For the last eleven years or so, any time I would fill out a form that required my occupation, I would write in "Mom". I didn't use "Homemaker" or "Stay-at-Home" anything for my profession. Most of my work did involve my home, certainly, but that wasn't the primary focus of my daily functions; it was my children.
Sometime around the beginning of 2011, I started to answer "Writer" if I were feeling particularly brave. Muchness and Light was a few months into its existence, and I was working on the original version of the first Junkture story. (That's all been altered now, and the characters were repurposed for Persona Non Grata.)
I was sitting by the neighborhood pool last week while the boys were at swim practice. I was reading my editor's notes and marking up her copy even further, planning the revisions I started that night. Another mom walked by and asked what I was studying.
"I'm reading... for edits," I said tentatively.
"You're an editor?" she asked.
"No," I replied, "I'm a writer."
She was surprised, though there are a lot of women who run in my Mom circles who have no idea about what I do. I don't know them very well outside of the confines of PTA or school functions, but I know them well enough to feel confident that Muchness and Light isn't their cup of tea. I sense they would likely brand me a heretic and suggest I wear some scarlet letter. (I would suggest F, to be funny, but that would just knot their knickers even twistier.)
Even when I wasn't sharing what I was doing, I was almost always writing. There are lots of short essays and stories on my computer that no one but me has ever seen. Occasionally when I need an idea or to remember something that was once much clearer, I'll go back to those pieces and see what goodness there is to be culled from the crap. Every so often, I'm surprised when I read something really old and try to find a way to work it into another piece.
I started to think yesterday about what makes me a writer. It's not the success. I make virtually no money now with my writing, and I have a small but growing fan base from all over the world. No one was more surprised than I was that anyone else wanted to read what I had to say.
There is something visceral in me that needs to write. It's as natural to me as breathing. I do it almost every day and often for hours. Tiff and Mo and Mandypants know I will call them when I need to work through something—which seems to be all the time—but I also turn to my computer screen when there's something bothering me. I used to write terrible poetry all by hand, and the process of physically creating the words in my uneven script was soothing to me. I loved the sound of pen or pencil scraping across clean, white paper. Now it's the soft clicking of the keyboard that soothes me. I love the uneven syncopation of the process of thought taking on a more tangible form, the start and stop of the energy of creating words that have never before been combined in such a way.
I've been stuck for hours in the middle of a new scene for Persona Non Grata, unable to find the way forward for those characters in their moment. I decided to put it away for now and write something else, namely this post. Already I can feel the shift in vivacity. Taking the time to think about something else in a completely different voice will let the other voices rest for a while until they're ready to murmur their refreshed truths to me once more.
I'm braver now to tell other people that I'm a writer. Even when they ask if I've ever published anything, I can only answer with my blog. Sometimes they'll go read it; sometimes not. But it doesn't change what I do and why.
So what are you? What makes you what you are? Is it what everyone else thinks you are? Is it what you think you are?
Comments