Writing Diaries #12 A long-ago conversation with myself

Talks with myself helped clarify my thinking

Into 1975, I was twenty-six and worried about what I should do to earn a living. Friends who'd found their niches early on left me in awe.

Who me? A writer?

As for me, I did have a vocation, I now realize -- I wanted to be a writer -- but had discounted it as an impossible way to earn money.

I read fiction hungrily and revered authors but doubted I had the talent to write novels. Had I been savvier about the business world, I would have known there were other ways of making a living as a writer other than novelist.

I had no role models

I was raised by Italian immigrant parents, people who knew even less than I did. I had no role models to emulate. My father believed a young woman who snagged a secretarial job in a nice clean office had reached the pinnacle of success. To my dismay, they were the only jobs I could find.

A bachelor of arts wasn't enough

After completing my bachelor's degree in English literature in 1971, I entered the job market. I got caught in a revolving door of secretarial jobs I detested. Already prone to depression, these jobs did not suit me and worsened my state of mind.

When my sad, confused and frustrated heart reached a boiling point, I would sit down and write. It eased my pain and helped clarify my thinking.

Sometimes, I'd have discussions with my alter ego, as in the example below, written in 1975.

A face to face discussion with myself

Me:  I was meandering through avenues of possibilities ---

EGO:  Where were you in Paris or what? You're so pretentious.

Me:      Am I? Okay, I was thinking about my future. Here I am in my twenties and still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. For five years now I’ve been earning a pittance doing grunt work I hate for a bunch of bosses I don’t respect.

EGO:   Everybody goes through that when they’re young. You have to earn your way the ladder.

Me:      Earn my way up the ladder in a tiny jewelry factory? Or working for Bell Canada where everything is so regimented you have to get permission to go for a pee?

EGO:   If you had your wish, what would you spend you life doing?

Me:      I love to read and I love to write!

EGO:   There are industries where you need those skills?

Me:      Like what?

EGO Newspapers and magazines, for example.

Me: Oh yes, and they're going to hire little old me. I have no training or experience, except as a self-taught typist.

EGO: Do you want to keep doing work you hate?

Me: No!

EGO: So you find work with, say, a magazine, a community paper and work your way up to the job you want.

Me: Maybe I should go back to school and take some writing courses in something specific.

EGO:   Or maybe you can do both. Sounds to me like you're scared of failing.

Me: Okay, maybe I am.

EGO:  The alternative is to keep doing work that makes you miserable.

Me: What if I don't have what it takes?

EGO:  There are no guarantees, kiddo. But if you don't try, you will, for sure, consider yourself a failure.

  During the next decade, I went out and found work with a number of publishing companies but in production, not as a writer.

In 1989, fourteen years after I wrote this conversation with myself, I found a job with the Toronto Star as an editorial assistant, a type of secretary. I loved the newsroom and now had a clear goal.

I made it at last

Ten years after stepping into the Toronto Star newsroom, I earned my way up to full-fledged reporter. I loved every minute of the twenty-two years I spent working at the Toronto Star’s.

I am the author of Elvie: Girl Under Glass, a memoir about leaving Italy in the early 1950s as a child and growing up in Montreal during cultural upheaval and traumatic family turbulence.