I am a Writer
Why reintegration is a natural part of the midlife experience
If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO and The Uplifters is about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives.
When I was 12 years old, I self-published my first book. Jaye Edwards illustrated it. I was definitively a Writer.
My paternal grandfather was a war correspondent in Pearl Harbor and taught journalism at the University of Hawaii, so I had this sense that writing was in my bones. I’d send him letters, and he’d tell me I was carrying on his gifts. Awww, I really was a Writer!
When I was 13, I won “best poet” in my middle school. When I went up to the stage to accept my award (the only one I received as a decisively non-athletic kid in a suburban Texas town), Mrs Pauletta McConathy, a poet and my Texas history teacher (yep, we had dedicated Texas history classes), wrote that, “Her feet didn’t touch the ground… Her beamer came unwound”. I was overcome with pride and purpose. I was a Writer.
When I was 15, I was a regional winner in a national essay contest sponsored by former POW Captain Gerald Coffee. I wrote about a woman who inspired me, a real-life hero. We went to a big fancy hotel and I read my work from a podium. I was an earnest girl, dressed in a dowdy old-lady suit that made me look more like a Victorian schoolmarm than a 1990s student, but I was also a Writer.
When I was 19, I wrote a play about a pawn broker, modeled after my grandfather who ran our family pawn shop. I got a good grade in my class. I wrote, but I wasn’t a Writer. Writers were something else. Something tortured, or at least compelled to write to survive. That wasn’t me.
From 20-50, I was many, many things, but never a Writer. I was a good student, a bad influence, an actor, a corporate ladder climber, a mother/daughter/wife, and more recently a podcast host and coach, but even though I have written my Substack every week for 4 years, I wasn’t a Writer, merely a person who writes.
Then, I was offered this big book deal and made a commitment to write a whole entire book. I introduce myself at parties as a Writer now. I did a Google search last week on “writer hats”, because I think I want one (though I haven’t found any I like, so if you find a cute one, please hook a girl up). I became a Writer not because of the book deal, but because I’m writing. I became a Writer by choosing to spend my time writing instead of doing other things. I became a Writer by sitting at my kitchen table and writing three pages each morning for the last year and a half to teach my brain how to stop editing. I became a Writer by blocking my calendar every Tuesday to do nothing but write, even as my brain tries to wriggle out of it and do easier things.
We treat identity like a license issued to us by an authority (a publisher, a contest judge, a grandfather with credentials) once we’ve proven we deserve it. We wait to be granted the title. We wait to feel like the thing before we’ll claim the thing.
That’s not how identity actually works though. There’s a wonderful old idea in social psychology called self-perception theory. The psychologist Daryl Bem figured out that often we don’t know who we are from the inside. Instead, we watch our own behavior and conclude who we are from the evidence of our actions.
So when I sit at my kitchen table each morning and fill those three pages, my brain is taking attendance. It notes: this is a person who writes. Again the next morning, and the morning after that. This is a person who writes. Eventually the evidence is conclusive: I am a Writer.
For many of us, the destabilizing chaos (and fewer fucks given) in midlife create time and space to go back to older versions of ourselves and check back in on those girls to see how they’re doing, and to wonder if maybe they’re ready to stop hiding in the wings.
I didn’t discover a new self at 50. I went back and gathered up a self I’d exiled at 19, when I decided Writers had to be tortured and I was disqualified for being basically fine. Re-integration isn’t becoming someone new. It’s calling home the parts of you that you sent away because they didn’t fit the life you were building at the time.
So no, the book deal didn’t make me a Writer. The book deal just gave the 12-year-old with the self-published book, and the 13-year-old whose feet didn’t touch the ground, a reason to come back to the table. I became a Writer the way anyone becomes anything that matters. Not by being chosen. By choosing, on a Tuesday, when my brain would much rather do literally anything else.
Now I just need the hat.
P.S. I’m currently offering my workshop, “Carrying Invisible Loads,” to organizations and ERGs during Mental Health Awareness Month and beyond. If your team is in that “everyone is at a breaking point” season, this is for you. Reply to this email to learn more.
P.P.S. Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts and an invite to our weekly Uplifters co-working Zoom/unhinged dance party.