I love writing and I love being a writer. Even if I never get anything into traditional print or make any money for it, I’ll probably keep doing it because writing is my favorite thing to do. It also keeps me mentally stable (well, as mentally stable as a writer can be) – if I don’t write I get cantankerous, irritable, and socially withdrawn. I don’t have it, I get serious withdrawals. Who cares – I wouldn’t trade it for ANYTHING.

However, it does have its drawbacks. Fear of failure is the top of the list, as well as social comparison. But those things are well documented (by better writers than me), so there’s no sense retreading old ground. Instead, I want to talk about one of the minor drawbacks to being a writer (though it might be a boon, if you’re the half-full glass sort), and that’s something I call writing the self. Hold on to your hats, we’re about to get all deep and shit (ha!).

The thing about writers is that they are both creators of culture and also perhaps those most easily swayed by it. The reason for this is that writers exist in the realm of ideas more than non-writers, if for no other reason than we spend long hours thinking up stuff that doesn’t exist and pretending it does. It means that other stuff that doesn’t exist can hold great sway over us, since imaginary stuff is very real to us.

This is fine and all well and good – it allows writing to happen – but it also makes us more susceptible to powerful ideas that we didn’t imagine, ideas that someone else imagined, like social concepts. Justice and love are just as imaginary as the characters in a novel, both are ideas and can have an effect on our lives, but have no physical location in the “real world.” (I don’t want to get into a debate here about love and justice existing or not existing here: show me a handful of justice and you’ll prove me wrong. Until then, just chill and listen to my armchair philosophizing. These things are ideas. The fact that they are so pervasive just makes them POWERFUL ideas.)

There are many social ideas we’ve given cultural power by adopting, but the one I want to discuss here is the idea of being an adult, and why it can be problematic. The thing is, writers believe so strongly in the power of imaginary ideas that we have no problem taking an imaginary idea and believing it has a bigger effect on our lives than someone who didn’t spend so much time imagining things.

The idea that I’ve become an adult is something I’ve done my best to adopt, but because I didn’t know what exactly being an adult entailed, when it seemed like it was time for me to be an adult, I reached for cultural markers, imaginary standards, and did my best to emulate them.

This involved two things: the completion of common adult milestones (college, real job, paying bills, etc.), and a reach into the religious mythos of the past, specifically Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 11.

Both the milestones and the biblical advice are imaginary ideas, but because I am a writer (someone who entertains imaginary ideas on a regular basis), it was easy for me to accede to the cultural power of these ideas. I made them my own. In effect, I took ideas and wrote my self.

I’m not sure if other writers have struggled with this or not, but it seems my experience that my association with imaginary things has made commonly accepted social concepts very easy to adopt without knowing it. They just sort of sneak their way in, and invoke very powerful feelings, because I take imaginary things seriously. The problem with that is that adopting ideas without knowing it can lead to some very strange results.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved Lego blocks and comic books. If I had to guess why, I’d say it was because I love the power of imagination contained in the mediums. Building a Lego castle is very similar to writing – blocks of ABS plastic can be arranged in countless different forms, but the blocks stay the same. I feel like words are similar (even though words do change, over many years).

I wasn’t a poor kid growing up, but I wasn’t rich, either. So when I got a new Lego set, or a new comic books, I would have fun with it, but also spend hours flipping through the included Lego catalog, or list of comic book back issues I missed, and tell myself that when I grew up I would buy all the Legos and comic books I wanted.

Then, of course, I did grow up, or at least, I got older. It happens to everyone. But beyond that, I wrote myself as an adult, adopted all the ideas that I thought would make me an adult. But I still wanted Legos and comic books. So I bought them.

It’s funny: I avoided Legos and comic books for so long because I’d written onto my self that adults don’t want those things anymore. But then, once I saw that the whole idea of an adult was just a cultural ideal I’d adopted, it was imaginary, and I’m susceptible to imaginary things, I bought a bunch of Legos and comic books and enjoyed the hell out of them. I rewrote what I thought an adult was, or maybe just said to hell with it, and didn’t worry about being an “adult” anymore. I’m not sure which it was.

Either way, it frightens me how easy it was, once I started thinking about it, to rewrite things I thought I knew about myself. Thinking about it further, the ease I had, rewriting my adopted idea of what an adult is, I wonder if that’s the reason that writers and artists seem like they are always on the forefront of “causes” and why they sometimes seem to be the strongest proponents those causes, only to switch to something else 15 minutes later.

I guess you could call that wishy-washy. I think I’d call it rewriting the self. The thing is, the imaginary is so strong for us, and we develop such fluency with it, that trying on multiple ideologies like suits or hats (or pick your favorite clothing simile) is easy. This rewriting of the self is probably why I love the internet so much, because without physicality, it’s easy to rewrite who I am to the rest of the world.
I don’t know, myself by talking about writers doing this I’m grouping in more people than should be lumped in. Maybe it’s not writers. Maybe it’s just my generation. Maybe it’s just me. I’m not sure.

I’m just surprised by how it is to rewrite the self, when the rest of the world seems to struggle with it so much.

-m.