SB LACROIX

There was always something: some event, some comment, some form of self-doubt, that left me with conflicted feelings about my writing. Sometimes it was the pressure to publish from someone who had read my work. Sometimes it was my inability to believe anything I wrote was any good.  Sometimes it was the comments I received prior to publishing my first book.

One such comment that stands out in my memory was from a woman who read my writing on a blog. She messaged me to ask if I had any books for sale. When I replied that I did not, she responded with: “What are you waiting for?” 

Yes, it was always something that fueled my confliction, be internal or external, but one day it was three words – three words intended as a compliment.

I had composed a business e-mail (not associated with my writing) and sent it. In the reply I received, the recipient hit the topic points and then stated:  “You write beautifully.” I sat staring at the screen – at those three words – and felt annoyed.

And I knew why.

***

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to become a writer.  Writing was something I just did, something I’d done since my adolescence. Sometimes I enjoyed it. Sometimes I hated it. Sometimes I felt like it was wrong not to write, as I seemed to have a “gift” for it. Sometimes, I wished I had never started writing at all. It felt like a disease, like a curse, not a gift. It felt like something I just couldn’t purge from my soul. It seemed as if it were in everything I did, in anything I ever wrote, even a business e-mail.

I told my husband I didn’t want to write for a while. I told him I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to write again. I explained that I never wanted to write like I did – I just…did, and it was a very personal thing for me. It was pieces of my soul every time I put words together. It didn’t matter what I was writing, it was always pieces of me, and sometimes, I offered them reluctantly.    

“So, don’t,” he responded.

I looked at him funny. Don’t write?   The thought of it seemed impossible – like not breathing. I could actually not write and it would be okay?

I smiled at the possibility. I don’t have to be a writer if I don’t want to, I thought. I don’t have to spend all that time writing, rewriting, revising, and scrawling down ideas. I don’t have to submit pieces or publish books.  I don’t have to keep an online and social media presence. (Self-promotion was not something I enjoyed. In fact, it was the part of writing for book publication I disliked the most.)  

Not writing meant free time, and I basked in that new-found freedom. I return to reading books that had been gathering dust. I watched disgusting amounts of cable and netflix. I got back to hobbies and other fun stuff.  I went to bed at a reasonable hour (instead of staying up late to write) and actually slept (instead of mentally revising whatever I’d been working on).

My writer-free state seemed liberating. I tried not to notice I kept jotting stuff down – the scrawling in notebooks and on scraps of paper, the lines of poetry, the ideas for plots, the names of “people” who didn’t exist, the titles of stories not yet conceived.

I went to my quiet space and settled in to meditate. Basking in the smell sandalwood incense, I told myself it didn’t matter. It was behind me. I would just stop writing and never write again. I was a former writer now, and I would fade away from the chains of social media and other word sharing places.

I threw the notebooks in a drawer. I messed up the scraps of paper on my desk and covered them with junk mail. 

I. Am. Not. Writing.  

***

I returned to the business-related e-mail. I needed to respond to the reply I’d received. While mulling over my response, I reread my original e-mail and relived the actual writing of it. I made myself sick with the revisions I felt the need to do on a simple, and not overly lengthy, business e-mail. I was disgusted that it took me an hour to compose because I kept rewriting parts so it would “flow better”. I rolled my eyes when I caught myself reading it aloud. Even after glancing at the clock and seeing how much time I had spent on writing it, I couldn’t clicked send until I reread it one…more…time.

I shook my head. I was pathetic. I couldn’t even write a business-related e-mail without doing that “writer thing”.

I was consumed with utter disgust, and the look must have been all over my face.

“What’s the matter?” My husband asked, peering at me through the pane of glass between my desk and where he was sitting having coffee.

I told him about the e-mail I had sent, the reply I received, and read aloud those three words:

You write beautifully.  

He smirked.

I glared.

His smirk faded, and compassion flickered in his eyes.

“You can’t help it,” he said, as if I were a kleptomaniac that had just returned home from the mall with a purse full of hot goods.

I sighed heavily in acceptance of my seemingly unavoidable state.    

I was born diseased with words, and odds are I will die saturated by them; my word-riddled corpse, fingers stained with ink, lifelessly draped over my keyboard keys worn of its letters. Next to my lifeless form: a drawer full of notebooks with poems and unfinished stories written in barely legible chicken scratch, and flash drives of unpublished work scattered amongst them.  I am a writer. Perhaps a reluctant one. Perhaps an odd and abnormal one. Perhaps a rewriting and revision obsessed one. But I am a writer, nonetheless.