5 Years

It’s pretty painfully obvious that I’m freaking out about writing/careers/my future/my identity right now.  I’m currently contemplating and planning my future as a super-senior and what I’m going to get out of the extra time I’m buying myself before I have to blindly commit to go down some uncertain path.  As relationship freakouts were to xanga, career freakouts are to blogger. 

Obviously, writing has been a huge part of my identity for the majority of my life (or at least the years worth counting – I’d say before eight, kids are as interchangeable as Runts – they all look different but underneath they’re all the same flavor), and I think it’s no coincidence that letting it slide has coincided with some major identity crises in the last couple of years.  It terrifies me that I can’t just do it.  Even if I’m being good and tunnel visioning every other successful writer/blogger I’m personally acquainted with out of the picture, I’m still not where I wanted to be as a writer going into my senior year.  Senior year of high school I was on top of my blogging game.  I would have hoped I could be on top of my essay-writing game as my college counterpart.

I read the word of people 10-20 years older than me (at least), who have substantially more writing/career/life experience (and paid editors), and I can’t wrap my head around why I’m not at their level right now.  I lost my patience for the slow maturation of my writing the moment my first essay got published and my professor pushed me towards professional writers workshops and a lifestyle of dedication and contemplation I am still in no place to sustain.  Since then, I feel like I’ve always been trying to catch up to those expectations, to get serious about writing rather than just doing it, whether it’s good, whether anyone reads it, whether it’s even worth keeping more than a few minutes.  I just want to pound out publishable piece after publishable piece, at whatever expense – and it’s that pressure that keeps me from writing anything at all.

Right now, I’m really into David Rakoff.  I keep thinking about how next year I’m just going to reread books I love and analyze them, and I’m so eager (god how nerdy) that I keep thinking about Xeroxing copies of essays from Don’t Get Too Comfortable and scribbling all over them.  A couple of days ago I came across this interview with him, and was more reassuring than anything anyone’s said to me lately – not my friends, not my professors, not my mother.

“Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.”

Okay, I knew the last part.  No one makes it out of elementary school without having phrases like that scorched into your retinas via block letters on neon-colored laminated posters.  But I really needed to hear straightforwardly what I can really easily be deduced from putting together the pieces of his, and every other writer’s, essays: all the good ones weren’t always writers.  David Sedaris smoked way more pot than I ever have throughout college and he seems to have ended up a decent writer.  I’ve got ten, fifteen, twenty years (although right now the voice of David Bowie is singing me “five years”) before I have to be a writer for the New Yorker or kill myself.  What is there to worry about.