Who are you when you’re not a writer?
Separating craft from identity.
I’ve questioned my identity as a writer throughout several stages in my life – periods of furious creative activity and periods where I wondered if I’d ever write again. I’ve often asked myself, what would it mean if I stopped writing?
Most writers I know use writer to define part, if not all, of their identity.
On one hand, this is an important step of your writing path – it is you claiming your rightful place in a community of creative people. It shows your commitment to your work, to adding your voice to the collective conversation.
But on the other hand, your identity is not just how you present yourself to the world. It’s how you define yourself in your mind, how you draw a line between this is who I am and this is who they are. It can also be how you define your value – I am a writer because of how much writing I consistently contribute through publication.
So what happens when, for whatever reason, you need to stop writing?
What if there is a period of time in which you can’t write for some logical, valid reason? When it’s in your long-term best interests to stop? What happens to your belief about your value? What happens to your sense of self?
For me, it can look pretty grim. Over the past several years, and especially since my son was born in 2015, I’ve had to face the reality that I simply cannot spend as much time writing as I used to. Coming to terms with this has involved a lot of shaming, a lot of shoulds, and at its worst, has sometimes made me resent the act of writing.
This has created a vicious cycle–I can get just as resentful about writing (and therefore neglect all of my other needs) as I can about not writing (neglecting my intensely powerful need to create). It has, at times, made me feel trapped – like it’s impossible to get one critical need met without sacrificing some other critical need – and therefore being in a constant state of depletion and want.
Nicole Gulotta talks in Wild Words about different seasons in a writer’s life—a few are The Season of Discontent, The Season of Listening to Your Body, and The Season of Raising Young Children.
In these seasons of sometimes not writing, she talks about slow writing, about finding harmony in writing less than you used to, and about one-line-a-day journals. This approach is a start, but for me, it wasn’t enough.
I recently read The Mother Trip by Arel Gore (a fellow single mom writer – I highly recommend it if you are a parent). In it, she mentions a quote by Gertrude Stein: “It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.” Ariel Gore adds to this, “It takes a heap of loafing to be a parent.”
The quote felt especially fitting to me this past Labor Day, as I sat on the couch in my jammies, eating Chinese food from the container while my son watched Bluey and played with his legos spread all over the floor.
Because loafing in this context isn’t equal to lazy. We need these slower moments, the downtime between activities, the vast space that is created by not doing. By not writing. We need thinking, absorbing, and reflecting time.
Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones, calls this process composting. It’s one of my favorite analogies because it’s easy to see how we can’t have the beauty of a garden (overflowing with herbs, vegetables, and flowers) without waste. It reminds me that what seems like wasted time isn’t wasted. It’s compost for your creative garden.
I’ve also found that a key component missing from conversations about what to do when you’re not writing is bolstering the not-writer parts of your identity.
Because writing is something you do, not something you are.
Because using one specific activity as a fundamental, integral part of the definition of who you are is inherently problematic. No one’s whole self can ever be defined by a single activity, no matter how fulfilling or noble the activity is. Trying to do so reduces us to a repeated action–like a machine.
We are more than an action. We are not machines.
One of my clients recently said to me – “I’m not sure what I’m like when I’m not always trying to be a writer, which I’ve been doing since I was about 10 years old.”
She’d been wrestling with the idea of taking a break from her book but wasn’t sure what that would mean for her.
As an experiment, she decided to allow herself three days to “quit” writing – she didn’t make a firm decision, she actively said she would not make a decision until the three days were up.
She didn’t make a plan for those days. She wandered. She mentioned getting herself a boba tea. She mentioned just thinking. Just being.
And at the end of those three days, she wanted to write again, so she did.
But if she had decided not to, that would have been ok too. Because she’s more than a writer. And so am I, and so are you.
Today, try saying this: “I’m a writer AND – “
– a single parent, a teacher, a public speaker, an accountant, a brother, an auntie, an actor, an artist, a real estate agent, a lover of stories, an accountant, somebody’s daughter, etc etc.
Because then when the other balls get dropped – when you have to be the not-writer first – you need to trust the other parts of yourself to take the reins and get all your other needs met. You have to trust that your creative impulses will come wandering back all on their own. Because they will.
And maybe that’s compost, or maybe it’s just living.
Writing is something you do, not something you are. There’s more to you than your output. You are a person who has value, whatever season you are currently in.
