Goddamn, I’ve Been a Writer for Nearly Ten Years and I Still Have Imposter Syndrome
If I’m defined by what I do, I’ll always be many other things more often than I’m a writer.
I have a lot of writer friends. It’s a lucky thing: to have people in my life who are down to swap critique, to attend local readings (or who are the local readings), to moon over the essays and stories and poems we envy as much as enjoy. People with whom to commiserate about the slogging gait with which one carries out the ubiquitous (to us) and onerous task of writing a book. In some cases, people who have already completed that Sisyphean task, whose resultant books stand as three-dimensional proof in storefront displays and private bookshelves and libraries. (These published-book-author friends are, invariably and confoundingly to anyone who is not a writer, all already involved in the tedious and tenuous process of drafting their next.)
My writer friends are singletons and divorcées and—increasingly—parents. They have restaurant jobs and bad dates and daycare drop-offs and fertility struggles. They have full and complicated lives. And they also, many of them, sit and work on their creative projects for at least an hour or two each day, or most days. They say things like, It feels totally reasonable for me to get to 900 words on the novel every morning or I’m going to have a finished draft by our next workshop. Many of them have bylines in magazines and journals that still feel leagues from my reach; a number, even if they’ve yet to publish their book, have found and retained that all-important connection that remains, to me, elusive: an agent.
I also sit and write—a phrase I originally mistyped as “sit and writer,” my perceived lack of accuracy of which as a descriptor for what happens when I do so being the grit of the pearl of this essay—for at least an hour or two most days. In fact, it’s often closer to three or four. But the bulk my writing is not the sophisticated, sexy, publishable-in-The Atlantic reporting or essaying I’d imagined when I told my high school English teacher I wanted to be a writer someday. Instead, it’s ~content~: SEO-driven, link-riddled mad libs about mutual funds or homeowners insurance or RV maintenance. It’s writing that keeps a roof over my head, writing with (mercifully) livable earnings attached to it, but still, a zombie version of what I thought I would be doing.
It’s worth saying: I am extremely grateful and lightning-strike lucky to have the opportunity to earn a living with words, even if those words are so often about 401(k)s. As I Googled my own name in the process of writing that last paragraph to come up with ~content~ examples, I noticed my Google knowledge panel calls me a “personal finance writer.” Which is to say: I have a Google knowledge panel, and it says the word writer less than an inch away from my given name.
In addition, my job is, by most measures, cushy as hell.1 Weekdays I wake up whenever I want—I virtually never set an alarm—and brew my coffee and read (or, okay, scroll Instagram and play with Duolingo) for fully an hour, and then usually go the gym before I even think about touching my laptop. Some days I just… don’t.
If and when it’s time to get started—often after 10 a.m.—that’s the sum of my commute: walk three steps to my desk; prop the computer open. Sometimes I have so much going on I lose sleep and work weekends, but sometimes I go whole weeks in a row working twenty hours or less. And somehow, I earn enough to live on my own in a very nice place in an expensive city. And to travel.
So, yes, I am a writer by pretty much any definition, including my ability to put food on the table doing so. I am also privileged as hell.
And I do get to do writing I enjoy as part of my work from time to time, writing that feels important to me. In January I reported on the last-minute reversal of the closure of a beloved local Portland bar and music venue; a few weeks later, I worked on a study about the increasing pervasiveness of email and social media scams—and how to avoid them.
And I do still find time for creative writing and its accompanying pursuits, too. I have three essays and two poems, so far, coming out in various journals and anthologies in 2024. Last December, I was promoted to Assistant Editor at The Rumpus, where I’ve been a reader a decade. Although I didn’t attend—Kansas City in February? No—I was invited to read this year at AWP, the major annual creative writer’s conference in the United States. Someone close to me said, after hearing all this news, “It seems like your career is really popping right now.” I’m shameless enough to admit she is, in many ways, objectively correct.
And yet, and yet—Google knowledge panel or no, here it is: imposter syndrome. You can tell by the way I keep pointing to exterior markers to confirm an interior identity—publications and titles and search engine algorithms, the many ways to say please be convinced that I am really allowed to do this.
Part of it is the obvious problem of feeling like a sellout. And I do know that problem is not special. Almost every working artist deals with the tension that naturally arises when you pull from the same creative well to make a living as to make art. If those two goals line up, well, terrific, but for most creators that’s a rare (and usually poorly paid) happenstance. With very few exceptions—think Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed—even the best-known writers don’t earn the bulk of their living by writing at all. (Probably even those two make more on speaking engagements and workshops.)
It’s very common for writers to be career academics and earn most of their money that way. At AWP, Where do you teach? is a ubiquitous networking opener. As a grad-school dropout who truly despised teaching (mostly because it terrified me), I was salty about this for years: Who decided the Venn diagram between the writing and teaching skill sets always overlapped naturally? How was I supposed to sustain the tenderness of a poet when I had to slap letter grades on the five-paragraph essays of college freshmen? But in spite of academia’s utterly terrible job prospects and often-mediocre pay grade (I’ve known adjuncts on food stamps), it does have some perks that make it a symbiotic fit for some writers. Summer break is an excellent time to get creative work done, for example, and university access to paywalled resources comes in clutch for research.
