Why Am I a Writer?

Topics: writing, grief, sickness, chronic illness

That’s a good question.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said writers aren’t people, really. They’re a bunch of people trying to function as one person. Which is to say, we aren’t ourselves, but our characters.

True. Each character a writer writes is built from nothing. There are archetypes and stereotypes and certain genre expectations but in very loose terms. In many ways, we are creating a human from scratch. Who they are, how they act, the sound of their voice in our heads, all of it takes up space. Characters become as real to us as how most people experience a memory—you don’t still interact with your little brother as a three-year-old, but you remember your little brother as a three-year-old. Writers remember our characters in the same way. I don’t interact with them, and yet, they’re entirely familiar to me. 

I write because I’m a bunch of versions of different people. I’m Tricia. I’m Annie. I’m Polly. I’m Elizabeth. I’m Imogen. I’m Brent. I’m Jay. I’m Jordy. All of it feels real in some capacity even though none of them are real at all.

But authors don’t exist in an echo chamber. (Is the word even writ if the word exists in an empty forest…or something like that.) In order to be a writer, all you have to do is write. In order to be an author, the parameters aren’t quite so simple. Authorship has a nuanced interpretation, but the idea that an author exists is only validated by the reader. For someone to know something has been authored by someone, two people must experience it: the one who wrote it and the one who read it.

Authors who aspire to be professional authors (which is, to be paid for authoring) have to have an audience willing to invest in their art. A product and a consumer. An exchange of goods and services. A writer and a reader. That process requires marketing. It requires selling. It requires business acumen. 

Marketing 101 is pretty easy. In order to sell anything, you need to figure out the who, what, when, where, and why. What do you do? Why do you do it? Who do you do it for? Also known as the place we first started: why are you a writer?

This is a different answer, though, than Fitzgerald’s quote about characters. Fitzgerald is commenting about the artist's temperament and creative interpretation. The latter version of the question gets at the very essence of the art itself: why did I choose it? What do I want to get out of it? What is my goal?

My writing started out being about women’s health. Being sick. Almost dying. The 50+ surgeries. The realities of chronic illness. This was my writing bread and butter. I wrote about how to be sick, what it felt like to be sick, and what could make being sick a little less lonely. I wrote about my optimism for healthcare and the personal dedication and responsibility of keeping your own spirits up.

I wrote to make sense of my own life, but more than that, I wrote because I wanted to be a voice that stood up and said, “THIS IS STUPID, RIGHT?” I wanted comradery. I wanted validation. I wanted to make someone else feel less alone the way a few special people made me feel less alone. I wanted to be authentic and honest about what it was like to be a young sick person.

I don’t really write about that anymore. It’s not because I’m all better. Yes, I can pee now and I’m not on the kidney failure merry-go-round, but I still have a life-impacting neurological condition. I have not one, but two, devices implanted in my body just to keep my autonomic nervous system working properly. I still see three specialists. I still have quarterly bloodwork and urinalysis testing. I will never be a person whose health is good for my age. 

But I don’t document that. I don’t spend time crafting that type of message anymore. The haunting question of, why am I a writer? is the reason. I was looking for comradery. I was looking for validation. I was looking to make someone else feel less alone. I was looking for connection.

And then life went dark.

Somewhere between my brother dying (2019) and now, I stopped caring about connection and the chronic illness community. I’ve actively ducked out of conversations where people open up to me about their health journeys. I have specifically avoided places where people have asked me to talk about being sick. I have gone silent on many current events impacting healthcare. 

That isn’t to say the story isn’t out there. Other people can talk and write about my sickness. I’m fine with that. That’s a community service in a way. You can’t pee? Neither could I. It sucked. You don’t need to live like this. This doctor can help. That’s just the honor code of being a decent human—let people know where to turn for help when they need it. 

But healthcare? Medicine? My own continued chronic illness problems? My current health challenges? No, those aren’t on the page. Those don’t get posted. I don’t want that to be the thing people come to me for. I don’t want to share a hug over it. I don’t have a shoulder to cry on.

Why? Oh, the answer is quite simple: I’m just too angry. 

