Wherever You Go

I Write A Lot About Not Writing. And Yet, Here I Am

Someone the other day asked me what my writing process is and I immediately replied as I often do, something along the lines of: “I don’t have a process these days because I haven’t been writing.”

I think this a lot but it’s not true— my process just looks very different than it has in the past. Before kids I had a consistent, almost rabid creative process. Then I became a professional that wrote every day for pay and while this felt less creative, it was still rigorous (and it was creative enough). And then I wrote my book, which was just the most rigorous and creative time of my life that I will probably romanticize for the rest of eternity but especially now, because where I’m at today is very different from all of these places, and at times it is deeply uncomfortable.

I am always secretly worrying I won’t ever write anything of substance ever again and that I am not actually the one thing that I am more than anything else: a writer.

All this makes me think that I am the type of writer that would benefit from the workshop I lead every last Wednesday of the month, Write It Anyway. The type of writer that, secretly or not-so-secretly, fears they may not qualify as a writer is exactly for whom the workshop was designed. Even though I’m a published author that still freelances regularly enough, and even though I am currently ghostwriting a book on a very important subject for a very nice amount of money, somehow none of this counts for anything. And I’ve always felt this way. All my career. Because the goal post is always moving— what counts as writing and being a writer is always just out of reach.

Perhaps you can relate? Join us May 27.

This is not what I sat down to write about but this is what I think about every time I sit down to write, which is not often enough. I was speaking with a longtime client just yesterday about my coaching rates and I said that I wish I could be more generous with my time (she wasn’t asking for a discount but had mentioned she didn’t have very much money). She is more than a client— we are friends— and so I told her that my family and I are moving into yet another temporary housing situation at the end of this week and are going into contract on a fixer upper also by the end of this week (hopefully) and will be closing by August (fingers crossed), “so my personal life is constantly intruding upon my work time and I already feel like I’m shortchanging my paying clients.”

So much uncertainty, which is actually what I came to write about— the personal matters that keep me from writing these days. I’ll sit down to work on the ghostwriting project and somehow migrate to Airbnb or Trulia because up until yesterday, I shit you not, I had no idea where myself, my husband and our two small children were moving to on May Fucking 30th. And still, we have no idea where we’ll be living after September 1— not really. I say we’ll be in contract on something by the end of this week but that is wishful thinking, manifesting, acting as if.

Hopefully our next move is into a home we’ve purchased— and hopefully we’ll be in contract yesterday, otherwise we we’ll never close by Sept 1 and we’ll have to find another temporary option and then we’ll never be able to afford to purchase another home ever again because we’ll have burned through the money we made earlier this month from selling what was meant to be our forever home, and I probably won’t get approved for a mortgage if not in the next couple months because the income that helped us pre-qualify was the income we made from Airbnbing the home we just sold.

“You’re spiraling, Melissa,” I hear Jeannie, our real estate agent, say and I hear myself saying to our couples therapist, “ I know these are not the worst problems in the world to have and that other people have problems, too.”

One woman I talked to about renting her house to us was apologizing for not getting back to me sooner and the reason, she said, was because her husband had just had another stroke and it is keeping her awake all night.

At 2am when I am awake worrying where the fuck my family is going to live, she is also up wondering if there’s a decent facility she can put her husband in that’s not too far and that will treat him with dignity and how will she pay for it, possibly by renting or selling her second property that I want to rent, except I can’t afford $5200 a month unless she is willing to go month-to-month, which she said she can’t.

I actually sat down to write about the house that, for months, we were lead to believe we’d be buying. And in fact, I did write about that house, which is maybe a little humiliating. Here I am, on Business Insider, acting as if it was in the bag. It was, in fact, NOT in the bag. It was not meant to be, I tell myself. I tell our therapist I am feeling disappointed, and that I am not so much angry as I am sad, that people can be so unkind as to have lead us on as long as he did so that we are now in a doubly precarious position. But I know that people can also be lovely, and that we’re all just doing the best we can, even when it’s our worst, and so I am letting it go.