A subset of these writers might supplement their academic income with freelance journalism—and some writers have a go at piecing together a whole living by reporting, which these days may be even harder than academia. But career journalists with creative-writing ambitions often face the same problem as those of us—hand raised—who sell our literary souls to marketing. 2
If I’m writing thousands of words a week for this newspaper/website/email campaign/app, when and how am I writing the boiling truth that’s inside me?
But plenty of people pull it off. Journalists publish books all the time, a feat made more feasible when their book and their beat overlap. Which leads to the heart of my self-flagellation protocol: More so than feeling like a sellout, I simply feel scattered. My paid writing and my heart-writing are almost never in alignment. And at times I feel I lack, even compared to friends with similarly busy lives, creative focus and conviction. The memoir I’ve been working on for what will soon be six years—two (non-consecutive, thank goodness) years of which I’ve failed to so much as look at the draft—still has yet to materialize.
I know this problem is not a special one, either. A writer friend of mine—who is also a mom, and also an editor at The Rumpus, and also someone who regularly writes words for money—recently posted an Instagram story to the effect of: ugh, I need to work on my book, but I’ve been looking at it for so long that I hate it. What do I do? This friend got so many responses from writers in the same boat that she collated their advice—which ranged from “relax and wait it out” to “grit your teeth and dive in anyway”—in further Instagram stories. Anyone who’s attempted the project knows how slow and ceramics-like the book-writing process can be: beautiful and maddening and just a little bit out of your control, and with so many opportunities for the whole project to shatter.
Memoir, specifically, has a reputation for slow-goingness. I always joke that my book changes every time I go to therapy. At AWP 2023 (which was in relatively temperate and drive-to-able Seattle), I went to a panel about books that were 10 years or longer in the making. The whole thing was massively validating, but I’ll never forget the wave of relief I felt when Deborah Taffa, the author of memoir called Whiskey Tender, said, “The space between the you on the page and the you in the writer’s seat is where the wisdom lives. Let it grow.”
I have been trying not to feel so guilty about the growth space this book of mine—which, in my fervor to transform it from process into product, I’ve falsely summited twice now—is forcing me to accept. After all, in the meantime, I’ve been creative in other ways. I’ve been building this newsletter and regularly essaying for it and sometimes even writing poetry (an ancient voice that’s experienced a long, quiet winter in my mind). I’ve started writing music over the past couple years and occasionally perform at open mics. This latter is a creative outlet I’d never have predicted for myself but which, at times, I find even more resonant than prose- or poetry-writing—precisely because there’s so much less pressure attached. Unlike writing, I haven’t made music my whole identity. Even though I’m objectively not that great at it, I’m too busy enjoying myself for imposter syndrome to take hold.
Identity. That’s the question that keeps asking for attention in this essay—this confusion between be and do. Because the kind of writing I spend most of my time doing (paid copywriting) is not the kind I have long aspired to (brilliant wordsmithing unfettered to a dollar value), it feels as if I can’t call myself—that is, be—the latter kind of writer. And of course, unless I make a substantial career shift, I’m always going to be incentivized to do proportionally more of the kind of writing that pays.
But the notion that we are what we do is just that: a notion; an invention whose function is—sorry—primarily to serve capitalism. The quote’s attributions range from Rick Warren to the Dalai Llama, but whoever said it, it’s true: We’re human beings, not human doings. And while this next bit is more debatable, art, as I understand it, is more about being than doing, too—or at least, a certain way of being has to precede the doing part.
To focus on the completion or reception or—shudder—sale of a an artistic creation is to render a living thing static. It transforms art into project, into task. Authentic artistic creation, I think, is an always-ongoing process of observing and capturing artifacts of human emotion. (And sorry, Adam Smith, but human emotion doesn’t work great as a commodity. Neither, by the way, do housing or healthcare.)
If I’m defined by what I do, I’ll always be many other things more often than I’m a writer. I’m a dog-walker and sleeper and traveler and eater and hiker and daughter and friend. At the bottom of all of it, of course, I’m just a human being. The writer part feels, in the end, like it’s less about writing than it is about the ways in which a writer sees the world—and records it. (And that, too, gets slippery: to observe and record to the detriment of participating, of living, is to miss the entire point.)
Maybe I am a writer because, as the fabric of my life flows by, I feel the unshakable urge to grab hold of its image—to attempt to memorialize what is definitionally and rightfully fleeting. Because walking around on a snowy day with my dog one morning, this essay zapped itself into my head nearly whole cloth. Because I want the narrow scope of my personal vision to have some kind of broader impact and relevance for others. Because when my best friend asked me what makes me feel most protected in the world, my answer was that no matter what happens to me, I will always be able to write about it.
Or maybe I’m a writer just because I want to be in this beautiful, chaotic world—to eat up everything it has to offer, and to write about it. Maybe it can be as simple as that.
Paying for my own health insurance is a noteable exception to this rule.
Sometimes, counterintuitively, my most writerly writer friends feel most writerly to me exactly by dint of their entirely-non-writing-related day jobs (i.e., waitressing). The way they earn their living doesn’t draw on their creative energy at all. And besides, the whole idea that writers should merge their art with their livelihood in some way is a relatively new one—one that, as Dana Gioia famously argued in the early 90s, may be responsible in part for pushing poetry and literary prose to the periphery of the American imagination. William Carlos Williams was a peditrician. When he wrote “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot was working as a bank clerk.