Rediscovering the Joy

June 2023

I used to write like it was going to save my life.

I discovered writing before I discovered long-term memory - I have no concept of a time before I could write. I just remember that first month of kindergarten, trying to convince my teacher that I really did know all my letters. I didn't want to sound out stop, sss-tuh-ahh-puh. I wanted to put words to work for me. I wanted to figure out what good they were for.

I wrote all through school, story after story. Plotless one-pagers in five-year-old wiggle letters turned into short stories. By eleven, I was determined to be the youngest published author ever. (I never stood a chance - a four-year-old beat me out. In the 60s.) In high school I wrote my first novel(la). At 17 I devised my own alphabet, purely so I could write erotica in class with no one reading over my shoulder. I wrote in every available moment, notebooks and notebooks filled and forgotten.

I think capitalism is what did me in. Writing has always been a compulsion, but more and more these past ten years, it's been the bad kind. Compulsion (disordered). Whenever I hate my job and can't imagine doing it another day - whenever I have no idea what the next job, the next career path looks like - whenever I quit in a blaze of glory, bills be damned, and all too quickly realize I've screwed myself financially - I sit down and write, hoping that maybe this time I can make it my real path forward. And I'll never have to take another shitty day job where I sit at a desk and hate myself for eight hours a day.

It's a lot of pressure to put on a story. No wonder it hasn't been fun for a while.

I don't know what's changed lately.

I still hate my job. It's a good job; I'm surrounded by good, kind people, doing work I'm good at and don't mind doing. I'm out of customer service for real this time. My coworkers respect me. The non-profit I work for does some genuinely vital work in the community. I hate it anyway, purely for the way it drags me from my home and my wife and my cats and my autonomy for nine hours a day.

But there's a shift I can feel. I'm done lying to myself that I can do anything else long-term. I've tried on a lot of goals, a lot of dream jobs. I was going to be a zoologist before anything, and then an accountant, an ESL teacher, a data scientist. I've planned for these things like I'm staging a war - degrees planned out down to the credit, the promotions I expect and the years I'll get them - and then I've abandoned them like I'm shedding skin. I'm ready to admit that I don't want any of these things - I'm just scared that if I go for what I really want, I'm not going to get it.

My wife pointed out recently, very rightfully so, that if I want to be a writer, I need to stop getting in my own way and just make it happen. It can't just be a half-dream that I hope will magically come true someday without me putting in the blood and sweat. I don't know why, but something in that was freeing. I know what I want. I even know how to get it, or at least how to try. And I've always loved a step-by-step action plan.

I'm writing for all the same reasons I have been for years - because I love story, yes, because I have such an invested love for language that no one in my family will play Boggle or Scrabble with me anymore, but also because they say not to do it if you can do anything else and I've tried everything else and it left me miserable. And yet, even though nothing's changed, writing itself feels new again. I'm finding myself hunched over my desk, scribbling as many paragraphs as I can before my boss sees me. I'm going to bed thinking about stories I want to tell. About lines I'm excited to put on paper. There's confidence and real joy in the work again, and I think you can tell when you read it. My first and only Creative Writing professor asked me at the end of the semester if my parents read me poetry as a child, because he could tell from my writing how much I loved language. I lost sight of that feeling for a long time. Rediscovering it makes me feel more like myself, like a version of myself I didn't remember.

I've always found that when I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing - cosmically, morally, spiritually, however you want to take that - things feel easy. Obstacles feel surmountable, even if getting past them takes time, even if the work itself is hard. The world doesn't fight you as much. I'm ready to give up on a useless fight and do what I'm supposed to be doing. It feels so much better.