Becoming a Writer vs. Wanting to Write

 

Wanting to Write

For years all I had ever envisioned for myself was becoming a writer. Sometimes saying it aloud, but mostly keeping it to myself, a quiet piece of me that I carried everywhere I went. I wanted to write and own my own bookstore—a little existence filled with words and adventures, of stories old and new.

Back when blogging was first emerging as a real force on the internet, I had told myself perhaps it could be my start. Start I did, finish I didn’t. I couldn’t seem to find my voice. I certainly didn’t know anything about the intricacies of the internet, SEO, etc., and after many moons, I gave up.

Years later, I tried again. But just like the first time, I didn’t seem to have the flare for such a medium. I became overwhelmed with producing posts similar to others or writing so people would more easily gravitate to my site. It made the process excruciatingly tedious. I had also convinced myself that the only thing I could ever possibly write was my own story. Fiction was not even a consideration. My computer was filled with half essays and one-liners doomed to be saved in a folder that is still seldom opened. And the world kept on spinning.

Feel the Fear

When the pandemic hit, it hit some of us harder than others. My work was shut down, my finances were left in shambles (well, that was mostly my fault and a lesson learned), and I was scrambling to figure out how I was going to stay afloat. This was all while fighting a depression slowly encroaching on every fiber of my being. Isolated alone and far from home, I figured out how to make rent but was adrift in my confinement of one. Though I did not lose someone physically during the pandemic, I did grieve the loss of the life I once knew.

Those first few days of not knowing what was to come, only to realize I would be mostly alone for the long haul were harrowing at best. I went from hopeful to desperate in seconds, day in and day out. I was helplessly unsure of the right course of action. Having made so many blunders previously in life, I was frozen with fear of making the wrong move in such a precarious time. Then one sunny day, shortly after another year around the sun, I sat down on my bed with only one mission: I was going to write a book. 

Becoming a Writer 

I had no plot, didn’t have the slightest idea of what to write, but I had read enough of particular niches to be my own audience. And with that, I just started to type. I had envisioned, truthfully, something smutty, a niche I knew far too well, but as I wrote a VERY rough first draft, and then a second draft, and a third and a fourth, the story took a life of its own. It was far from the tiny, nonexistent idea I had intended but it was a miracle all the same.

When 2020 went to all-out shit, many people kept saying this time at home meant you could do the things you didn’t normally have time for, like, you know, writing a book.

Others stated that it was okay to do nothing because everything we once knew was no longer, and you didn’t need to create a new you or prove anything.

I did write a book, and I also spent hours staring at the white walls of my apartment, crying at nothing and everything. It was the chance to finally make myself the writer I had always dreamed of being. It also felt incredibly wasteful to be dallying around when the rest of my life, like many others, was in shambles, and in comparison, I was very lucky considering.

But I regret nothing. 

I wrote a novel—a work of fiction, of romance, of unlikely endings. And in doing so I unleashed a creativity I didn’t even know I had. Story after story idea came pouring out, notebooks now overflowing with plots and characters to come. After so many years, a decade of thinking I couldn’t, it’s like breathing for the very first time. 

The cliche is more than true—–you are often the one true thing standing in your way.