The Story I Can Tell Now

and other gifts of being a middle aged writer

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

I am, as a general rule, not a very woo-woo person.

I think crystals are just pretty rocks. I love vaccines, peer reviewed scientific studies, and pasteurized dairy products. I’m cringe when I hear white people¹ talking about manifesting and the law of attraction (or anything that sounds like it could have come from The Secret). I’m suspicious of 90% of chiropractors and 100% of the people I saw offering to do reiki and other kinds of energy healing over Zoom during the pandemic.

Please note that I do love many people who are A LOT more woo woo than I am (not a hard bar to clear, tbh) and I try to stay respectful of that. People can get comfort or feel empowered by stuff that I don’t understand or believe in. Your boat, you get decide what makes it float.

(This effort in the direction of tolerance DOES NOT apply to the assholes who DM the chronically or terminally ill people in my life to tell them that they just need to treat their cancer with good vibes and essential oils. Those people can just fuck right off into the sun)

All of this is preamble to me admitting that, despite the fact that I find the idea of it sort of mortifying, I’ve been doing affirmations lately. Even though affirmations are kind of woo woo adjacent in my world, I have to confess: they might be working.

It all started when my husband gave me a copy of The Artist’s Way for Christmas last year. I’d heard of the book and knew that it was one that a some people really love. I didn’t know much about it beyond the idea of doing the morning pages (three handwritten pages, every morning) but was curious about it and thought it was a well chosen gift. I finally started working my way through it last month.

Spoiler alert: by “working my way through it”, I actually mean “I’m halfway through chapter 2 and I don’t think I’m gonna make it”.

I have yet to work on my “morning pages” before noon (I’m a chronic night owl) and I’ve never hit three full pages or made it three consecutive days of doing them. I’ve skipped all the exercises so far, except for taking myself on a writing date (but I would have done that anyways because I love a coffee shop writing session like the basic girl I am). I find myself skimming when she starts talking about higher power stuff.

However, before I realized I was going to be an Artist’s Way quitter, I did take her advice and jotted down some affirmations.

A quick side note: the first few chapters of the book talk a lot about stopping negative self-talk, about accepting the idea that you can be an artist and be happy, and about setting up boundaries with people who are toxic to your creativity and trying to hold you back as an artist.

As I read these chapters, I had a delightful realization: this stuff doesn’t apply to me.

I don’t have qualms about calling myself a writer any more. I fully believe that I can be a writer and be happy and fulfilled. I’m not tortured or tragic, nor do I aspire to have imaginary or self-inflicted trauma so I’ll seem more interesting or creative². I also don’t have “crazymakers”, as Cameron calls them, in my life. According to Cameron, crazymakers are “people who thwart the creativity of those they purportedly love” by causing “their hapless victims to doubt themselves” and causing chaos, conflict, and anxiety.

Honestly: hard pass.

Thanks to therapy, geography, and spending a lot of time building good relationships, there is nobody in my daily life who makes me feel less than or sees creativity as a zero sum game where my wins are their losses (or vis versa).

Despite what some Instagram business coaches might want me to believe, my brain is not a dick… and neither are the people I choose to be in relationship with.

So, when it came time to choose some affirmations, I didn’t need to try to refute any negative self-talk about my own belief in myself as a writer or my worthiness to deserve time and space to create. I am, perhaps, annoying self-confident about that at the moment.

But when it was time to think of an affirmation or two, I realized very quickly that there is still one area where I still sometimes struggle with doubt.

That area is my status as a middle aged lady.

When I have doubt about my life as a writer, it’s when I worry that I am too late. I’ve missed the window to be a child prodigy. I’m not a bright young thing. I’m never going to be a literary ingenue or appear on a list of up-and-coming anythings.

Obviously, I am a writer. You are reading my words at this exact moment (and thank you, always and always, for that). I’m not worried that I’m too old to become a writer but sometimes there is the fear that, once I finish the edits to my novel and try to get it published, nobody will want it. Is there really a market for a debut novel from a writer who is well into her forties?

I try hard to take the work of writing a novel one stage at a time, recognizing that good work takes time and revision and fallow periods and moments when it all comes together. My work right now is editing, not worrying about publishing… but sometimes I feel the impulse to rush, to hurry hurry hurry so I’m not even older when I finally get brave enough to send my first query letter to an agent. I’m a problem solver and I like to control the controllables but this is one that is simply out of my hands. I cannot make myself younger.

And so, I’ve been writing down these affirmations every time I sit down to work on my manuscript:

I am not too late

There is an audience waiting for me

I’m right on time

Does writing down affirmations make me feel a little dorky? Yes.

But, damn it, I think it is working.

Because here is the realization I had this week: I love my novel.

I love my novel and I love the world I’ve created within it and I love my characters so much.

Don’t tell my other characters, but Juliet might be my favorite.

And I am 1000% convinced that I could not have written this novel at 20 or 25 or 30. I had to be in this exact stage of my life to build this world and to create these characters. The reason that I believed I could write this book is because I’m in my 40s and I’ve done the work to get past the anxiety, self-doubt, and toxic relationships that Cameron writes about.

I’ve been in a good groove on this round of edits, edging closer to sending a draft to a few beta readers and worrying less about what will happen next. I’m not too late.

Maybe younger writers are more marketable but I feel more certain every day that this novel will be good because I’m not 25 anymore. I understand marriage and friendship and female rage in a way that I simply couldn’t have two decades ago.

I’ll still be middle aged when I finish this project, one way or another.

But I’m starting to believe that I really am right on time and that there will be an audience who will love my cast of non-ingenues in all their funny, prickly, fiercely loyal glory as much as I do.

I really hope I get a chance to find out if I’m right.

1. Let’s be honest, my fellow low melanin people: it is a whole lot easier to believe that you can manifest your way into a dream life if you don’t have to deal with structural racism

2. I could name a name but… IYKYK that I’m definitely talking about my nemesis here.