Insecure Writer's Support Group - November

This is my monthly post for Alex Cananugh’s InsecureWriter’s Support Group.

Over the twenty-plus years I worked in HR for a national retail chain, I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.  Over the course of that career, I performed as a high-functioning “square peg in a round hole.” Since the job paid well and the location and challenge level enabled me to be an available mom for our growing daughter, I stuck to it.  When the business began to struggle and layoffs occurred, I thought, “If I go, I don’t know what I’ll do next, but I won’t do this.”   Of course, I said those things thinking: “It will never happen to me.” 

Until it did. 

 

Most Middle Passages readers know that the day after my job disappeared, words welled up inside me, and a blog was born.  Two months later, I’d scored a personal essay relating to my layoff in the Boston Globe Magazine.  I’d been published in a niche magazine a few times prior, and won a monthly writing contest on WritersDigest.com.  But an essay in The Globe fulfilled a long-held dream, and for the first time in my life, I thought, “Good gosh, maybe I really am a writer.”

Working with my outplacement coordinator, I sculpted a freelance writing business, then took a part-time job to help tide over the uneven nature of the freelance beast, and continued my own writing.  Through the encouragement of The Artist’s Way, I challenged myself to write a book.  I “finished” that one, if you call getting the story down on paper and muscling through one revision “finished.”  A print out sits in a folder on my desk in my living room under a pile of books.  Last winter, I started writing another one and currently hover at about 50,000 words and change.

Here is my insecurity. I’m starting a new part-time job on Monday, which is a marginal economic improvement over my current situation. Until the layoff, I was a significant contributor financially to the bottom line.  For the last 2.5 years though, I’ve been a drag on our resources and yet for the first time ever, I’m doing what I know I want to do.   I’ve earned a few more publishing credits.  The writing friends I’ve made on line and in person support and challenge me and my husband stands beside me.  But guilt wheedles its way in and tweaks down deep.  Our daughter has just started college.  My lack of earnings impacts not only our present circumstances, but our future retirement, yet, when I contemplate going back full-time to the business world, nausea ensues.  

What if my focus on writing is nothing more than a big excuse to avoid doing what I should be doing?  Sometimes I’m afraid the word after my name shouldn’t be writer.  It should be fraud.