When I was eight, I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.
I still have my earliest efforts, the covers made out of old scraps of wallpaper, stories of missing jelly beans and mysteriously oversized pumpkins and making friends with a green alien named Bob. My classmates wrote encouraging comments in the back in crayon or pencil or those markers that smell like fruit. Great! I loved it! This story is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
But when I declared my intention to be a writer to my father, he said, "You can't be a writer. Writers don't make any money." What he meant, concerned as he was—and still is—with salaries and benefits and pension plans, was that you can’t make a career out of writing, but what my eight-year-old self heard was, “You can’t write.”
Because of that can’t, I spent the next decade and a half resisting a large part of who I am and how I connect with and make sense of the world. I wrote stories occasionally, but I tried, for the most part, not to be a writer—all the while still pursuing an education and jobs that allowed me to be connected to the written word.
I even started a Ph.D. in English, thinking that was the way to put books at the centre of my life, but I finally realized that I didn't read or write about literature in the same way as the other students. I wasn't interested in looking at texts through a critical framework; I was interested in how the stories affected me, the possibility that words held to witness and reflect and transform. I didn’t want to break books down and apart, to dissect a text so its neatly carved up parts illustrated a certain idea or concept.
I wanted to create.
And since re-committing to writing over a decade ago, I have. I’ve created stories and plays and essays and screenplays, and characters who I know bone-deep, and whole worlds for them to inhabit, and lines—the odd ones—where I feel like I’ve captured something true.
I’ve created too a space where I am most myself and can do the necessary work of paying attention, of writing, as Joan Didion put it, “to find out what I’m thinking”, and of sitting with complex, paradoxical questions about why I am the way I am and why the world is the way it is.
Creation begets more creation so what the writing has also created is the companionship of friends who are also doing the hard, messy and beautiful work of living a creative life.
It wasn’t easy, though, that return to writing. There are challenging points in any creative process, moments when the enthusiasm of beginning gives way to self-doubt, when the voice of the inner critic seems to drown out everything else, when you question the value of your—of any—creative work.
For me, that can’t—the idea that I couldn’t be a writer—had burrowed itself deep within, had taken root and entwined and tangled itself into my mind and my gut, its tentacles choking my voice. I tried to write without judgement, to embrace as Annie Lamott calls it, “the shitty first draft,” but the can’t dictated my process, to the point that I would suppress the energy of a new idea, stop myself just as I was getting started so I could test out the story’s sturdiness or viability before I committed to working on it, partly because I felt I’d wasted so much time, but also because if a project failed, it confirmed that voice in my head, the one that still said, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.
But there was another voice too, that eight-year-old in me who said: I want.
That voice grew louder each time I showed up for my writing, each time I kept my butt in the chair even when it felt nearly impossible to sit with all the doubt and uncertainty. It felt at first like all I was doing was pruning the tentacles of that noxious can’t, but as I continued to embrace and put my stubborn faith in the act of writing, the roots themselves began to loosen. It’s not that doubt isn’t still a part of my process; it’s that I now write in spite of it.
My father still thinks you can’t make a living writing, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a life out of writing. It doesn’t mean, as I thought it did all those years ago, that you can’t write.
I can. I do.
