Ready?

The phrase is “real life.”

“I can’t write/podcast/draw/compose because real life gets in the way.”

We’ve equated “real” to mean “mundane” and “boring” and “necessary.”

People. This is your real life. This creative outlet is what your soul is screaming for, and probably has been for years. I remember high school, I remember grade school, accepting that writing will always be a part of me, and I could either nurture it and write, or not write and feel hollow. And that indeed came true: when I stopped writing after college, I felt hollow. I always felt like “writer” was a part of me, something internal, ingrained, as encoded into my DNA as gender or race. It’s what I was, I just wasn’t doing it. I dreamed. I fretted. I identified falsely with this concept of being something without doing the thing that something involved. I wasn’t keeping up my end of the bargain. I wasn’t allowed to have the title if I didn’t do the work, no matter how deep I felt it.

It was not a real life I was leading. It was missing something vastly important.

Sure, I was happy and responsible. I had a husband, a daughter, a house. I had, for a while, a job that was tons of fun. I paid bills, played computer games, was a geek deeply invested in the brilliance and the mistakes of Babylon 5. But there was still a rather large hole in my life. I wasn’t writing, and therefore my real life wasn’t complete.

Yes, I understand that family responsibilities, job requirements, health issues, they all get in the way of the creative process. It happens to everyone.

But by all the gods who visit Thor for tea, don’t you call that your real life, as if writing is a pipe dream, because it’s not. That kind of thinking, that writing is something you’ll do when all the “real” stuff is taken care of, is bull paddies.*

Writing is as real as anything in your life, and probably more real than most things.** So stop calling that other stuff “real life.” Yeah, things get in the way, but dangit, if you never think of your writing as real, how are you going to actually make it real?

*(sometimes I wish I didn’t have a clean blog. I’m mad enough to swear here. Ah well. I can swear on my other blog.)

**(Look for an upcoming post on media, that will be very tough for me to write.)