perfection and pride. It wasn’t the final sentence of the paper–it was just some mid-work string of words. But the beauty of it, the rhythm, the flow, the meaning, all of it aligned just right and I was so happy. I get teary-eyed thinking about it now. How silly.

I’ve rarely felt that way in the twenty-odd years since. I graduated and floundered through my twenties. I tried out a few career paths, knowing that any smart girl with any sense needed a graduate degree. I despaired at the math section on the GREs and, despite my longing to study more literature, took the math-less LSATs.

I loved first year of law school–the academics of it, the reading and writing and analysis. The history, and the new vocabulary! But oh how I loathed second and third year–those more practical years in which it becomes clear that the goal is to become a lawyer. I got my degree, got married (in the same week) and practiced at a small firm for a year.  I hated it.  I left when I gave birth to my first son and did not return. I had another son. I was a stay-at-home parent for years. I adored that time, the feeling of the now, of being in the present because I was needed in the present. The relief from having to plan for the future, for my return to the world and work and career and success. I believe I was hiding.

But I also despaired during that time. I used to joke with my husband that I wanted my obituary’s first line to read, “A Wasted Resource.” I became bored and depressed. I had a one-night stand with a friend’s husband and destroyed numerous relationships. I tried to rebuild my marriage but realized it had been nothing more than a friendship since its start.

We opened our marriage, swapped with another couple, and I fell madly in love. I began to write–such inspiration! A novel. It was an arduous process and the product was terrible.  I got no more than 60 pages. And then I began to write poetry. I challenged myself: one poem every day during Lent of that year. Most of the poems were awful, but some–some brought back that old college feeling. I was in a failing marriage, engaged in an active polyamorous relationship, in love, bucking convention. I was ripe for poetry. But Easter did come, and with the resurrection came the end of my writing.

After my divorce, I knew I had to grow up and get a big girl job, and an attorney position fell into my lap. I convinced the firm to hire me, despite my years of absence from work, despite my being an “older” associate (at 40). I’ve been there ever since and I despise it. It pays the bills, my schedule is flexible, I’m fairly autonomous, but still. I married again (my polyamory partner, no less, and truly for love this time), have a beautiful home, darling sons, talented stepsons, and I’m trapped. 

I’m trapped because I cannot for the life of me sit down and write. I can’t do it. I’ve read all the advice and it doesn’t help. I’m in my own way. I’ve gone to therapy–I’ve had 5 different therapists over the past ten years. I’ve read books. I’ve tried–I’ve dabbled, but it doesn’t stick.

And I’m sad. I’m sad because I think I could do it and do it well. I’m sad because now the only time I have the discipline to sit down and write is for the occasional work article, on god-awful topics like probate and powers of attorney. I’m sad because I feel like I’m too old to change careers. I’ve really only had one career for any stretch of time, and it’s not even that long because of my parenting pause.  I’m sad because my life is half over.

I want to feel that exquisite satisfaction again. And the only thing in the way is myself.

How do I get out of my way?

Counselor seeks counsel

(Dear reader, This is going to be a long column; there’s a spot in the middle down there about the church bells and the Oxford English Dictionary; if you think about it, it all holds together (with baling wire!) but it certainly might appear to some as if the church bell thing comes out of nowhere.–ct)

Dear Counselor,

I know what it’s like to remember a special moment and want to repeat it and to wonder if, if only, if maybe, if that moment meant that I should spend my life doing that, and why haven’t I, and how could I rearrange everything, am I running away from something, was that a sign of my true calling, am I wasting my life?

But maybe you’ve got it all wrong. Maybe you know exactly what suits you best, you have made the choices that bring you closest to your ideal, and you have the life that suits you.

To repeat: I know what it is like to be haunted by a memory. It is vivid and powerful and sometimes arises unbidden in consciousness. But it is a memory. That moment is gone. It happened in the past. Today is different.

You’ve had five therapists in the last ten years. You say you’re in your own way. I don’t buy that. Nobody else is making these decisions. You’re making the choices that work for you. If your next choice is to rearrange your life so that you can spend a certain number of hours a week writing, then you are free to do that. Moreover, if it is a true thing, if it is a calling, then it is your duty to yourself to respond to it and cultivate it honestly and in the open.

So how do you do wedge a writing routine into your life without blowing up your life? Many people find that keeping a writing routine going requires an external structure.

You can structure your life in a way that allows you to write regularly for set periods of time. The Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method is a good way for people who want to maintain their writing practice and deepen their skill and commitment, without giving up the family life and the day job. I’ve led and participated in AWA workshops for over ten years, and while I also have had a professional writing career, there are many people in these workshops doing top-notch work for the sheer joy of it. Through regular weekly writing sessions they hone their craft. They become really good at it. I marvel at their talent and skill. Any one of the long-time members of the workshop who wanted to have a professional career at it has a decent chance. I think they know that. But they also know (partly from listening to me complain) what a grind it is, how humiliating it can be, how low is the pay, how bad the odds, and they prefer to keep writing as a bright spot in their lives. I’m always saying Oh, you could publish this, you could publish that, but it’s really none of my business what people do with their writing.

I just remembered something. Somewhere along in my writing career, I realized that I needed to stop writing for money. I realized that in relying on my creativity to pay the bills, I was mistreating my creative self. My creative self was like this innocent boy-self, this part of me that needed care and protection, and I was sending it out to dig my ditches and earn my keep. I was ruining it. I had to switch roles. I had to become the protective parent of my creative self and let my creative self just enjoy. I had to stop crushing it with my demands, my hunger for acceptance. So we switched places. I, the adult, went out and earned the money. And the creative self stayed at home and did its thing. That was a better arrangement.

