When I meet people and they hear that I studied writing or that I like to write ( I seldom say I’m a writer because I’ve never been one to have confidence), they inevitably ask me about it. “What are you writing now?” They say, or “What do you like to write?” Their eyes light up and their cheeks flush and they inhale just a little too quickly. They try to hide their crush like any self respecting acolyte, but it's overtaken them already and I don't want to disappoint.
There is no way I can admit the truth--that I am a displaced writer, an orphan searching for a place to land after ejecting (in black robes and a mountain of debt) from the hallowed halls of my university home. I cannot tell my admirers that most of my writing is memos and forms from my boring 9 to 5 office job for which I am 8 years and $80,000 overqualified. I cannot say that the rest of my writing is nothing more than my release into my own pensive: a reliquary for the deep darkness in my soul that can never come to light.
There is no way I can admit the truth--that I am a displaced writer, an orphan searching for a place to land after ejecting (in black robes and a mountain of debt) from the hallowed halls of my university home. I cannot tell my admirers that most of my writing is memos and forms from my boring 9 to 5 office job for which I am 8 years and $80,000 overqualified. I cannot say that the rest of my writing is nothing more than my release into my own pensive: a reliquary for the deep darkness in my soul that can never come to light.
So instead I am expertly vague. I mention the bare bones of a couple of projects I started two years ago and never finished. I tell them about the new project I am “conceptualizing,” but have yet to put words to paper. Only occasionally am I brave enough to tell an echo of the truth: “nothing,” I say, and I watch the light leave their eyes. They will not fall in literary love so easily again.
I am afraid to disappoint the few people who believe in me, but I am even more afraid to disappoint myself. For all my solutions and advice, most of me is just that chaotic creative who can't buckle down and focus and is still so afraid of failure. If I am fully introspective, though, I realize that there is another part that is not afraid of failure at all; she is afraid of what will happen if she succeeds.
And why is that? What self actualized woman, fully educated with a vision of who she wants to be and where she wants to go succumbs to a fear of success? How can such a fear even exists in me?
Do you have answers? I don't, but I don't doubt that even if you don't have answers, you've likely experienced my same fear. Let's work to overcome it together.
The one thing I do know is this: Fear does not define me. If I let it rule my success or my failure, I am letting it win. That cannot happen, and so I press on toward the vision. Adoring acolytes or not, the next time someone asks me what i'm working on, I will have a literary answer, and it will not be a lie.
Will you?
And why is that? What self actualized woman, fully educated with a vision of who she wants to be and where she wants to go succumbs to a fear of success? How can such a fear even exists in me?
Do you have answers? I don't, but I don't doubt that even if you don't have answers, you've likely experienced my same fear. Let's work to overcome it together.
The one thing I do know is this: Fear does not define me. If I let it rule my success or my failure, I am letting it win. That cannot happen, and so I press on toward the vision. Adoring acolytes or not, the next time someone asks me what i'm working on, I will have a literary answer, and it will not be a lie.
Will you?
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