I used to be a writer, but now I'm not
My friend Vu said something to me probably like, five years ago that I still think about on a weekly basis. We were having a working lunch at a restaurant, initially under the guise of talking about his website, but then at a point, the conversation transitioned to writing process (how it’s agonizing sometimes) and also how annoying it is when people claim to be writers, but they actually aren’t writers.
I might’ve said something about how I’m also a writer, trying to commiserate with him — and it must’ve triggered something in him — because he corrected me and said I was not a writer. I used to be one, but I didn’t currently actively write. To be a writer you have to actively write.
That legit stung, and I wanted to punch him in his fucking face. But he’s my friend so I refrained. I just corrected him right back. I think I said that he doesn’t know my life. He has no idea how much I actually write. I fucking write shit! I have a pop culture column about Asians! I ghost-write shit for the Seattle Times! I contribute to a blog about creative work! I write like, thousands of words shit-talking the people in my life like, all day on my Finsta.
Like, I write.
Even as I was being self-righteous about it with Vu, I was also simultaneously super insecure. Because most of the things that I could name that I wrote was mostly stuff I write in service of others. I don’t write like how Vu writes. Like, I don’t write from a very personal place publicly, ever.
When you’re young, and especially when you’re the kid of immigrant refugees, you don’t have any conceit of what jobs could be like. I was always into drawing stuff, and I had these really earnest dreams of being an artist when I was young. But all my parents and I could conceive of is like, all of these stories of oldass oil painters who died destitute and poor only for their work to be discovered fifty years later, after they were too dead to see their success come to fruition. My parents were like, “You don’t want that. Nobody smart wants that.”
I thought I was very smart. So I made this concession. Maybe I could get an English degree and not an art degree, and maybe that would be okay. (Though fact check: I think my degree is actually a creative writing degree, which is like, ha-ha, joke’s on my folks for that one.)
In college, with a lot of anxiety over an uncertain future, I rationalized that maybe I could take this shitty, useless degree and like, go into sales. Or maybe go into HR. Or maybe I could become a technical writer and write manuals. Or maybe I could write storylines for video games even though I don’t know anything about games.
I graduated with no job lined up, no internships under my belt, and totally depressed over how unremarkable and not special I was.
I showed up to my job interview at Northwest Asian Weekly in red sweatpants. That happened because things happened quickly. I was 23 years old. I was freelancing for them. On a lark, I learned the editor position was open. I was massively under-qualified.
(In later retellings of this story, people — women, mostly — like to reassure me and say, “I’m sure you weren’t under-qualified!” Guys, stop believing in me so much. Right now, looking back, I am positive I was one-hundred-percent under-qualified. Like the job I had before that one was as a data miner. I Googled all day.)
The cool thing about youth is that you don’t know what you don’t know. I didn’t realize just how under-qualified I was, so I applied for the position and was called in for an interview the same day, at 3 o’clock. And I was stunned, so I didn’t say, “But I’m wearing sweatpants because I fucking hate the job I currently have. Can I come in tomorrow?”
I showed up at 3 p.m. and my youthful self saw a diminutive Asian woman, and she reminded me of my relatives. I didn’t feel as intimidated as I should have. Because Assunta is a motherfucking badass.
I said a bunch of passionate, earnest things to her about how I wanted to change the world (and also denounced Vietnamese elders who are too obsessed with Communism, a weird journey she led me down during that interview) — just bold stuff that I would be too embarrassed to say out loud now. She told me I was under-qualified as fuck. She told me she doesn’t even know if I can edit worth shit or write worth shit, and she’s the publisher of two fucking newspapers!
I was like, oh my God, did you call me in to make me feel awesome about myself?
Just joking.
I actually said, “I really want this job. I know I can do this job. Please give me this job.”
I did that job for about four years. Technically, it was maybe three years and nine months. She likes to round down and say three years. It makes me insane every time she rounds down, and I’m like, “It was fucking four years, Assunta. Four years, we were together.”
After I left that job, I transitioned into corporate blogging and social media. And then from that, I transitioned into part-time graphic design. And then after that, full-time graphic design. And then I was laid off. And then I started watching Netflix all day and playing Diner Dash obsessively for all of my waking hours so that I would not have to feel the full force of my failure.
