I Almost Forgot Myself
I’ve noticed a recurring theme as I’ve moved through life. I forget myself—forget where I’ve been and what I’ve accomplished. I get stuck in the same moment, the same feeling at a single point in time. Some might call this impostor syndrome, but I think it’s more sinister than that. As I’ve watched my friends and family evolve over time, I’ve observed that some of them remain the people they’ve always been, while others have changed dramatically. I have no idea what this means in the grand scheme of life, but it seems significant.
At a core level, I’m the person (or persons) I’ve always been: I’m still that kid secretly reading the sci-fi novel hidden on his music stand while the band director rehearses the woodwinds (I was a trumpet player). The camp counselor sitting at his “word processor” in the staff lounge on his free time. The twenty-something pounding away on the keys of that same word processor in his first apartment in Seattle. That former husband sitting with his laptop at the coffee shop in his Illinois exile. The new dad driving his kids around town until they pass out, stopping in random parking lots to work on his novel. . . . And this guy sitting here today writing this.
But most of all, I’m a writer. It is who and what I am. But writing has never paid the bills, and no matter how successful I feel in a technology career that finances my life, that writer in me is not where he wants to be . . . has not accomplished what he set out to do. And for that he often feels incomplete and defeated. I constantly have to remind myself that I’m published; that I’m a member of the Authors Guild, the Sci-fi Writers of America, and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers; that I’ve had hardcovers and mass-market paperbacks in bookstores; and that I’ve appeared at a few conventions. And yet, even as I write about these accolades, they just don’t seem to matter because as I measure myself against where I want to be relative to my true purpose, I’m just not there.
The career trajectories of my peers are so vastly different than my own: some are rich, many are successful, and some are even in positions of power. And here I am, forever the writer with a dream. The level of effort those folks put into achieving their goals is the same level of effort I’ve put—and continue to put—into my writing. Until my writing meets with the same success, there will always be something missing.
In the fall of 2018, after several years of career instability, I struggled to hang on to my writer identity as I drowned in debt and could barely keep myself afloat. It felt as if that core part of me was slipping away and was in danger of being lost forever. In the midst of that, I took a contract job at Microsoft where I was able to stabilize my finances, if only a little. It gave me time to breathe and to think. What I found was the writer had not vanished—I had not forgotten. And in that moment, I started writing something different: an anthology of some of my various writings. Before each story excerpt, I’ve written short commentaries in which I share some background about how I came up with the idea as well as recount some funny stories. The project became sort of a “semi-memoirish” fiction anthology, turning my own life into the story—the story of me, the story of the writer. That effort of remembrance has finally come to fruition as this latest work is nearly complete. As writers do, I’m starting to plan for this launch and when that happens, the writer will be a writer . . . again.
