Monday, May 21, 2012

Follow The Leader

I didn't always know I'd become a writer.

What I did know was that if I was breathing, I'd be writing. Whether that would be journaling, blogging, or writing professionally, it was all the same to me. I had to get the words out and trusted myself to do that.

Like many people who find their true vocation a little later in the game, I took multiple detours. Fresh out of high school I worked at a fast food establishment, one of the only jobs to be had in a college town where throngs of students clamored for any kind of employment. I worked in a bakery as a professional cake decorator, off and on for nearly ten years. I learned to prepare taxes, teach preschool, run a daycare. I even became a licensed electrical contractor and a general building contractor. Housecleaning and property management were in the mix, too.

While I could do all of those things well enough, none of them stuck. Quite frankly, I was miserable doing many of them.

My post-divorce job was as a cleaning business owner. I ran a six to ten-person crew. We restored vacant rental properties. I often worked alone while others worked together, needing the quiet to collect my thoughts. I was angry and hurting over my divorce, and my life felt more than chaotic. I figured that if I could just spend enough time alone, I could sort things out, both what had just happened and what I was going to do with the remainder of my days. Cleaning proved to be an effective tool for that.

Many people around me thought that what I was doing was impressive, having gone from being an electrical contractor to a cleaning business owner without skipping much of a beat. I did what I had to do to provide for my children. That didn't mean I liked it.

I heard, "You're such a business-woman!" all the time. I received tons of encouragement. Some assumed that the business would become another franchise like a few of the now-larger cleaning services had done. While I know they were being kind, none of that talk sat well with me, and I needed to figure out why. Why would I throw away a perfectly good business opportunity, one I had been striving feverishly to make a go of? I eventually got very honest with myself: I didn't want more cleaning jobs. I didn't like supervising, being the boss, the paperwork, or the cleaning. I knew I couldn't strive for an end goal of something I really didn't want.

Just because I could do something didn't mean that I should.

Though the introvert in me preferred solitude, I often got lonely enough to switch on the portable radio I carried in my cleaning kit. Listening to talk radio sprouted colorful thoughts in my mind that were soon popping like firecrackers on the fourth of July. A forgotten tap had been turned on, and it was hard--if not impossible--to turn it off. Notions of essays I could write, stories I could tell, ideas for fictional novels all kept me awake at night. I dreamed of these tales, waking in the mornings with a smile on my lips.

Hungry to put pen to paper, I began taking longer breaks in the tiny yards of the rentals I worked on. I'd sit out in the sun and write and write and write, finally forcing myself back into the stale units to finish cleaning.

The urge to write seemed to have a pattern of strengthening and waning. I'd begin a story or an essay, then get busy and leave it for later. When later would come, I'd have no idea where I'd planned to go with the piece, get frustrated and either quit or start something new.

There were days I told myself I could never put words together in a way that people would read. I remembered a talk radio program that claimed every writer had to have a goodly amount of narcissism in them, to be vain enough to think that anyone would want to read what they'd have to write. For myself, I wasn't sure if I had enough of that vanity, or if I could even fake having it. The only feedback I had was from the high school teacher who said I wrote ' very lucidly', and in considering my older sister's addiction to my journal writings when I wasn't looking, years before.

Then along came a day I'll never forget. It hadn't been a good day; I was in a junky public-school-from-the-sixties-green interior duplex. The place was filthy, it had to be scrubbed from top to bottom. I was in the process of wiping down the hideously-hued walls, feeling lower than usual. My radio was dialed in to a program about people who led double lives. I was only half listening.

The first segment featured an anonymous exotic dancer by night/kindergarten teacher by day. She had to work two towns down the road to avoid being discovered by a parent. Her other ongoing concern was that she might not be able to dance much longer, since she was pushing forty. I listened with only mild interest.

Then the interviewer switched to a housecleaner who was also a professional writer. Nancy Peacock (author of 'A Broom of One's Own' and other books) cleaned houses by day, then got dressed up to do readings in the spotlight in the evening. After she'd been published, she still kept her cleaning jobs for the steady income. In the same twenty-four-hour period she would both swish a mop and get celebrated for her literary creativity. She spoke of the huge contrast, and how the two worlds didn't play so well together. No kidding, I thought.

That was a breakthrough moment for me. If this woman could write a book (and later have it named the New York Times' Notable Book of the Year), I thought maybe I could too.

I knew more than most just how well spending time behind a broom could bring about soulful expression. Hearing that I wasn't alone was a pivotal moment. It gave me the nudge to consider giving the writing thing a go.