I never really even started job searching. I applied here and there. And every time, I felt such hopelessness and dread over it. My parents were scared I was becoming a deadbeat right before their very eyes. They started telling me, with a shit-ton of subtlety, about how the City of Kirkland was hiring. My dad said the job posting requested an English degree. He reminded me that I have one of those.
I wanted to be like, “The fucking City of Kirkland, Dad! Are you fucking with me, right now!”
In reality, I said nothing. I just despondently avoided eye contact and was like, fuck the City of Kirkland — to myself.
And then, after a few months of obsessively making really embarrassing Etsy clipart because maybe I’m an entrepreneur now — after a trip back to Vietnam where I forced myself to think about what the fuck I thought I was doing — I finally told myself, “Dude, Stace. I don’t think you want to get a real job.”
I never got a real job. I ended up starting a business with no deliberateness or intention at all. I just kept scamming people into giving me money to make websites and design stuff and draw stuff. Doing that covered my mortgage and not much else. At that time (in 2016), ten dollars spending money was really exciting.
And it was fun to fill up my free time trying to score free food. I hung out with my parents a lot to eat their food while paying the unspoken price of putting up with their incessant need to tell me stuff about my life that I already knew — like how I didn’t have a real job.
Design pretty much became my entire vocation, my entire skill set.
Yet, I still forced myself to write. I wrote website copy. I wrote news articles. I wrote as not myself, but as a hole-filler. I wrote in such a functional, mechanical, agreeable, malleable way. I wrote bland shit for pennies, because I felt so attached to the identity of writer. And in order to feel good about calling myself a writer, I had to be actively writing. All the time.
I started writing in my Finsta when I discovered that friends lists exist on Instagram. Before that, I was doing a lot of shit-talking on Snapchat, but it kind of bothered me that anyone with my phone number could find me and watch my shit-talking. That made me feel vulnerable and just at risk of being stuck in a one-sided intimate relationship I did not sign up for, all the time.
I’ve been doing really well professionally, especially in the past year. It’s really nice, but it also makes me miss being young. I miss being stupider. I miss not having as much awareness. I miss being bold because I hadn’t yet been smacked in the face by my own severe incorrectness.
I feel hilariously and self-indulgently more and more trapped, the more esteem I have and the more reputation I gain. I feel like I have to be super careful about what I say in public because sometimes I might think that I’m Kanye West and that my haters are watching my every move — so I must be on my best behavior. I feel very responsible to the people I work with (I work closely with my best friend.). I don’t want to jeopardize my business. I don’t want to be a bad reflection of the people associated with me.
I would like to be able to insult a man’s penis publicly though. I would like to tell you all about what some bitch did to me this week (and really, it’s probably a misunderstanding or a miscommunication, but I don’t fucking care, and I don’t want to see their perspective on this!) I would love to feel like a legit writer again.
This is usually the part of the essay where the writer — hypothetically, me — would put down a bombastic statement of intention. Like, guess what, hos — full circle, here we are, gonna do it, let’s go, watch me now!
But I’m kind of here because one of my client-friends, Julie, was like, “Stace, Nam-ho said I should blog on Substack. What do you think?” I’m kind of here because not too long ago, Vu was like, “Stacy, we need to talk about Substack.” I’m here because a couple of hours ago, Tiffany was like, “I was thinking about writing on Medium, but then I got intimidated.”
To Julie, I was like, “I agree with Nam-ho! Get on Substack!”
To Vu, I was like, “I don’t think Substack is appropriate for you.”
To Tiffany, I was like, “Yo, have you thought about Substack instead of Medium?”
And to myself, I was like: Stace, I’m not sure you even know what the fuck you are talking about with such confidence.
So I am testing out this platform for work!*
I know!
Plot-twist!
Anyway, thanks for reading this far. You’re a peach.
*I’m joking. This is a legit endeavor. I just have to joke all the time because it stops me from feeling my true feelings, okay?
Well, I loved this! I’m excited for this endeavour.