Here's Your One Chance, Fancy....

 I fancy myself a lot of things: a good mom, activist, well when it's convenient, feminist, and super funny when I have had a few drinks.  In the past year or so, I have taken to fancy-ing myself as a writer.  Like a real writer who wrote not just to opine or to complain but one who wrote because the stories just welled up inside and had to be released.  A real writer who writes for money and fame and purpose.  But, in my typical fashion, while I was creating this part of my identity, I did absolutely nothing about it other than fancy it.  And to be fair, it's been a year.  We have all lived this year, so I don't need to explain.  Teaching, coaching, parenting, dating, living in a pandemic.  Doing all of those things in a pandemic.  God, someone should really write a book on how to do those things in a pandemic.

One way I coped with being cooped up last summer was to write stories about the people in my apartment complex.  The lives that I imagined they lived and not one of them were very flattering.  It is hard in many ways to go from living in a house to living in an apartment surrounded by weird people you didn't choose to live in and I took their eccentricities and my boredom and wow, I live among vampires, and bad parents, and incestuous couples.  I sent them on to my mom who sent them to her sisters and I am a real hit with white women over 60 that I am related to.  But does this make me a writer?

I also found myself writing about divorcing.  About raising kids who were so angry and sad and disillusioned.  About my own anger and sadness and disillusionment.  I didn't share much of this because it was so personal that I had to write about it from a second-person point of view.  But I wrote words that were true and painful and freeing.  But does this make me a writer?

My stories also made their way into the new world of dating.  Shared experiences made funnier, weirder, and explained by my brain and received well by their intended recipient.  But as we shared that experience and laughed about what could be and I just took it a little further and gave these people names and jobs and a penchant for murder, does that make me a writer?

Today I am at a coffee shop writing this because I feel that a real writer would write in a coffee shop while sipping hot coffee and using the free Wifi.  I have both coffee and Wifi at home but I felt compelled to come here.  Instead of editing the stories I wrote or finding a way to meld the stories together, I am writing this blog.  I tell my students all the time that writing is a process but I seem to be ignoring this process myself.  Also, wouldn't a real writer be able to write without relying on Grammarly? 

Free Wifi, $4 coffee.

I often write because the words get built up in my head like a logjam and I need to let them go so I can do other things.  I am pretending that after I write this I will attack those stories with gusto and get them polished and published by the end of summer.  Will that make me a writer?  What if I send them out and they get sent back?  What if I never polish them up or send them out?  If I spend the rest of the summer watching crime dramas with a strong female detective and British accents, relying on those stories and not mine?

I like to write because it gives me tremendous joy when people tell me they like my words.  I like to write because it is an escape.  I like to write because I can create worlds where they don't exist.  I like to write because it lets me express what I cannot always say.  I would also like to write because I am a teacher who makes $48,000 a year and it would be great to supplement that with something that didn't make me wear an apron or leave my soul at the door.  I fear living in smaller and smaller apartments with fewer windows with each passing year.   I am picturing one light bulb hanging from the center of my apartment and cats waiting to eat my face when I fall down dead.  That's actually too depressing to keep writing about. 

I will always write.  When I was eight or ten, I wrote my mom a terrible song about clowns for her birthday.  And sang it.  God love that woman; she pretended I gave her a million dollars.  I wrote terrible poems in high school that made the yearbook and now introduce my lessons on poetry.  I write this blog because, well the words are piled up like a logjam.  And I guess I will write stories whether or not I ever publish them because they are there in my brain and prevent me from resting.  Maybe I will never make money from writing or take a jump and try.  Maybe I just continue to write for me and for my fan club of aunts.  And when asked about my hobbies while interviewing for some terrible second job where I have to wear an apron, after yoga and eating dark chocolate, I will say "Writing".