I am a Writer When I am Writing

“Accept being unimportant.” Lao Tsu, Tao te Ching

As a musician, writer, wife and mother, it matters to me that these labels are just that—merely labels. Descriptors or definers but never confiners.

If I am slapping bumper stickers on my car such as “I’d Rather Be Writing” or “Without Music Life Would Bb” I’m telling you to think of me a certain way. If I am announcing on social media #iamthis #iamthat, I may very well dilute the very identities I am wishing to confer upon myself.

But the skills I use in each of these categories overlap endlessly and they did not originate with my life as a musician, writer, wife, and mother. That is a partial list of where I am and where I have come from.

For instance, what I gleaned from the jobs I sometimes grumped through in my younger years is often still serving me well today. I worked a karaoke machine/smoke machine/disco ball while hoping the kimchee I was microwaving in back didn’t burn, and I got the ratio of Sprite to vodka right so that the customers’ taste buds read “sake”.

At the Korean karaoke bar I learned efficiency, and how to work with a sense of humor. Or those years—yes it was years—I bristled every time I was called a secretary. What a lesson in humility, as I began to understand the simultaneous power and impotence of labels. And how about the special workplace skill of handling difficult people? I learned when to engage and when to walk away. I learned that it is best to complain only if you come bearing a solution along with your grievance. I was a problem-solver then, I liked that label.

And all I learned from the identities I wore in my youth—each step of being a student, each failed romantic relationship—was formative for me, like I imagine it is for each of us. Artists use all of these learned skills nestled within the skill of observation. And with observation, we use all of our senses. A musician may emulate styles of sounds; a writer may see the conflict between two lovers and watch as the tension unfolds.

But it seems labeling has become integral to observing. We are tending to announce each step in our individual growing processes, by oversharing, over-identifying, and thrusting our moments in our followers’ faces. We are indeed, monumentalizing our moments.

I think the adage: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” was supposed to represent cosmic irony, right? Now we feel that if we don’t state our feelings (clearly), avow our beliefs (loudly) and share our family time for posterity (widely) that just maybe these things never happened. Or more frighteningly, if we don’t share, then maybe that event or accomplishment doesn’t mean squat.

Yeah, I am aggressively questioning where we are at as a culture with our need to label ourselves and others at a time when it feels like a rainbow can’t even hold all of our colors. Why do we try to not only name every type of person, but everything they do, think, feel, and say?

We are obsessed with displaying our tasks, and then we choose to glamorize, distill and filter them, creating such falseness that it gives me the feeling that I am swimming underwater and have that moment of panic because I have lost which way is up. I suspect we are beginning to feel those moments of panic nearly constantly.

***

For me, now somewhat later in life, I am a writer. But I feel that if I were to in any way hang my hat on that identity I would be confining myself somehow to a wish or a preconceived idea about what I should be doing next instead of what I am doing now. I am observing, I am listening. And sometimes (oftentimes), I am writing. And although this new role has had a profound effect on my sense of fulfillment and joy, without it I am still the creative thinker I have been my whole life. I am all of those labels, and at times none of them.

I’m just saying let’s come up for air. Let’s take one moment and look outward. Look away from the information, like a breath. Like a release. We can look away; it is an actual option. We can look away for a moment or more just to refocus our gaze outward and to recalibrate meaning. Letting the dust settle after you dim the blue light reveals everything that was there. Your people are there, and nature is there. But you knew all of this already.

No label. No announcement. No confirmation. No one needs to know. Just you, the sunshine and the experience.

#noinstagrampostortwitterfeedwasharmedinthecreationofthisarticle

#laotsuwantstotalktoyou

#recalibratemeaning

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Monica Duncan is the author of Twine (Crowsnest Books) as well as a musician. Monica holds music degrees from Michigan State and Indiana University, and is active as a freelance musician and teacher in the Greater Boston area. Originally from Michigan, she now lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

TWINE

When Juniper Kowalski, a mediocre artist and graduate of one of the best art schools in the country, gets pregnant by her married lover, she ends up back in Gobles, Michigan, living in her dead grandma’s trailer. She fears that her new life as a hotel maid, and as the best friend of a subrural call girl, has fulfilled some bleak fate. But Juniper’s pregnancy also ignites a will to create. Every hurt that she’s ever suffered begins to emerge as confrontational, public art.

Family lore has taught Juniper disdain for men. But it’s not hatred for her absent father, abusive grandpa, or even her baby daddy, causing her issues. It’s facing actual love from a big, flawed, breathtaking man. “Twine” celebrates a quietly radical view of small-town life, ambition, and motherhood. It is the story of a young woman who needs no hero, and what she does when he shows up anyway.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing