Meg Dowell Writes

Never.

You will never JUST have a nine-to-five job, if you ever have one at all.

You’ll never be content making money just doing one thing, just working for one person.

You won’t ever sit back, look at your life and think, “Yeah, this is fine. I can’t do any better than this.”

Never.

Why? Because you are a writer.

You have been blessed, and/or cursed, with a mind that never sleeps. And dreams that never cease. You have ambitions, even if you aren’t naturally an ambitious person.

You float around the real world with fake stories in your head. You exist in a dimension that will not adapt to your kind — so you must, somehow, mostly adapt to the preset parameters of this realm you never asked to be born into.

There are rules, and you’re expected to follow them — unless one day a miracle strikes your life and you write something so brilliant that these rules no longer apply to you.

You are surrounded by people who do not understand you, and whom you do your best to understand — but often struggle, even though you write about [fake] people “for a living.”

You’re an offspring, a sibling, a friend, maybe a partner or a spouse, a dog parent, a parent to a much tinier and more vocal version of yourself. But you are also a writer, which means you have to be all of these things at once and more, and also must find the headspace and energy to tell stories in your head.

Some of them even make it onto paper. Or a more modern version of it — they call it a “Google Doc.”

You will never have a real bedtime. The sun is not your alarm clock. Your creativity determines when you fall and when you rise, if you’re lucky enough to call what you do horizontally “resting.”

You’ll rarely, if ever, have a long conversation with a stranger or someone more closely acquainted that does not at some point include phrases like, “What are you writing?” or, “I’ve always wanted to write!”

You may not have chosen this dark and twisted, mixed up, sideways, ever-revolving spiral of a life. But you’ve known for a long time that you’re stuck with it. You can’t NOT make words happen. You’ve tried to run from them. Every time, something drags you back. Passion. Boredom. Maybe you’re not whole without some kind of story to tell or underlying message to get across.

Maybe you just keep trying to fit into the mold they call “normal.” The nine-to-five, single-income-stream, this-is-good-enough-for-now life that doesn’t, has never, and never will belong to you.

You are an idea-driven, schedule-defying, rule-bending human being. You have many titles, you’ve formed many relationships and accomplished many things. But you are not normal. Your life is not normal. It was  never supposed to be any such thing.

One day, maybe, you will learn to embrace it.

Until then, you’ll just have to blindly write your way through it all. As all true writers do.

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Meg is the creator of Novelty Revisions, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words. She is a staff writer with The Cheat Sheet, a freelance editor and writer, and a 10-time NaNoWriMo winner. Follow Meg on Twitter for tweets about writing, food and nerdy things.

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