My mom will tell you she was amazed when I began making books at age 4. I would peel a few sheets of typing paper from a ream, fold the stack into quarters, staple a bind, and then cut along the remaining folds. How had I figured it out?
All throughout my school years I’d relish writing assignments too—jobber-like from the get-go. In college I warmed to journaling, that private endeavor of making order from chaos. Despite all of this, I have tried several times over the years to break up with writing, to consciously pivot away from this solo obsession in favor of a non-writer’s life—studying coaching was even a strategy to find purpose in something else. But I never feel quite as fulfilled as when I’m playing with language in some way, and I always return. It’s fascinating how our identities and sense of self evolves—what seems innate to us, what we dare claim for ourselves, what we just can’t quit.
The other day I shared with a friend how much time I’m pouring into this Substack and he said, “good to know because sometimes I wonder if it’s just easy for you.” It’s not, but my superpower is that I can tinker with words for hours on end. Truly, it must be a pre-programmed default setting. Writing is among the first things I think about in the morning, and rereading what I composed the day before feels genuinely surprising, the way you might forget what’s in a Christmas present you wrapped yourself. My favorite time of day is right now, the moment I’m pecking out this sentence. It’s 6:29 a.m., I have a hot coffee, and the house is silent except for the clicking of the keys under my fingers.
I know these are the lines that everyone cites, but for the uninitiated, reading Joan Didion’s essay Why I Write for the first time was like reading about myself: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
With vague intention, a high tolerance for adventure and aimlessness, and a healthy dose of luck, writing evolved from my creative and personal outlet to my profession, love language, and even greatest failure. I am a writer, but of what?
I remember saying once in a graduate school poetry workshop, “I don’t want this poem to be about me,” and Jane Miller, our professor, staring me down: “But identity is your subject.” I probably physically squirmed in my seat to get out of that moment; I could not fathom anything being less edgy or relevant than a white, straight, cis woman writing about herself, especially around a table of a dozen or so poets whose projects were to deconstruct meaning and subvert the narrative arc, or to explore aspects of personhood that were not so overexposed. In that room, I could have been cast on Selling Sunset. My identity seemed so precious, so thirsty, so of “a type”—self-absorbed, melodramatic, bad.
Plus using language to say something, to move people to feel something, looked like a cheap trick to our post-9/11 creative set, which was how we’d begun to mythologize ourselves in the early aughts amidst accelerating gun violence, corporate greed and scandals, global terrorism and war. Meanwhile, outside of our literary world, every marketing executive with a modicum of training was professing the power of emotion as if they invented it. In contrast, the poets were the truth-tellers, the sages and the seers, poor but on purpose, a counterweight to late-stage capitalism with its excessive consumerism and idolatry of success. Yes, I know, but this is how we thought, and despite that we were insignificant and small, we also felt a bit smarter and definitely cooler than everyone else, like we’d slipped into a purer plain of existence. You can see how it appealed to me. Now I had a job.
Looking back, I recognize that I’d embarked on the herculean effort of willing my mind to disavow who I was by worshipping specific poets and critical frames and texts, ignoring others, and sticking with the flock. If I did this, I reasoned, soon I, too, would be able to say nothing and mean it.
Humans drift off course by just a degree or two at a time until we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory altogether. You might not relate to me as a writer, but you might have had your own private, naked moments in which you’ve looked at your life and nothing seemed right.
It’s an uncomfortable reality, but being emergent may be what it means to be whole. We are shapeshifters by nature and our rebirths can be as muddling and confusing as they are thrilling and empowering. After all, even new dreams mean we are letting go of something, or someone. As I write this, Sunday, December 10, 2023, I also feel enraged and rendered helpless by the ways we’re forced to revise our identities not by choice. Specifically I’m thinking about the mass shooting that happened in my city at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas this past week, and the way life doled out new roles to everyone on campus. These are the leveling, devastating labels that we don’t ask for or want—“victim of….” “survivor of …” “battling with….” “recovering from…”—phrases that make me wince as a wordsmith and yet still may approach the best that language can offer.
All of this—what we choose, what we suffer, what we’re still figuring out—is why I am now an advocate of exploring our sense of self with rigor and intentionality, writer or not. It’s complicated, messy stuff, yet our skill improves with each pass: we become more curious, less judgmental; more resilient, less brittle.
Charles Sue-Wah-Sing spoke to me last week about how he explores aspects of personal identity—including culture, religion, gender, and race—with his coaching clients: “There’s insight and intelligence in how we see ourselves,” he said. Charles is a man of color in a profession that’s overwhelmingly white, and his vision for coaching is that it becomes a more diverse, inclusive field. Our conversation inspired me to think deeper about certain aspects of my own identity, including my inherited privilege, which I’d never thought of in a coaching context before.
Not to say I haven’t done some deep work. I grew up with parents who held different faiths, for instance, including stories of what happens when we die, so from a young age I grappled with my own spirituality. The arc of what my life was “supposed” to look as a woman felt as if it would extinguish me, a cigarette butt stamped out on the sidewalk, so I had to invent for myself what it meant to be valuable, secure, and loved.
But there are realities of other people’s identities that didn’t touch me at all, at least not as lived experiences. I never worried whether a friend’s house had stairs when I was invited to a birthday party. My family’s basic needs were always met—and I owned the cool jeans, too. I never feared getting beat up, or worse, for holding someone’s hand. My body and name aligned with how I, and the world, understood my gender.
I was 20 before I experienced my skin as white, and I mean really woke up to how one’s skin can be othering. I lived in Hawaii then and would hang with friends who were locals, and who were brown. Compared to them I was the color of a raw oyster—my skin seemed vulnerable and exposed. I remember being in a dance club one night and looking up at the mirrored ceiling to see my blonde head in a sea of black ones. I stood still, transfixed, an alien in a crowd of people bouncing around me like they were electric. I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t in danger, just ashamed by how I didn’t match everyone else. This is a story of privilege. My safety, the age at which I felt this, and that it was a single moment in time are all reflections of my whiteness in a white culture.
The other day I fell into a different, but similarly profound, reframe of how I see myself. I stumbled upon a hidden closet in my mind, a door that I’d probably rushed past a million times and never noticed, one that contains deeply personal, tender experiences of times that I have been a victim as a woman. For myriad of reasons I cracked it open this time, only to realize that the thing is stuffed with stereotypes and assumptions and media portrayals and clichés—woah, I thought, it’s a fucking shit show, a junk closet! Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
Let the sorting begin anew, the process of discovery, integration, and being at choice in the story of me. Junk is easy to throw out once you recognize it as such.
But it took me a long time, as a newly-minted coach, to scrub the jadedness, helplessness, and apathetic anger from my worldview. Later I even felt compelled to “confess” my closeted optimism and resilience to my writer and artist friends, who probably were not at all shocked, let’s be honest. At the same time, I’ve strived to maintain a respect and gratitude for my former poet self. She was lost, a little starry-eyed, definitely not perfect, but she did a pretty good job regardless—and I could not compose this without her. It’s weird. I’m still figuring it out. It’s a grand challenge for all of us, this becoming who we most want to be.