Feeding my addiction

I’ve been clean for more than a decade.  Not that it’s been an effort to stay clean – rather a non-effort. For years I lived to see my writing in print, I collected ‘tear sheets’ like it was my job.  I didn’t write for money or fame (well, maybe a little bit for fame), I wrote and submitted essays because my ego needed to be fed.  I needed to see my words on paper, I needed to hold the published piece in my hand, tear it out whatever publication it was in and glue it into my scrapbook.

I was a late bloomer. I was forty years old when I picked up a pen and started to write (actually I sat down at a computer but the image of words flowing from the tip of a pen is far more mystical than imagining them clicking onto a computer screen).  I took a creative writing course and discovered my guilty pleasure.

The addiction developed as addictions are wont to do, slowly.  At first all I needed to feel sated were the comments my instructor scribbled on my homework, he found something positive to say about everything and anything his students handed in.  He made me feel like my calling had been answered – he made me feel like a writer.

Considering yourself a writer and actually being one is subjective.  My instructor felt the action of putting words to paper sealed the deal – you were a writer because you wrote. And that’s true – a writer has to write. But I felt being a serious writer was something else and being a published writer, well that was the coup de gras – you were killing it.  Being published became my goal – if I was going to be a successful writer I needed to see my words in print.

I set my sights on the local bi-weekly newspaper and nailed my first tear sheet.  It was downhill from there.  The thrill of seeing my words in print was more than I could have imagined. Tear sheets became the reason I wrote – I was no longer writing for the hell of it, I was writing to be read.

I became a submitting dynamo – essays were being flung far and wide.  My collection of tear sheets was growing at a fairly steady pace when I realized I wasn’t hyped anymore. I had become obsessed with the outcome not the process. It was taking more and more tear sheets in larger publications to give me the thrill. I was an addict in the purest sense of the word.  My guilty pleasure had become a chore – so I stopped, cold turkey.

A writer who isn’t writing isn’t really a writer, they’re just a person who beats themselves up on the daily and procrastinates – they’re a writer-in-waiting, unsure of what they’re actually waiting for.  That was me for a dozen years – then I started this blog and writing became be fun again.  I felt I had tackled my addiction, I wasn’t collecting tear sheets I was just writing.  I would like to say I didn’t realize my addiction was being fed with clicks and ‘thumbs-up’s – but I knew I was playing with fire.  It was only a matter of time before I’d send words into the world hoping they’d land on a piece of paper.

I tested the water with a short essay about walking my dogs – I sent the submission to the local newspaper as a letter to the editor. Well – I’m guessing you know where this story is going.  Seeing that letter in the newspaper was fun – a de ja vu moment – but surprisingly the old thrill wasn’t in it.  I discovered my joy in writing was now coming from something else – it was coming from the process not the outcome.  Turns out my first writing instructor was right – you are a writer because you write.