Don’t Make Your Career Your Entire Identity
Centering my life around writing pulled me away from what I wanted to do in the first place — write
While many kids struggled with what they wanted to be when they grew up, I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer.
As a teenager, I chose to stay in and write instead of hanging out with friends. I quickly built an identity as “the Writer” of my friend group. Teachers and parents also noticed my literary draw, and adults would often jokingly ask me, “So when is your novel coming out?”
Knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up gave me lots of self-confidence as a teenager at a time when other young people were comparatively lost. I thought it would give me a head start.
But then I grew up. I went to university and met people outside my high school’s catchment area. I worked my first shitty service job and learned to appreciate minimum-wage work as not the easiest job in the world that any idiot could do. (And trust me, I was quite the coddled idiot.)
I matured and discovered how little I understood about this crazy world we live in. Gradually, my confidence in my single-minded goal of becoming a successful author began to wane.
I am now in my mid-twenties, and that coveted book deal my teachers and parents kept asking about still hasn’t arrived. I often wonder whether I have already failed as a writer because I haven’t “made it,” despite knowing from a young age what I wanted to do.
In other words, like many other writers, I feel like an imposter.
But along with pressuring yourself to succeed young, feeling insecure is not productive at all for a writing career. It’s a waste of time, a waste of energy, and quite frankly, a miserable way to exist.
I have since accepted that the reason why I flounder as a writer — the reason why I feel so insecure so often — is because I stake my entire identity around being a writer. And this is a mistake.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with identifying strongly with your profession. For many jobs, being confident in your career choice is critical to job performance. A doctor can’t “not feel like” being a doctor one day because their patients’ lives depend on the doctor giving 100%.
But I believe there is harm in revolving your entire identity around your job. You probably don’t want an over-worked doctor who never takes breaks from their job treating you.
Likewise, there are problems with revolving your entire identity around being a writer. For one, you will likely be very anxious, stressed, and miserable if your writing doesn’t do well all the time.
And with a job as volatile as that of a writer, where pieces can go viral one day and totally slump the next, your emotions will be in for a roller coaster.
Second, there is a lot more to writing than just putting words on paper. Many writers are drawn to writing not because they like stringing sentences together, but because they have a story to tell.
Whether that story is a blog post about cryptocurrency investments or a 700-page high fantasy queer romance, we writers often have something else — something higher — that drives us to write.
This should be what drives you to get up each morning, not some vague goal of publishing superstardom.
Many other writers achieve professional success not just by being good at putting words together, but because they have expertise in a secondary field. For a novelist like John Green, it may be understanding the teenage psyche. For a public intellectual like Roxane Gay, it may be an advanced understanding of gender politics.
As a freelance writer, one of my major clients is music-teaching service. I am very certain I landed this job not solely due to my writing abilities, but because I have an advanced understanding of music. I was a music teacher for several years, but more importantly, I LOVE talking about music.
It sounds awfully simple, but I think it’s worth saying out loud: to write, you need something to write about.
As writers, we need to get out of our shell and find our About, whether that is travelling, romance, activism, parenting, or whatever. The people who experience so-called writer’s block may simply have yet to find their About.
I also want to return to this important point: that staking your entire identity on being a Writer will make you miserable.
Writing is an emotional task. At some point, someone will tear down your writing. It may be a bad book review. It may be a friend who reluctantly gives you awkward, one-word feedback because your phrases and ideas were convoluted.
When this happens, a little bit of you will die.
I’ll be honest. I often go through spells of writer-misery. I see younger writers get more successful than me and start to hate myself. I write a manuscript, get lukewarm reviews, and hate myself. I start to wonder whether this writing thing I’m doing is even worth it. Maybe I’m a fraud, an imposter, a person who pretends to be good at something they’re not.
Writing forms an enormous part of my identity, and I am only recently learning how big of an impact on my mental health this is. A single lukewarm response can set me down a downward spiral, and in the arms of insecurity and misery, I stop writing. I crawl under the covers, watch Netflix, eat chips, and whittle my ego away.
These days, I am learning to have a healthy relationship with writing. It’s not that different from learning how to have a healthy relationship with a partner, a parent, or a colleague.
I may love a person, but I can’t let them define my happiness. No matter how much I love them, I can’t let a single person — or a single concept — steer my life satisfaction.
The same goes with writing. Writers need to be emotionally invested in their work, but writers also need balance.
Your mental health can’t depend on the strength of your work. This will only give you grief. Grief isn’t worth it, because it takes away your will to write. And wasn’t writing what you wanted to do with your life in the first place?
