What If There's Nothing You've Always Wanted To Be?
When you read an interview with a writer, or listen to a podcast, or sometimes just read an author’s own biography, there is often a moment like this:
Q: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
A: Oh always, I’ve always known. And, in a lot of ways, I always have been a writer. I used to make up stories for my sisters, I published a small book made out of exercise book paper and felt pen, I was told off at school for always being in my made up worlds. I am a writer because telling stories has always been my very essence.
This part of the interview always takes me unawares. I read the question innocently enough, keen to find out when in their twenties or possibly early thirties this writer decided to go all in on the writing, and then always I read the childhood anecdotes as if I am one of the humorous objects being slowly crushed under a hydraulic press for a viral video. I feel myself crumple and fold back in on myself.
It’s not just writers. It’s musicians too, and often artists. The ones who picked up a guitar at three years old and spent their teen weekends busking in the streets, the ones who were always doodling in their school books and spending their pocket money on paints. You read about it on the walls of museums next to the work of people now dead, you read it in books that are supposed to inspire you. Story upon story of a lifelong creative pursuit that inevitably transferred into a life’s vocation. Story upon story of people who always knew.
The reason these anecdotes put me under the hydraulic press is because I was not one of those children. I was not single-mindedly focused on making little books with felt tips, I was not unknowingly honing a craft by just doing what I was most interested in. I was jumping from hobby to interest and never settling on one, discarding recorders and art sets along the way. I went to every after school club I could; the art group and three different sports and I would be in the musical and I’d try anything and everything I thought I could be best at.
Because when I think back, that’s what defines what I liked as a child. It wasn’t having a creative hobby, or any hobby, that I enjoyed and that I diligently worked to be better at. It was wanting to be the best at anything I tried, and trying as many different things to best at as I could.
When you’re looking for inspiration on the internet about a career change or what kind of hobby to take up as an adult, the first suggestions are “think about what you loved doing as a child”. And again my gut crumples because what I loved as a child was “being seen as highly skilled and talented in things by adults and my peers”.
It was never about the thing itself, the thing that I was doing, it was about how good I was perceived as being at it. When I was younger I wanted to be someone who played the guitar more than I wanted to play the guitar, and so the idea of taking it back up now is riddled with a strange muddle of proving mixed with shame.
Aside from the times where I’m getting desperate enough to google “what should I do as a hobby?” I don’t think much about this stuff. I don’t go about my days worrying that I never explicitly wanted to be a writer as a child. When I read those interviews I feel the crushing not because I think everyone who wanted to be a writer when they were younger is one now, like it’s something you’ve got to have on your CV. It’s more about the qualities that person has as a result of their long-held dream. The commitment, the resilience, the patience, the interest in craft, the persistence, the passion, the belief.
Because to pursue something from a young age takes all those things. It takes the dogged determination to continually show up to the page, the quiet honing of craft while waiting for the opportunities to come up, it takes writing book reviews and small pieces at small presses to get a foot in the door, it takes an unbridled love of the thing, and a belief that it can happen. Even though writers can be famously unstable in their belief about their abilities, to keep doing it over decades shows a belief that it is, at least, worth it to keep trying.
These, to me, all feel like qualities that are essential, not simply for a good creative career, but for a good life. A life in which you feel satisfaction with yourself and your output, in which you do things for the joy of them more than what result they may bring you, in which you have a demonstrable tenacity to get things done and in which you have a love for something that is more than yourself.
What about the rest of us? The ones who haven’t always wanted to be anything (or always wanted to be everything)? The ones whose ambition didn’t manifest in this way, but instead in a way that schemed and hopped fences to greener grass and was based more on perception than adoration. What is there for us?
I have spent most of my adult life to date wishing I was different in this way. Wanting to be a person with patience and diligence, with one true calling and the mental fortitude to see things through. I resented that I couldn’t just know what I wanted like so many people did, that I itched and fidgeted and couldn’t just settle into something. I thought that there was something broken in me, either by social media and smartphones or just intrinsically - that had never formed to be “normal”.
I am still a wildly uncomfortable beginner, and wildly uncomfortable with being observed to be ‘bad’ at something. I am also wildly uncomfortable with feeling uncomfortable, so I often avoid situations I could enjoy in order to stay comfortable. These are things that still annoy me about myself, but they are at least things that I can recognise and try to gently shift.
This is the point in the essay where I wanted to end it in a positive way. I typed out two paragraphs about being multi-passionate, about how perhaps there is no One Thing for some people, that it is the multitude itself that is the Thing. But I got up from the desk with the distinct feeling that I’d lied. That I’d formed a conclusion that was easy but not true.
Because if I think about it, if I’m really honest, I do not have the multitudes. Even as I tried to write a list of the multitudes of things I’m interested in, I struggled. Because writing is the One Thing for me now. It’s the thing I want to make room for in my weeks, the craft that I am only interested in learning, the thing that I feel happiest to spend time on. Yes there are other things but I’d give them all up for writing if I could.
This creates a messier ending to this essay. Perhaps this whole piece has been a kind of justification, a trying to make myself feel better about having more than one thing when actually I do just want the one. Maybe it’s been trying to make myself feel better about being “behind” the childhood writers. Maybe it’s a real time response to the ageism prevalent in our society, that if you come to something after the age of ten you are coming to it ‘late in life’.
Or maybe, it’s a lesson. A lesson in not justifying, in not making meaning out of childhood hobbies when you are an adult woman and, most of all, a lesson in embracing the thing you love now, no matter how you came to it.