I am the living embodiment of The Chicks song, “Not Ready to Make Nice.” I’m angry at a faceless audience who is passively fine with American healthcare. I’m angry at the known audience who made jokes behind my back. I’m angry at people who carry on over minor inconveniences that minimize real traumatic experiences. I’m mad at the amount of people, problems, dystopian scenarios, and f$*$%# up situations I’ve endured just to be told I should go gluten free and I’d probably feel better. Worst of all, I’m mad that I’m mad at all knowing damn well I’m a privileged white woman with good health insurance and accessible healthcare. 

The cognitive dissonance is so overwhelming, I avoid writing about it. I haven’t figured out how to work through all that pent up anger. All that pent up resentment. All that pent up mistrust of society. All the lost faith, lost years, lost sparkle…all the reverberations of problems still lingering below the surface. I’m. Still. Angry.

Why am I a writer? Because of that ^ 

I didn’t know the answer going into this. Sure, I knew I was angry, but when I started writing this essay, I would’ve said my general frustrations were normal coming out of grief, COVID, and being home-bound. I didn’t know I was this angry. I didn’t know I was this negative, combative, defensive, and deeply hurt. I didn’t know I wasn’t OK yet. 

But when I sit down and explain to a blank page the feelings on my heart, the truth comes out. The body keeps score. The QWERY keyboard is my therapy office. I don’t know what my mission statement is as an author. I don’t know what my marketing channels are going to be. I don’t know what I want my audience to take away from this. I don’t know what measures I’m going to use to evaluate growth strategies over five years. But I do know when my train of thought is in sync with my fingers clicking across the keyboard, somehow I find more answers than questions. 

Even now, almost instantly, I feel calm. I feel a twinge of resolve. I feel a storm cloud drift away. Because I named the beast and her name is Anger. I can work with that.

Any psychology major will tell you anger is an unmet need abruptly realized. I’m angry because when I got sick, I thought I had built a community. When I got sicker, I relied on that community. But when I was at my sickest, I had no one. 

Somehow, despite my attempts at creating community, I still ended up isolated and lonely. I felt unsupported, unprotected, and, at the root of it, scared. My idea of how life would go if my health declined and how it really went were worlds apart. That unresolved discrepancy makes my brain bitter. When I’m bitter, I’m angry. When I’m angry, I retreat. When I retreat, I end up lonely. When I end up lonely, I get resentful. When I end up resentful, I resort back to anger. It’s a vicious cycle of negativity born out of a mix of bad timing, bad communication, and unforeseen circumstances. 

But when I can name that cycle, I can work through it. I can write more words, process more thoughts, realize more connections, and resolve the wound, little by little, letter by letter, word by word.

Why am I a writer? To heal wrongs the world will never apologize for. To like myself again. To trade negativity for, at the bare minimum, neutrality.

That’s the artist's temperament. That's the disposition of the creatives—the push-pull between expectation and reality, the combination of how the story played out versus how I wanted it to go, the angst of feeling every feeling with every part of my being, and the process of working through it. Anger makes sense to a writer because temperamental idealists are built to tango with disappointing realities. That’s how stories become stories: Hi Anger, I’m Tricia. When you show your face, I will raise my pen.

I don’t know what kind of author I will be. I still don’t know if I’ll write about being sick the way I used to. But I know I’m a writer because my emotional and mental health demand it. I cannot process what happened without telling it to a blank page. I can’t find the answers to my malaise without Microsoft Word. I can’t move forward without a space bar and a delete button (there’s something quite profound about that). I need writing because without it, every version of me ends up directionless and depressed just like Austen. Bronte. Dickinson. Keats. Lewis. Hemingway. Stein. Morrison. Lamott. Ephron. And, of course, Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald also famously said that writers shouldn’t write just because they want to say something. They write because they have something to say. I might not be able to directly write about what happened or what is happening with my health, but I do know that all those versions of me, all those characters, all those people made from nothing…none of us are healthy. None of us are well. None of us are over it. And, trust me, we have a lot to say about it. That’s why I’m a writer.

~ Tricia