Blammo.
I believed that at some point I would be able to call myself a writer—that I had simply to achieve a specific milestone and then, blammo, I would have arrived into writer-dom.
I wasn’t sure what that milestone was. Surely when I had my first short story published. Or my second. Third? Hmm, maybe when I got my first check for my writing. Ok, definitely when I had a book deal. When the book was published, maybe?
But even then, the feeling eluded me—the feeling that I was being granted permission, by some unseen force, to call myself a writer. I had a pretty rigid definition of what a “writer” was, and without giving it much conscious thought, I determined that I was falling short. I formed these ideas when I was little, this gumbo of images from movies and books and god knows where else. I should be churning out novels at a rapid clip! Chain smoking in front of the ol’ Underwood in my Parisian garret! I hadn’t been interviewed by the Paris Review yet! I wasn’t even trading bon mots with my fellow literati at the Algonquin or drinking myself to death! What a letdown I was.
Honestly: Like many creatives, I live with a relentless inner critic who harbors delusions of grandeur on my behalf. He (it’s a he) expected me to live on an estate by now, have a few awards under my belt, get called regularly for speaking engagements, go for long lunches with my publicist. And because I don’t have those things, he tells me, I am a failure.
It’s taken me a long while to even begin to counter this vicious inner narrative. First I had to figure out, where did it come from?
Oh.
I was trying to live up to the expectations of two people who would never be all that impressed with me. It’s not their fault. They just weren’t up to the task, which was to become magically happy simply because I had wished it.
Ugh. What a cliche.
It’s easy to figure this out; it’s less easy to really feel it. (That’s what therapy is for, and time. So much time.) But the more I do manage to feel it, the more I feel those other markers of success dropping away, They’re irrelevant, really. (Although they sound great.) They have nothing to do with the work I love.
I didn’t become the kind of writer I envisioned when I was 10. So what? I also didn’t marry Tony Randall (my childhood love—don’t judge me), and my best friend isn’t Sandy Duncan (I loved her, too—listen. I was a weird kid). Instead, I got to create a community online. I got to meet so many of you. And now I get to write children’s books. What a dream, right? Ten-year-old me could never have guessed how lucky she’d end up being.
P.S.: If any of this sounds familiar, it's also, not coincidentally, what I help other writers with.