being a writer

A friend texted me in the middle of the day, apropos of nothing, and told me I write well. She had been thinking about recent things I’ve written and just wanted to tell me they were good. She used words like “valuable” and “winsome” and “thoughtful.” We’ve known each other a long time; she is one of my favorite people on the planet. She is kind and honest and the type of person I believe when she says things like that. This text made me grin, and tear up, and spiral out for a few moments before returning to myself. In this text, she also called me a writer. She has been calling me a writer for years. That is where I draw the line.

I’m not a writer.

Several years ago, in a green room, on a ten-minute break, I asked a colleague about the other projects she’s working on, how they’re going. What else do you do? She makes polite small talk – she’s a director/actor/writer with some exciting things in the pipeline – and turns the question on me, and I stumble over a poorly rehearsed “this is all I really do, but I’d like to write? I mean, I write, but I don’t like, write, write.”

“So you’re a writer,” she said simply, and walked away to rinse her coffee cup. 

She is becoming kind of a big deal now.

I think about that a lot.

Fast forward to this year. I’m at a party, hosted by a sort-of-famous writer and poet, whose work I’ve read. They are a friend-of-a-friend, and I’m at their huge, multilevel penthouse, clutching a Sprite in a cocktail glass I garnished with a lime. It is the house of my dreams, luxurious and homely, grand but warm. There are books and art everywhere. I want to be this kind of person. I want to be here, forever. 

The party is a mix of theatre people – my coworkers, whom I’ve seen every day for weeks – and a writing cohort, advised by the poet. It’s a jumble of vaguely dressed-up work clothes and blazers tugged over blacks and bohemian flowy looks and devastatingly casual classiness.

I am starstruck by the writers, talking about their published anthologies, a reading of their play, a deadline on their next piece. It is a way of life I have never been convinced actually existed until this moment. But it does, and suddenly I’m desperate to be a part of it, feeling like the new nerd in the cafeteria in a high school movie. All I want is to be privy to their jokes about writers with names I recognize, their sly comments about magazines and publishing houses, the pontificating on lenses and frameworks and critical theory. I want to tell them I started working on my play again, that I drafted another essay, that I’m dipping my toes back into fiction, that I think maybe I want to write a book one day. I want to ask them about form and genre and let them explain everything to me.

Instead, I hang close to the drink table, disguising sparkling waters with citrus wheels and sprigs of nice herbs. Drinking makes me anxious. I’m too anxious to drink.

Late in the night, I find myself in conversation with one of the writers, both expelled from our previous conversation circles in the way that happens at these kinds of parties. We awkwardly talk about the show I’m working on, my job (which is, I clock, decidedly less interesting than the actors’ milling around the party). I ask about their writing. They left a New York City publishing job to come write, to finish their short story collection. We chat about the effects of the pandemic on the world, and on art. They recommend a book. I read it two weeks later. I loved it for all the reasons they said I would.

I never even got their name, am not sure I ever told them mine. It wasn’t that kind of conversation.

Days later, a coworker grabs my arm just before we go into a meeting together. “Sarah,” she says sincerely, and I expect bad news about something that will come up in the meeting. “I read your blog. You’re a fantastic writer. It’s beautiful. You should write more.”

I thank her, blushing – it’s weird to me still when people reference my writing in the real world – and make some joke about how I work in theatre to fund my writing career. We laughed, but part of it was true – I’m cursed to be a morning person, and so when I wake up early with nothing to do until my 7:30pm show, it makes sense for me to write. So I do. 

Half of it will never see the light of day, because it feels far too vulnerable, too soft for the internet, and I’m not brave enough. Not yet (not ever?). 

I’m at drinks with the cast of a show I’m working on. We had had a talkback at that evening’s performance, and a question had come up about the writer. What was their intersection with the themes of the play? Where did the idea come from? No one knew. So we were talking about it now, at this poolside bar, I once again sipping on my Sprite. An actor is a successful playwright in their own right, and spitballs about their writing process. Then turns to another actor: “do you write, too?” Kind of, here and there, short plays mostly, which quickly turns into a discussion on the state of the American theatre industry. I won’t bore you with the details but please go see local professional theatre! 

In the moment, my feelings are hurt. They shouldn’t be. This actor doesn’t know I write, has no reason to assume that I do. Actors are often multi-hyphenates, stage managers are not, or not in the same way. And to be fair, I’m not. I have had the incredible fortune to make my living – my whole living – from facilitating storytelling in the best way I know how. I am not a writer. If the question had been posed to me, I would have deflected. 

