Write to Read or Read to Write?

“I don’t read books” I responded during one of my first communications classes in college, when we were asked to name our favorite novel. Sure, I could’ve come up with something because I loved Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and J.D. Salinger at the time. But I was into the dumb is cool concept and wanted to stand out from the crowd. I’d call myself the late bloomer of a post-feminist mother. I shared the story with my friends and told them how I did want to be a writer. I can recall, my now-published freshman roommate telling me she thought it hilarious that I had such an ambition. What had I read? Unbeknownst to her, it had been a wide variety focusing more on modern literature than the classics with which she was accustomed. I told her I wanted to comment on life. She told me there already was a Gertrude Stein. To be honest, I’d not heard of Ms. Stein.

Embarrassed, my writing remained private. For years I filled journals and completed legal sized yellow notepads one after the other with the illuminated ponderings of my world. With each move the bounty was buried deeper into my storage and became less of an actionable item. In 2006, I began work on a memoir writing contest for Marie Claire magazine but arrived to the party just as the last guest was about to leave and didn’t have the desire to pay for a courier to take it from Baltimore to New York to meet the deadline. Then, my computer screen lumens went out and now it sits on an old Macbook nestled high amongst antique cooking scales and unhung art. The cost to restore the file to paper would be three times that of having couriered it to the judges in the first place. I instead started up a magazine at work centered around lives of others and became editor. My failure down one avenue turned my focus back to my purposeful, true-to-me-self.

I’ve realized the only way to move forward with life’s dreams is to be confident about your strengths. It took time for me to send positivity about myself as a writer into the universe. I’d encountered a few naysayers and let their words go in front of the accolades and accomplishments I had accumulated over the years. Being a nerd about anything is way cooler than not being yourself. Consistency and practice are key to succeeding and maintenance of any kind is tough.