My relationship with writing? It’s not complicated — I’m obsessed.
When I was a kid, the annoying adults in my life (which, let’s face it, was all of the adults in my life) would ask, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
I only ever had one answer: “I want to write for Rolling Stone.”
I blame my mother for this. It’s her fault that I started reading before I set foot in school, and by the time I was six, I’d read through every book in the house and almost everything in our tiny public library. In the town where I grew up, folks valued education and intelligence less than being pretty and knowing how to dress a deer, so saying I’d read every book there isn’t a significant accomplishment. Being single with two small kids meant my mom worked a lot, and there wasn’t time to drive me to other towns to make sure I had reading material. The internet didn’t exist yet, so she couldn’t just order books from Amazon or hand me an e-reader. She did the only thing she could think of at the time: a subscription to Rolling Stone. Why not Good Housekeeping or Reader’s Digest? I have no idea. Blame it on the 80s.
This was the late 1980s when RS was still trying to pretend that they weren’t as mainstream as other publications, despite their glossy pages. They had something, or rather someone, other publications didn’t have, though. They had Hunter S. Thompson.
The aging Gonzo journalist wasn’t a regular contributor, but they’d publish the occasional piece, and I adored him. At six, I was no stranger to cussing, as the women in my family swear like sailors on leave and always have, regardless of how young their audience was. I didn’t quite understand the references to drugs and sex, but that would come in due time. I just knew that I loved the way he put words together. The way they flowed, it was magic to my tiny mind. I never doubted for a second that I, too, could be like Hunter.
So I started writing. I filled up every available piece of paper with my scribbles: pastel pink diaries with cheap plastic locks, spiral notebooks, composition books, and my younger sister’s coloring books, much to her dismay. I wrote about things I saw, things people told me, things I saw on tv. I recorded my observations of my world and the people who lived in it with me. If I’d lived a century ago, they would have called me a “prolific diarist,” but since I was born in the 20th century, most people just called me that weird kid with the notebook.
I was obsessed.
I was still obsessed at 15 when my school newspaper rejected me for being “too alternative,” whatever that means. At 18, I allowed other people to dissuade me from pursuing a career in journalism because “media is dying,” but I was still obsessed. I stayed obsessed into my 20s, and my obsession grew thanks to the internet and the emergence of weblogs. Blogging allowed me to write about whatever tickled my fancy and send it out into the world, almost like a “real” writer.
My relationship with writing hit a bit of a rocky patch when, at 23, I married someone who didn’t like my writing. More than not enjoying the things I wrote, he didn’t like the act of writing or that I felt compelled to do it. There wasn’t any reason for me to write in his mind since I could talk to him instead. I had to hide my writing, and if he found it, there would be violent arguments about me lying to him or cheating on him, even if I was writing about completely innocuous things. I know now that this type of behavior is abusive, but at the time, I was trying to be a good wife and not make him angry.
I gave up writing, something I loved, to keep the peace in my house. When I was finally able to leave that relationship, I didn’t go back to writing immediately. It had been so long since I’d been able to write, and I felt like the passion was gone. Every time I sat down with my computer or a notebook intending to write, nothing happened. I could hardly write about the weather or what I had for breakfast without painstaking effort. I thought that maybe writing and I just weren’t meant to be.
It took years of forcing myself to write the worst drivel imaginable to come back to my obsession with writing. Today, 32 years after that first inkling, I’m back to being just as obsessed as ever. If I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing, planning what I’m going to write, feeling guilty about not writing. I need to write the same way that some people need to exercise or meditate; it’s an act of self-care and a thing I need to do to feel like my best self.
I still dream about writing professionally one day, but in my own way, not Hunter’s, and I’ll leave Gonzo journalism to the experts.
