Reading between the lines, perhaps
On Friday, driving home from work in Guelph for the last time as my contract wrapped, I was struck by a peculiar thought I had not entertained previously. That thought, as I posted to FB after I got into downtown Kitchener ahead of the survival celebration at Imbibe, was,
"And unexpectedly, the thought from nowhere that slammed home like a steel blade through the gut, was the realisation that as of 4pm today, I am no longer A Writer, first and foremost. I have never *not been* A Writer. This thought, more than anything else in this transition, undoes me."
The response from people protesting a change in state they don't perceive any way but externally was a fascinating thing to watch because almost to a one, they denied and dismissed my perception and perspective. (Well, all except RA who messaged me privately with some very excellent questions of exploration; still challenging in tone, but a vastly different approach that I appreciated very much and have every intention of continue to ponder over the coming weeks of this transition.) But the truth is, while I will continue to write here as the whim takes me, I *have* in truth identified myself as A Writer because as much as I lived to write, I also wrote to live, and being paid to put words on paper/electrons was the validation of state that most professional writers operate by. Anyone can slap words on a shareable medium and announce themselves "writers" but without validation by someone beyond friends and family (who may be familialy-conditioned or predisposed towards saying nice things about our endeavours whether we're any good at them or not), and to a large extent without *paid* validation of a preferably-consistent kind, we're little more than poseurs.
Ask a professional photographer what it's like to have the conversation with someone who just bought their first digital camera and wants to know how quickly they can "go pro"... I have long since lost track of the number of times I've had similar conversations with people wanting to be Writers. I've tried submitting work to professional publications: anthologies and magazines for fiction, mostly, but stopped early on because I'm not disciplined enough to battle the rejections for the hope of not-enough recompense other than seeing my name in print. Technical writing became a reasonable outlet that paid something unheard-of for many writers: not just a living-wage salary but, thanks to the dot-com bubble in the 90s, a salary and benefits package that could at the upper levels of experience approach "absolutely luxurious". It wasn't the most exciting of writing opportunities, but it was a good one, and exercised most of the writing muscles while still leaving at least a little bit of breathing room for the less-disciplined creative spurts and the growing arena (for me, at least) of self-discovery writing.
That act of disciplined practice of one's craft is, to me, what turns feral talent into A Writer (a Capital-Letter Anything, actually). So when I wrote on Friday that I was losing my identity as A Writer *first and foremost* (the snippet that seemed to be something most respondents ignored or overlooked), what I perceived in my future was the loss of the disciplined practice of my craft. And before you ask, no, I have zero intentions of setting up a disciplined practice on my own any time in the coming months. Been there, tried that (multiple times), have zero inclination to set myself up for failure on that score again. It may be different in 6 months, a year, two years - there may be more inclination to leave space for a disciplined practice somewhere down the road, but for the forseeable future, my focus will be on developing as A Therapist. This is the fork in the path I have chosen. This is where my resources need to be aligned until I feel like the world is stabilizing on its new heading. I'll keep blogging, absolutely. I already know I can't currently maintain multiple blogs simultaneously, but not being A Writer with the bulk of my resources going to the discipline may also change that aspect in future as well.
For me: there will always be words. There will always be a fascination with language, how it flows, how its varying constructs can shift and evolve to provoke and prompt and jar. Language is a force for creating assonance and dissonance in both self and audience. I'll never (probably) lose that fascination with the nature and power of language. But without the disciplined purpose of exploring that fascination - or any of the multitudes of other things that fascinate me, even if the audiences for those explorations must by need be selected on increasingly-filtered parameters - then my self-identification as A Writer still falls to the wayside, by my own definitions of what constitutes being A Writer. Unchanneled and undisciplined, I resort to feral talent (and "talent" is a word thrown in for deliberate measure, in that "beauty in the eye of the beholder" sense) at best.
But at the core, writing is no longer *what I do first and foremost*. It will be, as this blog entry itself proves, something left to be crammed in around the edges of other things I do now, other things I am becoming. Nothing is left out of this transitional phase, including some very ancient and treasured aspects of my self-identity. But as part of the process of letting go and searching for those points of groundlessness that began even before Matthew left, letting go of this part of my Self is just one more place where the Universe has offered an open door to see what else there might be, what else *I* might be. Friday's realization came as a thrust to the gut, absolutely. One doesn't often get to confront solid perceptions of self identity very often, never mind only confronting them in the challenging act of being invited to release them. (Not that I haven't always been aware of self-identifying as A Writer, but as with most of any individual's perceptions of Self as labels, we don't sit with them consciously very often.) But the idea of releasing the disciplined aspect of the identity also means being free now to see what else I might want to do with it in future, how it might fit around shifting priorities and ideas and aspects in ascendancy now that have not been here before.
