My Walk-Up Song

“What would your walk-up song be?” I heard this question twice recently–once related to sports and once related to presenting at a national conference. I wasn’t the recipient of the question, but in both instances I knew what my answer would be–”Nada que perder” (“Nothing to Lose”) by the Mexican group Maná.

I remember listening to the pulsing beat of this song as I fell in love with my now-husband, queuing up phrases like “no hay nada que temer” (“there’s nothing to fear”) as I drove to meet him for the first time after we had been emailing each other for weeks, having met first through an online dating platform.

I remember listening to the driving guitar of the song as I worked towards reuniting with my parents after a four-year estrangement. “Yo no sé que hay en el camino / pero yo tengo que cruzar” (“I don’t know what’s on the path / but I have to cross it”).

I remember listening to the song’s inspirational lyrics as I thought about changing careers from being a full-time university professor to being an administrator at a technical college. “En mí tengo que creer” (“I must believe in myself”).

Now, I listen to it as I work towards publishing my memoir about my relationship with my dad and as I declare something I never allowed myself to declare before.

I am a writer.

“Yo sé quien yo soy” (“I know who I am”).

I have wanted to be a writer since I was around five, so before I could write. I spent my childhood starting stories, writing them out by hand and then later on an old typewriter. I wrote a couple of romance novels, even sent one out once to be considered for publication. I’ve already spoiled the end of that part of my story: it wasn’t accepted.

Still, I didn’t consider myself a writer.

I often had to put my writing “for fun” to the side during college, graduate school, and the early stages of my career. To complete my PhD in English, I wrote a book-length work–a dissertation–of over 400 pages. To earn tenure and stay employed as a university professor, I wrote and had accepted for publication numerous articles. I studied 19th-century Victorian British fiction, so I wrote articles about authors like Anne Brontё, Elizabeth Gaskell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and George Eliot.

Still, I didn’t call myself a writer.

My teaching career led me to also teach Spanish–my second undergraduate major–so I branched out and wrote articles about teaching Spanish. I wrote columns on various education topics for a few years for the publication of Phi Kappa Phi, Forum.

Somehow still, I didn’t think of myself as a writer.

Recently, I ran across a book tucked away on my bookshelves by the writer Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, called How I Came to Be a Writer. My aunt, an amazing elementary school teacher, now retired, sometimes attended national conferences where she got to hear writers like Naylor speak. She gave me this book when I was 22, about to move into graduate school, and had the book signed for me by Naylor: “To Jennifer, who is also a writer–Good luck and best wishes!!”

I remember feeling like a fraud when I read Naylor’s words, feeling bad that she had been led to believe I was something I wasn’t. A combination of that embarrassment, having given up on my dreams, and the crushing workload of graduate school kept me from reading the book then.

I read the words of Naylor’s inscription differently now so I’m glad I kept it all these years. It was time for me to read the book, to consider the unexpected and yet not surprising revelation that she too struggled as a young person to believe she had the right to dream of being a writer.

It’s time for me to believe Naylor’s inscription–to adopt, affirm, and declare my identity as a writer.

It’s time for me to publish the memoir I’ve worked on for the past 12 years.

A couple of years ago I had one of those amazing epiphanal moments, where the wisdom you’ve heard over and over again suddenly becomes tangible. I was driving to a work event on a sunny fall day, winding my way on county roads with multicolored leaves cascading down. It was one of those days when all of nature is helping to open one’s mind and heart to embracing deep insights. I was listening to Brené Brown read her book The Gifts of Imperfection and heard her say what I’ve heard many other people say—that we should stop worrying about what others think. That day, I heard it more deeply.

I’m done waiting and worrying, I thought. What do I have to lose?

Almost immediately, I heard my dad’s voice in my head: “What will people think?”

I can hear my dad yell at my mom, “What will people think?!” after some small misbehavior of mine or my sister’s in public. I can hear him tell me I couldn’t go out to the movies alone—“What would people think?!” I can hear him question 100 decisions throughout my childhood and adult life singing the same refrain.

I now know from reading his journals after his death that my dad hated this saying, one he heard from his own parents, yet he lived and repeated this phrase. This phrase and all its baggage is a part of my inheritance from my dad, an inheritance on which I keep paying taxes.

I’m done. Or at least I’m trying to be. It still took me nearly nine months after my epiphany drive- time moment to even work up the nerve to reach out to the hybrid self-publishing company I’d found to see if they would help me publish my memoir. It turns out that personal growth is as hard as they say it is and that daily life blurs our epiphanies.

I continued to let my worries control me.

If I publicly declared, “I’m a writer—here’s my book!” I just knew people would say things like “Who does she think she is? She’s not a writer. She’s terrible.” I worried that I would lose people’s respect. I worried people would think I was arrogant. I worried that since I had tried unsuccessfully to find an agent or win a contest that by finding a route to self-publish people would say that I was valuing something that no one else did, that I was deluding myself.

Over time, I kept revisiting the insight of that fall day, reminding myself that what someone else thinks of me isn’t concrete and it isn’t permanent and it doesn’t matter nearly as much as my dad thought it did. It’s just what they think. That’s all.

And I realized that at no point had I been asking myself, “What do I think of me? Who do I think I am?”

I wonder why we don’t ask ourselves that question as often. I wonder how we can help each other do so.

The truth is that in addition to all the things my circle knows about me I am also a writer. I love to struggle to put words together to create meaning, to convey my thoughts, experiences, and ideas to others in ways that provoke thought or feeling. I love revising. Ironically, I suspect most of those in my circle already know that. I think just maybe I was the last one to affirm it.

And as Maná sings and we all know, “el tiempo es corto” (“time is short”). Reading my dad’s journals after he died, seeing his dreams and fears in the rearview mirror, knowing he can’t work to fulfill or overcome them any longer, gives me courage. It helps me go forward and not just write more but put my words out there.