Embracing My XX

Sometimes I wonder if I’m too old for this gig. I wonder if I should bother trying to make it as a writer or just go back to working a nine to five office job. Then I remember, oh, yeah, I’ve been out “the regular workforce” for at least four years now, so, uh, yeah, anywhere I go, I’m starting at the bottom. Why not start at the bottom of something I love doing? If I don’t make it as a writer, if I can’t afford to pay my rent and utilities writing, then okay, I’ll have to go get the job I would be looking at now anyway. I wouldn’t know if I could have made it, would I?

Financial security is a great thing, but for me, who has always wanted to write, financial security came at the cost of not doing what I loved. And guess what? I didn’t get rich from not doing what I loved.

I’ve seen a few blog posts lately about what advice I’d give my twenty-something self. There’s one thing I would say to my newly adulted self: Just be you.

The realization that I’m smart enough, talented enough, good enough, and strong enough to do what it is that I want to do, is coming slowly. I wish it would come a little faster because my twenties are long gone, and if I’m going to make up for lost time, I need to get on that…rapido. 

Yes, history is filled with examples of people who achieved great things once they’d passed forty. Frankly, I’m not looking for greatness; I just have a few milestones I’d like to hit. I have some goals I’d like to check off and I’d like to try some unfettered happiness for a while.

Just before I started at college, I was told, “Teaching is a good job for a woman.” That statement has pained me for many years, and the pain of it has changed as I’ve changed. At the time, I was eighteen, and what I wanted to pursue at college was writing. “You have to do something that pays the light bill,” was the reason I was given for not pursuing a degree in creative writing. I was young and insecure. I believed what people told me. I didn’t value myself and wasn’t able to summon enough strength to do what I wanted. I was unprepared to navigate alone.

At eighteen, what bothered me most about the teaching statement was that it said I wasn’t worth the risk of pursuing something extraordinary. The person who said it to me didn’t have the faith in me that I had the talent to achieve my goals. I needed to be someone ordinary to pay the light bills because I would never be extraordinary enough to be a writer. I wasn’t good enough.

The statement also denigrated teachers, many of whom I had and still have a lot of respect. “Teaching is a good job for a woman,” as opposed to “Teaching is a good job,” says that men are better used in another, better capacity. That teaching isn’t a job that requires strength or dedication, so let the women be teachers. When I finally did become a teacher, decades later, what I found was that teaching is a job that requires an inordinate amount of strength and dedication, no less than any other job, and more than so many others.

As I gained consciousness of bigger issues, I realized that the statement perpetuated a belief about me as a person that was also painful: as a girl, I wasn’t as a good as a boy, I wasn’t good enough for a man’s career. The belief bar, the expectations, had been set low from the outset because I was born female. When I helped my double econ-finance major apartment mate, two years my senior, with her papers and at her part-time job, as I wondered what her issue was. I did not recognize my own ability. When my Foundations of Education teaching assistant asked if he could publish the midterm I wrote in iambic pentameter, I shrugged it off, thinking it was clever but not that I was intelligent. As successive attorneys encouraged me to go to law school, I chose marriage instead because it was safer and what I was supposed to do, as a woman. I let the limiting belief that my gender diminishes me limit my belief in myself. I had accepted that belief unconsciously for a very long time, and when I recognized the truth behind it, the realization was wrenching. It remains painful to this day.

To raise myself, I needed new gods to foster belief in my inherent value. Gods that would reveal the truth: it has nothing to do with my gender; there is nothing wrong with having matching chromosomes. It’s not about deserving, because I deserve every good thing. It’s about belief. It’s about believing that I can meet expectations; no matter how high the bar is set, because being a woman isn’t a limiting factor. The limits are only where I set them. If I choose to put the work into writing, then my success stops when I do. I am every bit as good as a woman as any man, and frankly, better than some. I don’t have to accept a lesser life because I have a vagina.

Going back to the question of what I would tell my twenty-something self, I know what I would say: You go, girl. Don’t look back. Don’t ever doubt that you have what it takes. You just keep going.