It's not that there won't be a grieving process; I went into Imbibe on Friday night grieving really quite heavily and was vastly coddled in the grief by not being alone. (Not that the subject came up; I made a point of keeping it to myself, and no-one else who might have seen the post before arrival brought it up either.) Yesterday was not a day for thinking about anything, and today I find the grief is at a low ebb with a much more prevalent sense of peace. Removal of a label, even one as deeply-threaded through my entire life as Writer has been, does not mean death of Self. There was a time when it would have been, like when I finally realized I could not take another pink rejection letter from a publisher because each one corroded my faith in my Self (as defined by that Writerly skill) to the point where if my writing was unacceptable, then *I* must be unacceptable as well. I'm pretty sure I've gotten over that; writing as a technical writer, I learned eventually to stop emotionally-investing my Self in my writing because the iterative review and edit process on technical matters I didn't always understand was enough to drive anyone under the wheels of the bus otherwise.
And so here I am on the cusp of being something that focuses on live, interpersonal communication: listening, reflecting, reframing. An entirely different manner of exploring narratives not my own, in which I expect being A Writer will work wholly in my favour in that sense, but not have the same outward expression as it has had in the past. And today at least, I find I'm okay with letting go of that label. Ceasing to be A Writer does not mean ceasing to write. It does connote a change of state in the form of that writing that in truth may not be apparent to anyone exposed to me largely through FB or LJ (words, words, WORDS). But in here where it counts, the difference is already being felt like old panelling being gingerly pried off older walls.
Things can change. Things even maybe should change from time to time.
Necessary and easy are two entirely different concepts however, especially when measured internally. In the end, as much as I appreciate everyone's rushing to defend the label or the person they may have perceived in distress from the tearing off of said label, sometimes a renovation of the Self is the best thing that happens to a person. Just because I didn't anticipate *this* curveball when I started the path, nor when I challenged myself at the outset of the year to say yes to the Universe and learn to get the hell out of my way, doesn't mean that letting go of the ancient labels isn't ultimately the right and needful thing to do for where I am right now, where I want to be... or where I may be going in spite of those first two things.
I am no longer A Writer, first and foremost.
I will continue to write. Someday, maybe something will come of it... and maybe nothing will. It's good either way, it really is. It's decidedly not who I need or want to be right now, and that is something I am, or will be, okay with - even on the days I will undoubtedly struggle with that change. I have other things to do now. And this is entirely as it needs to be. It would be nice if I could outgrow new jeans as slowly as I've outgrown this label, but... that much at least, was clearly NOT meant to be. And I'm (mostly) okay with that, too.
"And unexpectedly, the thought from nowhere that slammed home like a steel blade through the gut, was the realisation that as of 4pm today, I am no longer A Writer, first and foremost. I have never *not been* A Writer. This thought, more than anything else in this transition, undoes me."
The response from people protesting a change in state they don't perceive any way but externally was a fascinating thing to watch because almost to a one, they denied and dismissed my perception and perspective. (Well, all except RA who messaged me privately with some very excellent questions of exploration; still challenging in tone, but a vastly different approach that I appreciated very much and have every intention of continue to ponder over the coming weeks of this transition.) But the truth is, while I will continue to write here as the whim takes me, I *have* in truth identified myself as A Writer because as much as I lived to write, I also wrote to live, and being paid to put words on paper/electrons was the validation of state that most professional writers operate by. Anyone can slap words on a shareable medium and announce themselves "writers" but without validation by someone beyond friends and family (who may be familialy-conditioned or predisposed towards saying nice things about our endeavours whether we're any good at them or not), and to a large extent without *paid* validation of a preferably-consistent kind, we're little more than poseurs.
Ask a professional photographer what it's like to have the conversation with someone who just bought their first digital camera and wants to know how quickly they can "go pro"... I have long since lost track of the number of times I've had similar conversations with people wanting to be Writers. I've tried submitting work to professional publications: anthologies and magazines for fiction, mostly, but stopped early on because I'm not disciplined enough to battle the rejections for the hope of not-enough recompense other than seeing my name in print. Technical writing became a reasonable outlet that paid something unheard-of for many writers: not just a living-wage salary but, thanks to the dot-com bubble in the 90s, a salary and benefits package that could at the upper levels of experience approach "absolutely luxurious". It wasn't the most exciting of writing opportunities, but it was a good one, and exercised most of the writing muscles while still leaving at least a little bit of breathing room for the less-disciplined creative spurts and the growing arena (for me, at least) of self-discovery writing.
