To say the finale of How I Met Your Mother affected me would be an understatement. I probably played those last scenes in my head a million times that night. I mean, this show has been on the air since before Isaac and I met; watching HIMYM has essentially been a part of our relationship since day one. It was enough for me to write yesterday's blog post at 6 in the morning (because if there is anything that ever gets put on the chopping block for whatever reason, it's my sleep). I polished it up, fixed a few grammatical errors, and sent it to Medium (which, let's be honest here, is Tumblr for intellectuals) and Thought Catalog.
To backtrack, I got spoiled rotten with my Motherhood and Teacher essays on TC. Have a few essays go viral and suddenly everything needs to be a hit. Never mind the type of traffic TC gets. Never mind that even articles on Buzzfeed or Huffington Post are lucky to get a thousand or two shares. It was irking me that my essays would getting a handful of shares and maybe a comment or two.
Of course, it helps that I was writing about pop culture events (emotional essay about dealing with the meaning of life after a friend's mother's passing? Whatever. Essay about a show's finale? ALL the love). But I woke up to one of my most popular essays since, well, the Motherhood essay.
All writers have a bit of narcissism in them. While they write "with the door closed" as Stephen King would say, at the end of the day, we're looking for people to pay attention to our writing. And when we get a sudden influx of attention (for crying out loud, Clutch Magazine ran a piece about my Motherhood essay), only to have it drop off with our other work, it's discouraging.
So, for me, this boost is huge, in so many ways. Yes, it's nice to get a bit of recognition from complete strangers. But it's a reminder that I'm not a complete doofus for devoting so much time to this particular craft. My writing is why I haven't gone on Monster.com and picked up the first administrative assistant position I can find. I can shrug my shoulders and say it's because of my tai chi teaching, my yoga classes, my sporadic go-sees and occasional modeling jobs. But the reality is, is that I'm not focusing on getting that ~big break~ in modeling before I have kids. I'm not focusing on opening my own studio before I have kids. But I am focusing on maybe -- just maybe -- getting a book deal before I have kids. Finishing that third manuscript (which I just get such a good feeling about) before I have kids. I know that having children doesn't necessarily mean, "THE END OF ALL THE GOOD THINGS FOR YOU AS AN ADULT." But it's a goal. The same way running this year's Chicago Marathon is a goal.
So I plan on riding this bit of extra attention as I continue to plow through Manuscript #3 (which is so stupidly close to the end, but I'm at all the parts I can't rush through -- something I can talk about on a later post) and feel just a little bit better about the fact that I'm essentially the New Hampshire version of NYC Trust Fund Babies trying to "make it as a writer".
No comments:
Post a Comment