So This Is A Midlife Crisis, Cool

The writer I was supposed to be, and the one I was meant to be instead.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.

I take all these photos myself, but I assume that’s obvious.

There are days I want to quit everything I’m doing and everything I’ve ever tried to change in the world, cocoon myself inside my 120-year-old New Orleans house and butterfly into the kind of writer I thought I’d be by now. As a kid I always assumed I’d write novels, because all I ever read were novels. My personality was almost entirely Judy Blume’s fault. In the fluorescently lit reality of adulthood, my disdain for the tedium of world building and character development together with a talent that’s best expressed when I’m fucking livid have come together to form an essayist, and a pretty literal one at that.

There was a time this made me feel like a joke, almost like I wasn’t a writer at all, because I never did anything “important.” (Singlefam, take this with a grain of salt, I know what I’ve done, I’m quite proud of it, and of us.) My entire career as writer has been marked by professional rejection one moment and prestigious bylines/book announcements by people kind of just like me in the next. Is life kidding? Why has the writer club never opened a door for me, or cracked a goddamned window—I’d settle for it. Then, as if on cue, I start to circle the drain of self doubt, I take “hard looks” at my talent and realize it’s probably not on par with other people’s. This is followed swiftly by me returning to myself and remembering that my writing ability is my very favorite thing. It has always, and will always be enough for me, absent the framed New York Times cutouts and book deals and best-seller celebrations and fear that even as you read this, you—a subscriber—are sick of my shit. Whatever I am, as I am, has a place in the world, no matter how much people with power and budgets “don’t see a market.” I think I chose to write about it today because you have a place in the world, too.