On coffee shops and self-doubt

An aspect of being a parent they don’t warn you about is the awkwardly timed appointments. Drop-off a child at x time, but there’s not enough time before y meeting to go home and too much time to show up early and stare at the wall in some lobby. Normally, I am more than happy to sit in my car and read a book, but circumstances this morning had me skip breakfast.

To remedy this, I decided to wile away the time in a coffee shop, whose name starts with ‘s’ and ends in ‘tarbucks.’ Living in the PNW, these are on just about every corner. And I am risking the revocation of my state citizenship by confessing I do not drink coffee, for both personal and gustatory reasons. So, I order a peppermint hot chocolate and munch a croissant in semi-solitude listening to the comforting hiss of milk steamers.

This is not my usual hang. I know writing and coffee/tea are portrayed as inseparable, along with knitted scarves and emotional anguish. Even though this particular store is mostly empty this morning, I have no desire to linger and use the ambiance to fuel my creativity.­­ It’s distracting and exposed and I hate it. This attitude makes me jokingly wonder: If I don’t like coffee and/or coffee shops, am I even a real writer?

Then I seriously wonder: Am I real writer? With more anxiety, this time: What am I thinking, self-publishing and doing this marketing thing and there’s no way people are actually interested in reading my rambling, self-deprecating rants?

Then, I throttle that inner critic and shove them back down where they belong: in the id, or the subconscious, or whatever it is. The critic can go to h-e-double-hockey-sticks because I am a real writer. I have a book you can buy on amazon. People I don’t know have read it and written reviews. I have a business license, a writing-only laptop, seventy-five notebooks, and cats who step on my keyboard. The last two are obviously not necessities, but they certainly add to the ambiance.

And I remined myself, with growing surety after every repetition, that I am a writer because I write things. Whether it’s blog posts or articles, PI proposals or flash fiction, I write because I love it. I will keep writing because I love it. If I never get widely known and have a tiny following, I am still a writer.

I write because I have stories to tell, stories too big to stay trammeled in my head. I have characters who are funny or tragic or obnoxious and they need to get out and breathe and stretch. They have stupid choices to make and the consequences to shoulder.

I am a writer because I choose to be. And my inner critic can stuff it.