on being a writer who doesn't write

A note: These are sometimes feelings.

I woke up today ready to write some words on a project I haven’t been able to get back to for awhile. A past version of me would have spent the morning unspooling stories from the spinning wheel of my mind, marveling at the straw sparkling like gold. Present-tense me gets distracted by the waiting to-do list before the pen can meet the page. 

When I became a teacher, I locked up my writing self. I wrote only when I had a specific goal or project: examples for classes, a writing program, a blog I was trying to promote. Once I started working to support myself, I thought that was all that counted. The other things — the fun things — filled me with guilt that I tried to erase with more work. 

I broke down over and over again. I was sick, anxious, injured. I was not what anyone would describe as a model employee. But I thought my job was the only meaningful thing about me and I attached my worth to it, fully. 

When I resigned from teaching, I told myself and everyone who asked that I didn’t want to write for a living. I thought I could save writing from becoming as stressful and demanding as a job. Like I could somehow keep it to myself. 

Of course, it was already work. I couldn’t give myself time to write unless it was attached to a task, and if I couldn’t point to that effort as “paying off,” the guilt poured in until it was too heavy to keep moving. I gave up on so many projects that were successful or promising on paper because of that shame and guilt. 

I cut myself off from my family shortly after I became a teacher, and part of this intense pressure I put on myself was from the anxiety I had around money and survival. There was no one left to help me, no safety net (unsafe as it was). I racked up debt and panic, feeling always like a mouse fighting a rising tide, nose just above the water. 

And there was something to prove to myself, to everyone who told me I should find a way to forgive them, to their haunting presence on the fringes of my consciousness. I had to win. I had to justify this choice. 

But I’m not one of those people who achieved great things and then pulled back the curtain to reveal they were a miserable mess behind the scenes. I was just messy in public. I derailed progress, tanked successes, crashed and burned, got in my own way over and over again. And I couldn’t — can’t — stop. 

I am terrified of the rejection that accompanies effort. But maybe I’m also punishing myself. 

I used to think I had things to say, that I had a voice that needed to be expressed. But at some point, after estranging myself from my family, I seemed set on proving to myself that I didn’t matter. 

I said the opposite, but I didn’t believe it and the repercussions sucked. I felt sick, got sick, carried tension in my body that flared up and tortured me with incomprehensible pain, got so depressed I could barely move (and I think this is what turns me off about affirmations: how shitty it feels to lie to myself). 

If I have a confession, it’s not that I was suffering behind a mask of success all along. It’s that I am tired of trying to believe in myself. It hurts to write that but not because something in me resists or doubts it. It hurts like skin knitting itself back together. 

I’d like to matter simply because I matter, am matter, am here. I’d like to not have to attach my worth to what I can produce, even if it’s art. 

Of course, as long as accolades exist, I will crave them. And as long as I need to earn money, I’ll have to try to tell people that I am good at things. 

But I’d like just to be.