During the earlier years of my writing career, all life experiences were filed under “material” for future writing projects. This mindset helped me endure difficult times, and even the drudgery of caring for small children (which goes hand-in-hand with the joy) could be made to feel useful, as if I were collecting scraps that could one day be turned into a delicious writer’s stew.
A few years ago, during the pandemic, I recognized that all of my writing was therapeutic, including the literary writing I’d been calling my career and vocation. I did not like this idea at all. I rebelled and revolted against it, maybe because it felt exploitative, even of my own experiences (let alone everyone else with whom I am in relationship).
Lately, I’ve been feeling at peace with this discovery—that my writing is therapeutic, that I’ve practiced it with devotion out of necessity, as much as discipline. My writing has kept my head above water, while also giving me a sense of purpose and hope during dull or aimless or desperate periods of my life. Writing soothes and comforts me. Writing fiction has deepened my capacity for empathy, sharpened my curiosity to learn how others see and frame the world. Writing is a magnetic force that pulls me in its direction; yet writing has never quite become the organizing principle around which I can structure, to satisfaction, my energies and priorities. Is writing my reason for being? My purpose and calling? Or is it the practice that sustains my purpose and calling?
My life is structured around relationships. Connection is my organizing principle. I am a quiet interior person, yet I thrive on sharing experiences with others.
I recently did a time audit, tracking the minutiae of my activities throughout a week (valuable, because so much of my time is “unstructured,” at present). First, I noticed that I spend a lot of time being with others, focusing on the needs of others (and that this brings meaning to my days). The flip-side is that I spend a lot of time in self-oriented activities—going to the gym, writing and journaling, quiet time alone, walks with friends. Focus on self; focus on others. Fill the cup; pour it out. Experience; process the experience. Action; reflection. Sometimes there is overlap between these circles—for example, biking on an errand feeds my spirit while the errand may benefit someone else; a walk with a friend can be both an experience and a processing of experiences.
One more observation: I spend very little time “working,” when work is defined as as an exchange of one’s time and skills for commensurate financial gain in the form of salary or paycheque, benefits, pension, etc. When someone asks “What do you do?” they generally mean “What do you do for a living?” And for this, my time audit showed very clearly, I have no good answer. I’ve been writing poems all spring; does that count? I also spend a lot of time looking after my dad right now, trying to understand his needs as they change, keeping my siblings and wider family in the loop, connected, feeling togetherness, mutually supported. Is this work? It’s just life, isn’t it?
When my kids were little, I stayed home to look after them for close to a decade (while trying to find time to write). This was a hard time, in many ways, for many of the same reasons that now is a hard time, in my life. “What do you do?” I’m a writer, I would have said then; or not, depending on how confident I felt in that identity on a given day or hour.
Twenty years ago, I was writing poems too.
They’re in a stack of books and projects beside me now—a manuscript titled “Famous Love Story,” which was never published in full, and did not earn me a living, though it probably kept me sane and grounded. Reading those poems now returns me to the tones and textures and chaotic/serene inner life of early motherhood. (As in the photos above and below, when I was the mother of a six-month-old infant.)
Maybe poems belong to this strange between-time, when my identity feels threadbare outside of my relationships—mother, daughter, sister, spouse, friend. Thank heavens for friendships, the landing spot for safe ranting and commisseration and truth-telling and kindness. (Not that there isn’t respite and kindness and ranting inside those other relationships too, but friends are a different category of caring and reciprocity; side note, just finished reading The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood, and now I want to write a book about friends—maybe in twenty years or so!)
So. Poems. Self/Other. Making meaning, meaning-making.
Is my CV an incoherent tangle of part-time, contract, volunteer, temporary job-jobs? Or is it a fascinating but partial record of a person who has been a steady, creative, connective presence in the life of her family, for which there is no job title, no description shorter than a novel, and for now at least, no particular beginning or end? Probably both. That’s life.
xo, Carrie