ON NOT BEING A WRITER

(This is a blog post from a wise friend of mine. If we needed reminding, older age is sometimes about giving up on things - in a good way.)

When I was at school I was praised for my imagination and writing. I wrote about nature - I was passionately in love with the natural world around me and still am. I added to my repertoire as a teenager by writing about love and the anguish thereof. Unlike nature, I’m no longer so interested in the yearnings of teen love – for myself, anyway. It was the opinion of my teachers, consequently, that I would be a writer and this view was taken up by my slightly bemused family – and by me too, who didn’t know what on earth I was or might be but knew I liked reading and was moved to join those who wrote the kinds of things I liked to read.

I didn’t become ‘a writer’. But throughout a long life of not being a writer, at the back of my mind I was always and forever becoming a writer and eventually, all the little flurries of writing would coalesce in some magical way and it would be revealed to me that I was now ‘a writer’. ‘Why! You’re a swan!... A very fine swan indeed!’ from Danny Kaye’s recording of The Ugly Duckling, a popular choice on Children’s Favourites, played from the radio on Saturday mornings in our house.

Many all night conversations were had with my close friend who was also ‘really and secretly becoming a writer’, despite our actual lives being something else that made it practically impossible to even attempt to make that early prediction come alive. We brooded on the reasons we were not yet real writers; we wondered about our lack of character, and we determined to be more determined and made energetic plans to improve our writing output... We wrote morning pages and evening pages, we joined workshops, we looked with resentment at our contented partners who didn’t understand that we were leading the wrong life for being a writer... the paper piled up, metaphorically. Were we writers yet? One day, with time running out, a new proposition came to me. But, I noted, it had taken the whole of that lifetime of ‘becoming’ to finally arrive at the very obvious conclusion. I wasn’t ‘a writer’.

The relief was transformative. Like Christian's moment of salvation in The Pilgrim’s Progress, my more secular burden of obligation to a rather accidental set of circumstances and expectations from long ago slipped from my back. I now embrace my freedom not to be ‘a writer’. As the composer John Cage teasingly puts it, I discovered in all its fullness of creative possibility that “I have nothing to say and this is me saying it.”

Isobel Urquhart