Used to Be

A few years ago (closer to a decade than I’d like to think), a couple of friends had a day off mid-week. Knowing my flexible schedule, they asked if I wanted to join for breakfast, which we did at around 9:30. We luxuriated over coffee and chilaquiles at a restaurant that on weekends came with forty-five-minute waits and crowds of people lingering by the sidewalk seating, applying a bit of pressure with every longing, judgmental glance at your still-full plate. After our forks were down, resting in congealing puddles of earthy red salsa, no one waiting to take our place, my friend looked up at me and said: “This is your life? You just get to do this?”

A sheepish smile, a tamping down of the acknowlegment of my luck, knowing that a certain amount was expected and healthy (we must count our #blessings), but too much of it was gloating. A fine line to walk, but in a relatively unburdened life, I didn’t complain about being forced on that plank.

Of course, it was hard to truly appreciate that luck, not having known much of anything else. I had a only few years of privileged struggle and aimlessness out of college before my first book deal catapulted me into this sort of indepenence, into the kind that no one would really mistake for wealth, but which can be clearly recognized as good fortune. My schedule was the open source of envy, a running joke among my friends (this same friend and I once joked about meetings, how the biggest perk of my career might have been how few I attended—though it turned out I had a rare one the very next day to which I was embarrassingly late).

Now? Now I’m stealing the moment to write these words in a rocking chair my wife uses for middle-of-the-night breastfeedings of a three-week old. He was quick to soothe, my tiny child, and since last night I had given up hope of sneaking in a writing session and gone to bed relatively early, I found myself relatively awake as the sun lightened and what sounded like an owl hooted improbably between the rumble of the train headed between the airport and downtown. So I put my infant down, hovering over his bassinet to make sure his initial squirm would not escalate, and then I grabbed my computer to write. Used to be that I was so rich in time that I gave it away freely, eagerly. I was gladly the first one to raise my hand if a friend needed a favor. I could write always write later. Start the day with all the others for a change, or, end it deep into the night. Skip one of my two midweek matinees to catch up on my word count. I slung rice bowls at my friends’ food truck and carried kegs of my friends’ beers, stood in line, handed off keys to a friend of a friend.

Now? Now I steal.

Not actually the aforementioned chilaquiles.

Somewhere in my Word or Google files, there’s a document that has a lone sentence, written in the middle of the night some time ago, borne out of writer’s block or imposter syndrom or perhaps merely the yearning for a new book deal: A moment of silence for the writer I used to be. The melodrama!

I must have written a bad chapter or something and gone scrolling through old documents looking for proof that I used to be able to do this better. I know that there have been times in the past couple book-deal-less years where I’ve second guessed my abilities. Where I’ve been critical of my prose and wondered if it still carries any sort of flair. Where, I have wondered, is the whimsy I was prone to? Where are the speculative short stories I could churn out at a moment’s notice? Have I forgotten how to weave insights into my writing, the kind that made readers find my work relatable, the kind that made my voice so clear?

Of course, what I was forgetting when I wrote that woe is me missive into the void, is that the writer I used to be longed to be better at plotting, and never thought of the economy of language, could not employ succinctness if he tried. He second-guessed his abilities just as often, scrolled through one-star reviews to self-flagellate, failed to finish fifty percent of the short stories he started.

That jerk also had the luxury of time. He had the gall of a 9 a.m alarm clock with an “alright, let’s not push it” backup at 9:15. The luxury of book deals with hardly a gap between, and of earning dollars while living in pesos. He was not yet jaded by multiple publishers promising the world and delivering two instagram posts, had already forgotten what it was like to spend months on a book only for it to be rejected.

How could I possibly be that writer again? I am not the same person anymore, nor, necessarily, would I want to be. Oh, sure, I’d love to have the time again. Would love a favorable income-to-expenses currency exchange.

But I have always professed to be a believer in change, an evangelist repeating the gospel: the only constant is change. Grasping onto the past is a fool’s instinct, fingers gripped around an unraveling rope, the other side of which is no longer even tethered to what we think we’re holding onto. We’re just holding on to the memory of what we had. An idea, always. The past is not a truth, but a story we tell ourselves.

Much better to let go and reach for something new, and not with desperation, but with tenderness. To hold the writer I am now in my arms the way I do my sons. Perhaps with a frustration that they don’t let me sleep as much as I like, or don’t say please, or poop in uncontained ways, but with love nonetheless.

I should embrace this new stage of my career as I have embraced the new stage of my life. Putting aside the things I cannot control (even if I may grumble as I do) and honoring the best part of who I used to be: someone who could appreciate the luck he had. Easier, perhaps, under the circumstances I mentioned above—9:30 chilaquiles and a deadline not quite looming in the distance, merely forecast—but now is when I get to use those muscles I developed then. Writing muscles and appreciation muscles alike.

I can appreciate being able to deftly pace out a sex scene during nap time on Monday, perhaps pivot to the goofiness of a children’s graphic novel later that night when everyone’s asleep, pitch usable ideas to my partner on a high-concept TV adaptation of a book on Tuesday when kiddo #1 is at daycare. I have hundreds more books read and movies watched under my belt than who I used to be, alongside the wisdom they brought me.

Yes, my next book might have to come via a hurried sentence typed into my phone at night, or scribbled into my notebook during my shift at the bookstore. But I am lucky, after all, to still be able to steal these moments. To have a partner with a steady income and insurance that tempers the lull between book deals. That I still have inspiration, an agent who believes in me, health.

Maybe I cannot produce a book a year with six or seven(teen) trips mixed in, but I could once, which is not necessarily something that I have lost, but something I was lucky enough to have before life changed, as it was always going to.

“Used to be” is a wonderful phrase for the purposes of nostalgia, for a brief harkening back to another life. But a more useful question to me is who am I now? What could I still be?

Maybe I am a thief now. So, what? Let me be a deft one. Let me pickpocket a book into existence. Let me concoct a literary heist around my schedule, one hand rocking the baby to sleep, the other playing with the toddler, the sleight of hand all the more impressive for my lack of available hands.