On accidentally becoming an essayist
If I had to testify about how this writing thing started, I can imagine it now: “It was an accident, I swear.”
And in a way, it was.
I’d like to think I’m a self-starter, but there was no handy guide to midlife reinvention—or crisis. You decide. Depending on the day, I use the terms interchangeably.
Neatly excised from the only career I had ever known, I found myself standing before a significant fork in the road: persevere in media analytics, or try something new.
The question was: what?
In a Dave Chappelle special, commenting on plans to bring industry home to the U.S., he said, “I want to wear Nikes, not make them.” It was either from The Age of Spin or Deep in the Heart of Texas. I don’t remember. Frankly, you should probably watch both to be sure.
The sentiment was not lost on me.
I won’t flirt with your patience by walking you through what felt like iterations one through seven. Long, meandering, multi-tangent story short, I found myself conducting an in-depth mental audit and being rather horrified by the findings.
I had spent years flitting about the planet—or, more accurately, the GTA—and had accomplished bupkis for my trouble.
Specialties? Drawing a blank.
Marketable skills? Crickets.
I lived and died (exaggeration—I have a dramatic streak) in a nebulous area too small to run with the executive big dogs and too big for the ankle biters. I was a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel without a lap.
Imagery aside, I was a print media specialist who spent too much time with her head in the sand—or at a hockey rink—to properly diversify into digital.
Before you chide me, I understand the urge. I just didn’t want to.
Stupid, I know, but the tangibility of print was my ride or die.
Without a lottery win it’s not looking good, but that’s maudlin. This bias has even crept into my new life, but that’s jumping ahead in the story.
Also—and this was becoming increasingly important to me—I really, really didn’t want to work in a sweatshop.
One of my favourite sci-fi tropes is the “what if.”
Is there anything funnier than Bill Murray and that enraged groundhog in Groundhog Day?
“Don’t drive angry!” Classic.
If Future Andrea had travelled back to, say, 1991, she probably would have instructed me to go directly to university, major in Fine Arts, and then—I dunno—become an eccentric English teacher.
They’re the best.
The problem with this is the same one presented in About Time: if this had actually transpired, there would likely be no husband—or at least not the one I currently have—and certainly no oddly athletic children with minimal appreciation for books.
However, viewed another way, it’s as though someone finally hit play on that abandoned timeline. Sort of.
In February, I discovered quite by accident that there was something I could produce at sweatshop pace—though hopefully of much higher quality.
Essays.
Narratives.
Long form observations.
Apparently an alarming number of them.
All of these conversations I had apparently been having with myself for years were suddenly queued and ready to deploy, like the soundtrack to a life I hadn’t realized I was recording.
The skills were there—rusty, certainly—but muscle memory is an incredible thing.
Assuming the artistry of writing can be attributed to muscles.
Back to the accident. Or perhaps “incident” is the more appropriate term.
I still hadn’t completely abandoned my aspiring cult leader ambitions when the sly thought crept in: you should write about this.
How To’s.
10 Steps to Rewriting Your Life.
The Idiot’s Guide to False Starts.
And so on.
Minor detail: I knew next to nothing about any of those subjects.
Presumably that part would come later.
Instead of documenting the agony that was setting up my website—which, truly, I should have, as I was consumed by a kind of blind administrative rage at the time—I wrote four chapters.
I think.
Not fiction. The beginnings of a dissertation on hockey, of all things.
A particularly odd choice on the surface, considering I had never actually played—other than one regrettable season of ladies’ ball hockey that should never be repeated.
However, if they need someone to work the gate, I’m there.
What followed was a torrent of opinion pieces, reflections, and bastardized critiques that seemed to possess neither rhyme nor reason. A multitude of choose your own nonfiction adventures.
Once it became evident this was less a temporary episode and more an ongoing malady, I consulted Dr. Google.
The diagnosis was bizarre and completely unforeseen.
I was writing essays.
Essays.
By choice.
Who had ever heard of an essayist?
Remarkably similar to those columns I favour in the weekend paper. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Walrus—entire ecosystems apparently teeming with essays.
It seemed I couldn’t even have a conventional artistic awakening.
I knew writers. Enough of them, at least, to constitute a statistically relevant sample size.
All fiction.
One wrote cozy mysteries with a supernatural twist.
Another produced literary philosophical fiction.
A third lived and breathed high fantasy.
And then there was me.
When I put down my pen in university with the thought that I’d write when I had something to write about.
Something fictional. Or at least conventional.
I suppose it’s par for the course that when the words finally came, they weren’t conveniently attached to any recognizable form of genre fiction.
Instead I’m contemplating why Stephen King’s works are artistically superior to classic dense literature. The mosaic versus the melting pot and whether Lin-Manuel Miranda should consider rebooting the original play.
I suppose the twist ending is that I am surprised by this.
After speculating which hockey dad looked the most like Sting, a friend once said to me, “I never know what you’re going to say.”
To which I replied, “Neither do I.”