I’m not a writer.

This, whatever this is, doesn’t count. This is a hobby, my quiet little nerdy side project, a creative outlet for the leftover energy of my very creative job. And maybe that’s all it needs to be. 

I am young and chronically online in a way that is entirely disproportionate to the way that online-ness intersects with my life. I often think of this Christianity Today article from January of this year. The article is about the gap between the  “Evangelical elite” and the likely Trump voter, but it is not a far leap to draw comparisons more broadly: not everyone has the time, energy, or interest to engage on a level that feels obvious or important to a subset of people. The things that matter to me, the books I read and the thought exercises they send me on, are largely uninteresting to almost everyone I know. If it is interesting, I can point you in the direction of a dozen writers saying all the things I’m thinking who are a hundred times more qualified than I am.

Which is to say, I don’t know what I have to say. I’m a pop culture hobbyist, an amateur theologian, an armchair philosopher, an ill-informed pundit, and a grown-up third-culture-wunderkind. There is no platform. There is no byline. There is just me, brain too full, britches too big, desperately wanting to synthesize everything I so voraciously consume into something that makes sense to me. Or at least to try to. The world is so big. We are storytelling creatures, hardwired for narrative, and it is so, so strange to feel your worldview morphing, to hear the flutter of flaps as the ticker display in my head changes to something new. I want to capture it somehow.

I just turned 25. I don’t want to write about The Kind of Person I Am and Who I Am Becoming. I had a birthday! My prefrontal cortex has developed! I know everything about life! Let me now explain the universal human experience to you in a way that suggests I have discovered it! I am the only person to realize this complexity and tension that we all hold! 

I did not wake up on my birthday as a genius. But I can feel myself straining in a fight between youth and maturity (you can laugh. This is, I recognize, an obnoxiously twenty-five-year-old thing to say). I feel like I am shedding my skin. Physically, emotionally, mentally. There is a shift happening. It…hurts? In a good way? I both desperately want to talk about it and to bury myself in a weighted blanket until it passes.

This month, there was a total eclipse in Aries and mercury was in retrograde. My friends who know about these things kindly informed me that that means I should remain calm and avoid big changes and big decisions. Someone even pulled up my chart and talked me through it. Make no choices right now! Wait! And what do you know? I made some big decisions and everything changed. Is changing. I have not remained calm. 

I am not sold on the astrology of it all, and the personal development is uncomfortable at best.

Which brings us back to the writing thing. To quote Vice President Harris, in a context I literally only know from TikTok, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

I mean, duh, right? That’s been my whole shtick for years now.  

I am lots of things, but I am not a writer. I am a wannabe writer weaned on blogs and essays and books with words so good they get stuck in my head like song lyrics. Any identities I could claim or labels I’m drawn to feel complicated and unimportant in turn. I can’t separate any of it, really, myself or my history. I don’t really know what any of it means. I’m not even sure I want to write about it. I don’t know that I could. I don’t know how.

And yet, I do somehow. I participate in this exercise in vanity because I can’t not.

Do you not feel the tightness in your chest? The pounding in your head and in your heart that demands you get it out? That thing, that nag at the core of your being that sometimes feels like a living breathing creature somehow trapped inside of you? Do we all just live like this?

Is that childish? Wildly romantic and unrealistic? Maybe. 

Which is why I’m not a writer. I can’t do what they do. I am not Joan Didion or Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf or Margaret Atwood or Annie Dillard or Madeleine L’Engle. Jeanette Winterson wrote Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit when she was my age. Has the clock already started on my Kunstlerroman? I’m behind on so many levels. I cannot be a writer. 

I subscribed to a weekly newsletter because a near-stranger forwarded it to my work email with a note that read, “I think these might give you the sorts of phrases to hold in your chest. Or the roads to ideas you’ve almost had, but not thought close enough to the surface – not thought to the point of putting words to.” Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that the goal of all of this? Of any of this? Can I do that? Maybe, when I do that, maybe that’s when I’ll be a writer.

The book I’m going to write – which I think about as inevitable but remain certain it will never actually happen; Schrödinger’s book – will have to wait a few years. Ten, fifteen, twenty, probably, when everything feels less important.

I am trying to say the things I want to say. There is so much I want to write about, a hundred little tiny dreams I want to pursue, flickers of the ideal against the monotony of it all. And for some terrible reason I cannot pretend to understand, this is all I know to do.

So I will cosplay, pretend I know what I’m doing, until I believe my friend when she tells me that I am, in fact, a writer.

 I am not.