Writing: Gift and Duty
I’ve identified as a writer for just about as long as I can remember.
But I’ve often had a conflicting relationship with writing. Almost like it was an obligation that I was stuck with.
In my childhood and teenage years, my sense of identity and self-esteem were unstable and broken. Life seemed non-intuitive to me; I felt insecure, undefined, and incompetent.
Writing was my singular skill that garnered frequent compliments and praise from authority figures and peers alike.
For a kid who felt like a nobody, that external validation was like a drug.
A drug and a compass, as it pointed toward a potential career path.
Since I felt inept in nearly every other facet of life, writing seemed like my only hope for making a living.
Thus marks the origin of my identity as a writer, and the sense of resentful obligation that developed later.
The first story I remember writing—I want to say I was six or seven years old—was about a fish who gets separated from his father, and goes on a journey of reunification.
Complete with a colorful assortment of aquatic companions.
I was pretty much ripping off An American Tale, Homeward Bound, and The Land Before Time… but I’m still waiting for my royalty check from Pixar.
Into my teenage years, after having developed an obsession with video games, a friend told me that I could probably write the best RPG (role-playing game, like Final Fantasy) ever. Went to my head a bit.
So later, I bragged to another friend about how I had ideas for the best RPG ever (I did not actually have any such ideas). She asked me to spill the beans and tell her all about it.
So I improvised, making up a story on the spot. She loved it. I loved it. I still love it, some twenty-five years later.
It’s a fantasy with a mind-twisting hook, and I respectfully salute my miniature self and his peach fuzz-covered face for coming up with it.
That story has lived on and expanded to enormous proportions in my brain and heart since then. One of these days, I’ll finally write the damn thing (as a series of books though, not games anymore).
As a teenager, and slightly into adulthood, I also dreamed of starting a print magazine.
I was banking on this whole “being a writer” thing.
And as I got older, I still failed to identify and cultivate other life skills, and sucked at holding jobs to the point that I was beyond desperate to make something of myself with writing.
The more desperate I became, the less I wanted to write.
Plus, I was arrogant about writing. Can’t improve upon perfection, right?
(My ass didn’t know how to correctly use “its” and “it’s” until I was 32, so there’s that.)
Also, I was firmly entrenched in a vicious drug addiction for much of my adult life. As that progressed, my mind was dominated by thoughts of getting the next fix, as my life passed me by and my writing skills were rarely exercised in any sort of industrious way.
For a time, I identified as the writer who doesn’t write.
About as refreshing as water that isn’t wet.
Life took a promising turn when I cleaned my life up in my late twenties and found my way back to school in my early thirties.
Still feeling largely undefined and unskilled, I was more than thrilled to rediscover the euphoria of external validation, thanks to glowing praise about my writing from professors and fellow students.
You know in Return of the Jedi when the ewoks deify C-3PO?
Well, I kinda felt like C-3PO, and my classmates were the ewoks.
If that sounds arrogant, well, just remember that in Star Wars, C-3PO was a neurotic and pretentious bucket of bolts.
But yeah. Professors relied on me to help students who were struggling. I was able to help the ones who actually cared about succeeding. This led me to a job at the college Writing Center.
During those years, my external validation was over-abundant, and I went from the writer who didn’t write, to the writer who juggled about seven major projects at once.
Which is less impressive than it sounds, when you consider that seven major projects all imploded simultaneously when I eventually burned out and lost momentum.
Before the burn out, back in the heyday of academic achievement, professors in writing, philosophy, and social work courses regularly asked me why I hadn’t written a book yet.
Feedback written on my papers was often along the lines of, “This is publishable.” “Submit this to a magazine. Get paid!” “When is your book coming out??”
Art of Being Human
One of my philosophy courses was called Art of Being Human. A fascinating, life-changing course with a great deal of self-reflective writing.
Through that writing, I came to see many of my childhood traumas in a new light, and in some cases experienced profound healing events.
Art of Being Human was a brilliant course with brilliant instructors, who gave me the final push I needed to get serious about pursuing publication.
So I compiled much of my work from Academia, combined it with some blogs and private journal entries from over the years, and wrote some new material, which together formed into the philosophical Megazord that is my first book, The Art of Being Human: What It Means to Be.
My life took a sadistic detour around then, though.
When my drug addiction came back for an encore, all bets were off.
The ensuing instability and drug-induced mania heartbreakingly turned me into a pariah in the academic community and made my continued employment at the Writing Center an impossibility.
Then my stupid ass broke the law, landing myself on probation.
It was a dark, confusing, and delusional era for me, and that was when I published The Art of Being Human.
A weird contrast there. To publish my academic triumphs right at the point of my life in which all those triumphs were on the crux of becoming ghosts. Phantoms that would haunt me on the nightmarish path I was on toward obscurity, isolation, and suicidal depression.
All that external validation from professors and peers dried up, and left me with agonizing memories of that almost-successful person I used to be.
On that road, the only external validation I could find anymore, was from people as lost as I was or worse.
And the only internal validation I could generate was based on drug-induced delusion.
What a mess.
And it went on for nearly five years. Felt like ten to me.
Those five years stripped me down to less than nothing, and eventually reverted me back into the writer who doesn’t write.
I hated writing. I wanted it to die. How dare writing, for being the only shot I had to make something of myself. A shot I took. And in my eyes at the time, I’d failed beyond redemption.
Recovery
Thankfully, this story doesn’t end there.
It was darkest before the dawn, but dawn was no picnic.
I re-entered recovery, and got honest with myself.
I’ve had to rebuild myself, in many ways from scratch.
For the first six months of being drug-free, I felt like a blank slate.
A silent protagonist like Crono from Chrono Trigger, just walking around shaking and nodding my head.
The only writing I did then, was for myself. Daily journaling.
Exploring questions like, Who am I? What’s possible? What should I care about? Values and priorities? What can I do to do better going forward? What beliefs do I have about myself and the world that are holding me back and defeating my soul?
The mission became to form a foundation for my identity and future. The foundation I’d utterly neglected to build in my youth.
I had to get out of my own way. Be humble and teachable. And to develop habits, skills, and mentalities that would allow me to stay afloat without the unstable, chaotic influence of drugs and without a desperate need to be validated by others.
I’m a human being. What other people think matters to me on some level. That’s how it works, right?
But to depend on praise as a guiding force was to cast myself upon sporadic winds.
When I wasn’t clear with myself about who I was, I became whatever I thought other people wanted me to be.
That’s no life. That’s chaos incarnate.
Part of me is yammering right now: “This piece is too long. No one wants to read this. Why hit publish on these words?”
Well. Because while doubt and insecurity are still a part of me. And while I have zero control whatsoever over the outcome after hitting publish…
These factors are no longer my dictators.
This is a process. Of refinement. Of exploration. Of practice. Of learning. I am in a process of becoming.
Today I no longer write in some anguished attempt to find a way in the world. I don’t write out of obligation anymore.
Or to impress people. Or even to save the world.
I write, because it’s good for my heart. Writing sorts out my mind. It tells a story that previously only existed in the abstract corridor of memory.
When we tell our stories, we find the connective tissue between us, which renders obsolete our snap judgments and narcissistic delusions of apartness.
Today I write for the most powerful reason of all: Because I wanna!
I hit publish because I can.
Come what may, let’s keep doing our best, one day at a time.
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