And I honestly am. I am honestly over it. Because I don’t believe in “the one.” I believe that— depending on when and where you’re looking—there are a handful of “ones,” and that ultimately, any one, there are going to be issues and it’s going to take work.

Speaking of marriage— and I honestly never thought I’d say this but— that is the one thing in my life that is currently working: my relationship with my husband. Arran and I are working as a team and I feel supported and un-alone. And that has taken a tremendous amount of work, on both of our parts.

If I were to write another book, I would write about that— the work it has taken to overcome mistrust and find the partnership I always desired.

Or else I would write a book about my son’s special needs school— how mainstream education fails kids that learn differently (and all kids, really), and what it takes for children and families to thrive.

If not for writing this Substack, I’d be working on the ghostwriting project, which is all the fun of writing minus any of the pressure of publicity.

Or, more realistically, I’d be packing.

Before writing this Substack, I responded to a student from the course I’m currently teaching: Personal Matters: Writing for Personal Discovery, Individual Transformation and Social Change. She asked me to read something in addition to the manuscript she had submitted for the class to read and at first I was annoyed— I actually bitched to my husband about it— but then I read the piece and I was just so grateful and humbled that she had trusted me with it.

This has happened a couple times recently. Not to brag, but I’ve had a couple students lately, offer writing that is just so urgent and real and unsafe to share in most contexts and I am so grateful to be a vessel for them and that kind of writing. I don’t know what the title is for that role — I guess technically it’s a teacher but it feels like more than that, and it’s the only thing that comes close to bringing me the satisfaction that being a writer does.

It’s not all the time, but every once in awhile I get to assist a student at creating something so profound and important. When I talk about my process as a writer, I should really talk about this work I get to do as a teacher and mentor. It reminds me of the power writing has, and the power I have had as a writer. Again, not to brag, but I have written some powerful shit. Probably most if not all writers have! Not everything, sure. But some pieces really hit.

I sent that student this piece of writing I had written some time ago because it touches on similar subject matter (chickenshit, ideologically inconsistent Democrats) and because I think her piece could imitate the structure. She wrote back to my initial feedback and she was like thank you, thank you, thank you, something along the lines of I am so grateful to work with someone with your perspective and I wanted to tell her: actually, you can thank my husband, he is the most ideologically pure person I know and a lot of what I offered you, I learned from him.

He probably wouldn’t say so, but he is also a writer.

For not being a writer and having no process, I sure am going on and on.

Maybe that’s the process now: not disappearing into a camper van for six months with the justification of an impending deadline and a six figure advance, but writing in the middle of the chaos anyway. Writing while moving. Writing while parenting. Writing after a night of catastrophizing at 2am and answering student emails and refreshing Zillow and trying to remember what address I gave the post office when I gave them a forwarding address. Writing not despite life but inside it.

Maybe process is whatever keeps pulling you back to the page, no matter how long it’s been and even when it’s been so long you fear you might no longer belong there. Maybe it’s the accumulation of all the ways you remain in conversation with language and story and other people’s truths. So yes that includes teaching, and mentoring, and ghostwriting someone else’s book while quietly wondering if you’ll ever write your own again. Maybe it’s sending an old essay to a student because you recognize a shape she’s reaching toward. And also, it’s this— sitting down to write one thing and ending up somewhere else entirely, only to realize afterward that you were writing about the thing all along.

I don’t know where my family will be living in September. I don’t know what my next book is or if there is a next book. I don’t know if I’ll ever again have the kind of disciplined, ecstatic creative immersion I once did. But I hope so. And I do know that every time I insist I’m not writing, I somehow end up with several thousand words saying otherwise. Being a writer is not a fixed identity, at least not for me. At least for today, it is an elusive forever home. And it is where my heart is.

Thankful to you, for listening, and for Substack, the roof over so many writers’ heads.