The Fuck-It Stage

I won’t pretend that I don’t still enjoy a lovely review of one of my books (though it’s been a while) and I won’t pretend that I write purely for my personal joy and not for money. I like to be paid for my work. I like people to read my work and to tell me that they loved it. I like even more to have that glorious sense that a perfect review gives me: that the reviewer saw exactly what I was trying to do and that they loved it.

But one of the wonderful things about being in the writer space I am currently in is that I spend no time at all worrying about if what I’m writing today is “good enough.” I spent so much time early in my career worrying about that. I don’t regret that time. It made me work hard and revise and I hustled and went to conferences and read books and threw things out and started all over again. I think this phase of becoming a writer is an important stage. I don’t think anyone can skip it. But it is exhausting and I like that I’m not in it anymore.

It's not so much that I think I’ve learned all the skills I will ever need to write any book that I decide I want to tackle. It’s not that I think that I’ve perfectly written any of the books I’ve tried to write before. It’s just that I don’t think worrying about it is helpful anymore. There’s just the writing, just the doing. And I don’t really believe that I can do it any faster than I’m currently doing it. I used to write 5-10k words a day and sometimes I think I didn’t know that I was writing too fast to let the work fully marinate in my brain and in my soul. Or maybe that was just part of the process that got me to where I am now and I’m glad to be here.

My books are not for everyone. Some of them are probably never going to have more than one reader: me. It’s just that I don’t mind that anymore. I don’t need other people to tell me that the work is worth doing in order for me to believe that it is worth doing. I don’t always know consciously why a particular book is the one I am currently being driven to write. Sometimes I have two I’m deciding between, and I just let my gut (or whatever) decide. I might start something and then stop it because it doesn’t feel right. I don’t try to explain this to anyone, least of myself. I just feel my way through.

Sometimes, years later, I can see why a particular book was important then, because it was a precursor to a later book in ways probably no one else can see. Mostly, though, it’s probably just the “fuck it” stage of life that I’ve entered in my fifties. I don’t need writing to be the be-all and end-all for me. It is important to me, but it isn’t the only important thing. It won’t fix my self-esteem. It won’t make people love and adore me. It sometimes makes people hate me. It may be my life’s work, but that doesn’t mean I believe that anyone will remember me in a hundred years. And that is satisfying to me. It is enough. I am enough.