That act of disciplined practice of one's craft is, to me, what turns feral talent into A Writer (a Capital-Letter Anything, actually). So when I wrote on Friday that I was losing my identity as A Writer *first and foremost* (the snippet that seemed to be something most respondents ignored or overlooked), what I perceived in my future was the loss of the disciplined practice of my craft. And before you ask, no, I have zero intentions of setting up a disciplined practice on my own any time in the coming months. Been there, tried that (multiple times), have zero inclination to set myself up for failure on that score again. It may be different in 6 months, a year, two years - there may be more inclination to leave space for a disciplined practice somewhere down the road, but for the forseeable future, my focus will be on developing as A Therapist. This is the fork in the path I have chosen. This is where my resources need to be aligned until I feel like the world is stabilizing on its new heading. I'll keep blogging, absolutely. I already know I can't currently maintain multiple blogs simultaneously, but not being A Writer with the bulk of my resources going to the discipline may also change that aspect in future as well.
For me: there will always be words. There will always be a fascination with language, how it flows, how its varying constructs can shift and evolve to provoke and prompt and jar. Language is a force for creating assonance and dissonance in both self and audience. I'll never (probably) lose that fascination with the nature and power of language. But without the disciplined purpose of exploring that fascination - or any of the multitudes of other things that fascinate me, even if the audiences for those explorations must by need be selected on increasingly-filtered parameters - then my self-identification as A Writer still falls to the wayside, by my own definitions of what constitutes being A Writer. Unchanneled and undisciplined, I resort to feral talent (and "talent" is a word thrown in for deliberate measure, in that "beauty in the eye of the beholder" sense) at best.
But at the core, writing is no longer *what I do first and foremost*. It will be, as this blog entry itself proves, something left to be crammed in around the edges of other things I do now, other things I am becoming. Nothing is left out of this transitional phase, including some very ancient and treasured aspects of my self-identity. But as part of the process of letting go and searching for those points of groundlessness that began even before Matthew left, letting go of this part of my Self is just one more place where the Universe has offered an open door to see what else there might be, what else *I* might be. Friday's realization came as a thrust to the gut, absolutely. One doesn't often get to confront solid perceptions of self identity very often, never mind only confronting them in the challenging act of being invited to release them. (Not that I haven't always been aware of self-identifying as A Writer, but as with most of any individual's perceptions of Self as labels, we don't sit with them consciously very often.) But the idea of releasing the disciplined aspect of the identity also means being free now to see what else I might want to do with it in future, how it might fit around shifting priorities and ideas and aspects in ascendancy now that have not been here before.
It's not that there won't be a grieving process; I went into Imbibe on Friday night grieving really quite heavily and was vastly coddled in the grief by not being alone. (Not that the subject came up; I made a point of keeping it to myself, and no-one else who might have seen the post before arrival brought it up either.) Yesterday was not a day for thinking about anything, and today I find the grief is at a low ebb with a much more prevalent sense of peace. Removal of a label, even one as deeply-threaded through my entire life as Writer has been, does not mean death of Self. There was a time when it would have been, like when I finally realized I could not take another pink rejection letter from a publisher because each one corroded my faith in my Self (as defined by that Writerly skill) to the point where if my writing was unacceptable, then *I* must be unacceptable as well. I'm pretty sure I've gotten over that; writing as a technical writer, I learned eventually to stop emotionally-investing my Self in my writing because the iterative review and edit process on technical matters I didn't always understand was enough to drive anyone under the wheels of the bus otherwise.
And so here I am on the cusp of being something that focuses on live, interpersonal communication: listening, reflecting, reframing. An entirely different manner of exploring narratives not my own, in which I expect being A Writer will work wholly in my favour in that sense, but not have the same outward expression as it has had in the past. And today at least, I find I'm okay with letting go of that label. Ceasing to be A Writer does not mean ceasing to write. It does connote a change of state in the form of that writing that in truth may not be apparent to anyone exposed to me largely through FB or LJ (words, words, WORDS). But in here where it counts, the difference is already being felt like old panelling being gingerly pried off older walls.
Things can change. Things even maybe should change from time to time.
Necessary and easy are two entirely different concepts however, especially when measured internally. In the end, as much as I appreciate everyone's rushing to defend the label or the person they may have perceived in distress from the tearing off of said label, sometimes a renovation of the Self is the best thing that happens to a person. Just because I didn't anticipate *this* curveball when I started the path, nor when I challenged myself at the outset of the year to say yes to the Universe and learn to get the hell out of my way, doesn't mean that letting go of the ancient labels isn't ultimately the right and needful thing to do for where I am right now, where I want to be... or where I may be going in spite of those first two things.
I am no longer A Writer, first and foremost.
I will continue to write. Someday, maybe something will come of it... and maybe nothing will. It's good either way, it really is. It's decidedly not who I need or want to be right now, and that is something I am, or will be, okay with - even on the days I will undoubtedly struggle with that change. I have other things to do now. And this is entirely as it needs to be. It would be nice if I could outgrow new jeans as slowly as I've outgrown this label, but... that much at least, was clearly NOT meant to be. And I'm (mostly) okay with that, too.