The Origin Story of a Writer: Cardboard Books & A Shadow Career
I’ve been reading a lot lately, even more than I’ve been writing, and I’m always interested in the origin stories of the writers and authors whose work I adore.
Some of them, more than one, have stories of living in their cars before “making it.”
Some have a Masters in Fine Arts, but were good writers even before they sold their first born to the bursar.
Some were and are regular ole people who love to lament about the act of writing all day until they sit down at their computer at night out of self loathing and a deep need to produce something, and then draft some of the most hilarious and relevant shit I’ve read in my life.
I started to think of my own origin story, and how it is weirder and less romantic but still interesting. I scribbled it down to make sense of it, as I always do.
I decided to write it in the third person because it somehow feels more powerful, objective, and funny (if I do say so myself).
Without further twiddling of the thumbs and time-wasting to avoid vulnerability or whatever is equivalently scary (a never-ending brain-freeze, a flock of geese simultaneously releasing their bowels just as you gaze up to admire their honk orchestra, wildfire smoke that engulfs much of North America…oh, wait), my origin story is (thus far) as follows:
Girl’s mom takes her to the library to check out as many books as she can carry as often as she wants.
Girl writes a 5-page book for a school project called Mind Loss in which a boy walks under a waterfall that wipes his memory (the rest she doesn’t remember, and how funny is that).
Her cardboard-and-construction-paper book goes on display at the literary show night at the local community college and she earns a silky purple ribbon for “Young Authors.”
Girl feels like hot shit.
Girl goes to book premiers for Harry Potter and revels at the floor-to-ceiling fortresses of hard copies and fellow Hermiones vibrating with nerd energy and too many frappucinos from the bookstore cafe.
Girl takes an Advanced Placement Literature (“AP Lit,” she clarifies as she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose) class in high school that blows her mind.
Girl listens to a speech given by the hopeful next president of her high school’s Key Club that is chocked full of smarts and hilarity. She didn’t even know you could do that and she dies for it.
Girl starts a Wordpress blog out of her dorm room during her Junior year of college and feels on fire for the first time ever.
Girl does nothing about this on-fire feeling.
Girl gets a degree in psychology then two more degrees in school psychology.
Girl starts reading for fun again after formal education is finally over.
Girl is classified as not an “essential worker” during a global pandemic.
Girl restarts her blog six years after the first one but for realsies this time.
Girl self publishes a guided journal then writes several children’s books about social-emotional learning for a traditional publisher thanks to a wonderful editor friend.
Girl writes for her email list subscribers and pitches local stores to carry the journal on consignment and otherwise tries to entrepreneur even though she cannot spell it and does not have a business degree.
Girl gets serious writing a memoir about growing up with an abusive parent and also other stuff which is even quite funny.
Girl gets a business lawyer and a literary lawyer and promptly gives them all the money she’s thus far earned from writing.
Girl gets a Cease and Desist letter she always knew would come and promptly throws more money out of her attic window straight to the lawyers.
Girl picks up freelance work to pay for costs of running a website and LLC and future legal fees and also because she wants to prove to herself that she can do something she loves and make (some) money.
Girl reads more books, feels more on the right track, feels even more GAH at work-work as a school psychologist that she for some reason became.
Girl goes back to therapy to feel her feelings instead of “intellectualizing” them and even though she hates it, she loves it.
Girl attends writing critique groups with local writers, feels more fire and loves it, feels more torn in her inability to let go of her formal “career because UGH, health insurance! and the school children of America!
Girl keeps writing, keeps reading, keeps doing and undoing and peering across the river, willing her right foot then left then right again to start the walk across the bridge away from the fear and toward the fire inside.
Every cell is ablaze for our girl, but her feet are not yet really moving.
Not yet, but the inevitability burns and she wants it.
She just has to let herself want it.
She’s just got to raise a foot, lurch forward, and land on the other foot.
Start a Frankenstein walk into the unknown and awesome.
She just has to.
I read an email last week from Emily McDowell in which she wrote about the concept of “shadow careers.” (You can read her email here). A Shadow Career is a similar enough version of what we actually want to do, but we choose the shadow because it is the perceptibly safer option.
Her shadow career to the career she really wanted but was afraid to want, writing, was to ghostwrite, write ad copy, write marketing materials, and eventually start her own greeting card company (which downright rocks by the way).
My shadow career, in case it isn’t obvious, is school psychology because I get to
1: Write reports most of the day,
2: Do something familiar because public education,
3: Have a stable paycheck, health insurance, a retirement account, and
4: Have relative prestige/ respect in doing something “meaningful,” which really means working with kids in a crumbling institution in an even more crumbly country, and “understandable”/ “respectable,” which really means people get what you do and don’t judge you based on their perceptions since it is a “real job,” which really means that you are using the degree(s) that you paid for and slogging along five days a week but mentally always and not doing something frivolous and unstrucutred and even fun as a job instead (how dare you).
I’ve felt this way about the career I chose, the shadow one, since I started doing it.
I “like” it.
It’s flexible enough.
I get paid enough.
I have autonomy enough.
I often say that my favorite part about this job, which turns out is most people’s least favorite part since it takes away from “working with kids,” is writing reports.
How painfully enlightening is that??
In my shadow-career-job-prison, I can be most of a real person and people leave me alone to manage myself, which I desperately require because of how much work I’m putting in to pretending to like it.
It is tolerable, mostly.
It suits me, enough.
But since I started this blog again in 2020, I’ve felt torn and unable to really convince myself otherwise. Writing is what I constantly think about, what energizes me, what I “care” about, and school psychology is just what I do.
Am I ever going to change this? Am I ever going to originate further, complete this story that has been me to my bones since I could read?
I don’t know.
I really don’t know unless I “hit it big” with future book sales one day, or a piece of my writing goes mega viral online and leads to greater writing opportunities, or something.
Something to push me to say, “Okay, this is real and I can do this.”
Or more realistically, “This is real and I can’t (don’t have to) do both anymore.”
I’m working hard to tip the scale toward something.
Toward something, and away from the shadows.
Yours stoking the fire,
Emily Rose