Emily Fishman

I’ve always been a little uncomfortable calling myself a writer. Sure, I write, but, as my previous work can attest, I’ve always perceived a connotation with the word “writer” that didn’t quite sit right with me. In high school and college, I always thought that calling myself a writer felt like when I was little and I would play dress-up with my mom’s makeup and jewelry. Looking myself up and down in her closet mirror, it was clear that I had the right pieces, they were in the general right place, but none of it looked anything like it was supposed to. The lipstick was the wrong shade, the necklace too long, the high heels so high I had to grab onto something for fear of falling over. I was playing pretend. My relationship with writing and the idea of being a writer has always been kind of like that. Some days more than others, I could convince myself that the entire ensemble was achieving the desired effect, but the unease remained.

 

So, then, why write? Why do I write? Coming into college, I thought I had the answer to that question. I write because people tell me I’m good at it. Because, like every cliche, I like words and the way they look on a blank page. Because even though the identity of being a writer still felt like it didn’t fit, writing was one of the only things that I was consistently good at, so I stuck with it. These things weren’t necessarily bad, but the combination of them resulted in what I like to call my “crisis.” The optimistic view of that episode goes a little something like this: I realized that I wasn’t as good of a writer as everyone thought I was, or even as I thought I was. There were plenty of people who worked less than I did and performed better on writing assignments, and were just better writers in general. The identity that I thought I had finally earned or embraced or beaten into submission crumbled. However, I found my way through. I created the structure I thought I craved. I found other ways of being creative. I wrote awful fiction for no one to see, telling myself that this kind of writing was all I needed. I stopped calling myself a writer, but I was enlightened. I was free of the complicated feelings I had toward writing and being a writer, and I had a well-rounded understanding of the creative process. I was carving a place for myself among the editors and the behind-the-scenes players. If you had asked me this time last year why I wrote, I would have told you that I really didn’t write. I took off all the elements of my identity that didn’t fit, that weren’t easy, and told everyone that it was better this way.

 

It’s hard not to look at that time in my life and roll my eyes. Some days, I feel as if my supposed “enlightenment” was utter garbage. All my emphatic conclusions and meditations on what it means to be creative concealed a real insecurity about my lack of skill. Turns out, when you remove the ill-fitting clothes, you’re naked. When you’re naked, you have to stop pretending and start dealing with what is there. And I hated that. Despite the all anxiety that this was causing me, the “crisis” I had wasn’t just mild, it was ridiculous. I got one B on a paper: so what? My own crippling sense of self-doubt caused me to depend entirely on the praise of others to view my writing as worthwhile. Other people have real problems. I have character flaws that masquerade themselves as earth-shattering issues. I was always good at school — so is everyone else. Nothing about my issues are unique or profound. I want to shake freshman-Emily and tell her to get over it and just write. Don’t settle for editing everyone else’s work for the rest of your life while secretly thinking (but never admitting) that you think you could do better. Screw the structure and just WRITE. You have no place pretending you have reached some higher state and can now give advice to those who are struggling with why they write when you don’t write anymore. At this time in my life, all I wanted to say to myself was that if the clothes don’t fit, make them.

 

Realistically, both the optimistic view of my writing and why I write, as well as the derision and the pessimism, are both too extreme. Yes, I had a crisis in who I was as a writer, Just because sometimes I think it was silly doesn’t invalidate what I felt in the moment. The need for an expanded definition of what it means to be creative, and by extension what it means for me to be a writer, was necessary if I was going to continue trying to figure out what exactly writing and creating meant to me and meant for me. Some of my “enlightened” realizations are legitimate. Conversely, the ensuing doubt of the validity of some of those conclusions as well as the scorn for my innocence (or ignorance) were necessary. Necessary, but too harsh. I had an experience that was valid, and maybe I drew too many conclusions from it, but it was an experience I needed to have nonetheless. It changed how I view my identity as a writer, and it complicated how I write in a way that I needed.

 

Writing is not as easy for me as I would like to pretend that it is. Unlike Joan Didion, descriptive language doesn’t flow out of me. I don’t sit up and wonder at night why the lights are on in the bevatron. I don’t think in beautiful sentences. Writing is slow, and painful, and nonlinear, and frustrating. I stop and start and write and rewrite and outline and freewrite and my anxiety about creating and being creative comes through even when I try to bury it. Writing is a struggle. Being a writer feels like a struggle. I procrastinate writing up until the last possible minute, and then inevitably turn in something in which I am not satisfied. Writing my repurposing and remediation, which were both about my process of writing, ironically exposed the flaws in my process. This anxiety about my creative process has been well-documented, and I cannot help but critique this anxiety as inconsequential and unfounded. Ultimately, my process involves making things high-stakes that are in fact low-stakes. When I write, I convince myself that this essay, this short story, even this blog post, are the things that determine my identity as a writer and, to an extent, my worth as an individual. Herein lies the problem. Because of my “crisis” and even my scorn at that crisis, I convinced myself that why I write was about identity. It was about that ever-elusive idea of the Writer. I was certain that it was about making those clothes finally fit right.

 

Why I write is not about my identity as a Writer. It’s not even about being a writer. I don’t even know how I would define that anymore. Why I write is about the process. It’s about struggling. It’s about finding the why amid the how. For so long, the answer to why I write was externally-derived. It was because I was good at it. It was because people told me I was good at it. It was because I got good grades on my essays. It was because my parents told their friends I was going to be a writer. Everything I had written had made me dependent on the approval of others for my own self-worth. When I didn’t fit that mold, I had no answer to the question of why I write.

 

I write because I want to write. It is because that act of writing is something I do for me, not for anyone else. It has been quite a journey to get to that point. I finally feel like the reasons why I write are internally-derived. The writing I find most valuable is writing that is hard for me, which, no surprise, is writing about myself. The types of writing I do most frequently are all about me. One might even call me self-obsessed. Part of that is an overcorrection from the disregard of the wishes of the self that used to exist in my reasons for writing, but finding fulfillment in the process when the writing is about myself has changed my reasoning for writing for the better. I journal, I write short stories based on events in my life, and I write papers where my opinion bursts through every line of prose. One might even call my writing narcissistic. I write because I want to write, and I want to write about me. Looking to the future, the part of me that knows what is good for me would say that the kind of writing I want to do is no writing. It’s too messy, too hard, too unfinished. However, I know that I’m not going to stop writing. I write because I don’t care anymore that the appearance in the mirror doesn’t look quite right. When all is said and done, the metaphor was misconceived, and collapses under further examination: unlike small Emily comparing herself to her mother, there is no picture of the “Writer” to which I can fall short. It was never about identity.