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A Writer's Earring I'll never forget the moment I realized I was a writer, or the years of physical pain that followed. Many writers start filling notebooks as soon as they master the alphabet, but I never did any voluntary writing aside from my diary and some pen pal letters. I was obsessed with reading, and never pictured myself as the one to put words on pages for others. Even so, I remember that when I looked through a college catalog in tenth grade, there were just three things I thought might be interesting enough to concentrate on for four years: medicine, music, or creative writing. My dad had long wanted a surgeon for a daughter, so I tried Pre-Med. I hated all the required classes. My second semester I took a short story workshop just to offset the horrors of Concepts in Chemistry. I was so terrified to write for an audience that I couldn't even consider a topic for it without panicking. I had to write the whole story in one marathon session the day before it was due, making up the whole story as I went. It wasn't award-winning material, but re-reading it fourteen years later, I can say it's better than I thought it was. I showed my story to a guy I knew was a real writer because that was his major and because he'd written stories just for fun ever since he was a little boy. He said my writing was good. We started dating, and I quickly starting thinking of him as THE writer in the relationship, while I was a wannabe. What a convenient excuse not to write any more fiction! I switched my major to Communications before my writing course ended, loved all the classes, but couldn't find a suitable job after graduation, so I worked in a series of finance and accounting jobs for ten years. I also married the writer because he's a lot of fun. As I neared age thirty, I realized I wanted to have passion for more of my work than the paycheck, so I pierced my navel and dyed my hair red. When that didn't help, I started working through creativity self-help books. My breakthrough came in "Creating a Life Worth Living" by Carol Lloyd. That book is packed with exercises, for which you must choose a field of creative interest. I was convinced that my blue-sky ideal job was to be a puppeteer; I'd auditioned for the Muppets right after college, and had long thought that if I'd only gotten the gig, my life would have been fabulous. But it was too difficult to use puppetry for the exercises, so I used writing as a substitute just to get through the book. I figured I'd learn something even though writing wasn't what I really wanted to do. But as I did the writing work, I started getting caught up in it, and looked forward each night to the next exercise. After a few weeks, it suddenly clicked. Tears slid down my face and I grinned in delight as I whispered to myself, "I'm a writer! I'm a writer!" It wasn't long until my old friend, fear, came back. I was afraid of writing badly, but oddly I was more afraid of failing to write at all. If I came to doubt the truth of my revelation, I'd just go on with my life and forget I should be this writer. I decided to give myself a reminder I could never leave behind. I thought about tattooing "WRITER" in reverse letters on my forehead so I'd see it in every mirror. Instead, I went to the mall and got my ear cartilage pierced with a small gold stud, my "writer earring". I told myself it would always be there to prod my faith when my emotions said, "Maybe you're a crazy waste of time and paper." And it looked cool, too. It would be beautiful if I could wrap this up with "My gold earring is still firmly snapped through my ear, and my pen is still planted on the page," but when did the writing life or its metaphors go so smoothly? The fact is, my ear never took to that piercing. One year should have healed it to a perfect pinhole at the tip of my ear; instead, two years later, the site was still red and ouchy. Finally, I left the earring out of my ear for a mere three nights of comfortable sleep, and it closed up completely. Other than a small bump on the back of my ear, there's no sign of the long months of suffering. If I were superstitious, maybe I'd say I was wrong about writing, and my soul was rejecting it as my body rejected fourteen-carat gold. Instead, I keep writing, because even if the earring was silly, it still served its purpose. To live is to try things, and better to have tried the earring and know that isn't the right way to conquer fear. I do the same with writing -- if I can't concentrate at my desk, I go out and sit by a lake and see if I can make some progress there. It's a constant process of learning who I am and how I work. So…onward to the tattoo shop! Natasha Gapinski is a Central-Florida based freelance writer who lives for your constructive criticism. Send e-mail to natga@ivillage.com. Want to see your story here? Query or send complete essays to jenna@absolutewrite.com with the subject FIRST PERSON SUBMISSION. (No attachments, please. Paste essays into the body of an e-mail.) We're interested in seeing unique, personal essays related to the "whys," "wherefores," and "how-tos" of writing-- obstacles, successes, creative ways you've sold your work, experiences with workshops, classes, etc. |
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