For a while, it was possible to do both, as a salaried advice columnist. But when that ended I went back to doing it for the love of it.

(The church bells just went off. It’s kind of deafening. It’s Sunday morning and at 7am and again at 7:15am and again at 7:30am they go off every Sunday. It’s right outside my window, the bell is. It interferes with WiFi sometimes. I think it’s either the vibration of the bell or the electromagnetic impulses of the motor that runs the bell, but lots of times when it goes off, the Wifi can’t cope and goes haywire.)

Why the word haywire? That’s another thing about writing. I’m thinking, why haywire? So I go to the Oxford English Dictionary my father gave me. Oh, that’s something too, about writing: family tradition, early experiences, indoctrination, so that it feels like it’s “in your blood.” It’s not in your blood of course but the early memories and experiences and the lifelong acquaintance with family members who esteem it, who do it, that’s a big part of it. Because whose father gives him the two-volume condensed Oxford English Dictionary as a birthday gift.

So I look up “haywire” in the Oxford English Dictionary and it’s not there. The Oxford entries go from “hayward” to “hazard.” A hayward, by the way, is “an officer of a manor, township or parish, having charge of the fences and enclosures, esp. to keep cattle from breaking through from the common into enclosed field; sometimes, the herdsman of the cattle feeding on the common.” But there’s no “haywire” in my edition of the OED. Mine is copyright 1971. Maybe it’s there now in the updated version online but the online OED is kind of stingy and stuck up, it doesn’t let you just look up one word for free, just one tiny word I want to look up please? Nope. They want a lot of money! I’m not paying that much money just to look up “haywire.” I’m in a small town in Italy so there isn’t an English language library nearby. I’d have to go up to one of the universities in Florence to see if the OED has yet added the word “haywire.”

The American Webster’s Third Dictionary has “haywire” of course. It’s about baling wire, which many people probably don’t even know what that is, or that you’d better wear gloves when working with it because it’s springy and nasty and where it’s been snipped it can be sharp. And it originally meant more something that’s just hastily slapped together. I once drove a 1963 Mercury Comet and the muffler would fall off, or not exactly fall off but become disconnected from the manifold and suddenly it’s incredibly loud and it feels like everything has gone haywire so I pull off the freeway. I would fix it with baling wire and a tin can. Fixing things with baling wire is a fine American tradition. But it’s in the category of things “jury-rigged.” Or more properly “jerry-rigged” which I prefer, because of the long history of the term “jerry-built.” How it became “jury-rigged,” and how the Webster’s Third decided that the term is “jury-rigged,” when that makes no sense, is beyond me. But that’s how it is with dictionaries. They’re only human.

You get why I’m saying this? Because if you can pleasantly spend hours with such nonsense it’s an indication that you might doomed to commit to the daily tedium of writing. The dirt and feel of it. The pots and pans of it. The garage full of junk part. The getting underneath the oil pan and looking up at it part. The spending all day looking for just one stupid part part.

Oh and by the way, having no success at all and little hope of things improving are part of it, too. I got over the success thing. It didn’t take long. Only about forty years. I no longer crave the thing I thought I wanted which I believed would come with fame. I no longer crave the experience of working with a “major publisher.” I did that once and that was fine. I’m over it. So if you can get that out of your blood – I don’t really know if it’s in your blood but I suspect so – that would be a great help to you in your desire to write. To write, I say – oh for chrissakes there goes the bell again. It’s 7:30 now and they’re really going at it. There are three of them up there, in the belfry.

Now here we go again with the OED. Because you’d think, “belfry” must be about the bell up there, but in Middle English it was berfrey, and it had nothing to do with bells. It was a tower, or “pent-house” used in medieval time for purposes of siege. We forget, I think, how long the form of siege warfare was just the way you did it. Towns had walls and were small so you’d surround them for months and try to starve them out.

And there goes half an hour reading about sieges.

And the bells are swinging like mad and clanging again, and the swallows are here as usual at this time of year, and they’re shrieking. And the neighbor cat is up on the roof outside my window, or would be if this were fiction in which I’d be allowed to add that cat. He’s actually not there now, but often is. That’s the difference with fiction. I could just put it in there. But here I’m trying to be honest. There really are bells ringing and swallows shrieking but there really isn’t a cat on the roof. Not now anyway. Maybe I could sit here and wait until the cat is on the roof and then I could say it and it would be true.

And that’s another thing: The whole set of rules we operate within. The instances in which it’s OK to lie and the instances in which we’re supposed to be scrupulously honest.

Sheesh.

OK, that’s enough. You get what I’m saying. You’re nodding and closing your purse. You’re turning and going out the door. I’ve ruined another otherwise pleasant morning. And I need a haircut. And if I told you why I didn’t get a haircut when I had my appointment, you’d just think it was gross. And if you’re having dreams of fame and fortune, well, there’s what my brother says about playing guitar and singing for a living when rich people in bars come up to him after a gig and say they’ve always wanted to do what he does. He’s like, no problem, just practice all day for years and be poor. That’ll do it.

Oh shit I’m still writing. I’ve really got to stop. And that’s maybe the final thing. Eventually you have to stop.