“Do You Have Demons?” by Andrea Whittle

 

Amelia, Andrea's cat. Yes, she has demons - she's a cat!

“Friday’d give me time, Saturday could wait, but Sunday’d be too late…”                 
 –  “Seven Days,” Sting

“I’ll do it later” – every teenager, everywhere, has said this at least once. Spoiler: they never do.

I shouldn’t throw stones, for me, it’s the height of hypocrisy, because I am a terrible procrastinator. It’s a curse. Partly ADHD – self-diagnosed, but before you scoff, try having a conversation with me.

What else inspires my procrastination? Fear of failure maybe? Hard to be sure.

I was visiting family when we found ourselves watching their still-kittenish cat rolling around on the floor, apparently playing with air. My friend studied the cat for a moment before asking (with a laconic air I’d dearly love to emulate), “Do you have demons?”

Well, yes, obviously for the cat – all cats do.

And yes, me, too. I have demons. Well, one demon.

No, I am not schizophrenic.

My demon is my narrator. Think The Wonder Years: grown-up Kevin Arnold calmly explaining to the audience what was really going on while his younger self blundered enthusiastically through life.

Unlike Kevin, however, I'm a fifty-something, grown-ass-looking adult still faking my way through life while my internal narrator placidly comments on whichever ridiculous rabbit hole has most recently caught my attention.

I’m just a girl with an iPhone, a perpetually open Notes app, and a narrator who seems convinced the bathtub is the ideal place to workshop an essay. Yes, it’s a bizarre premise, but don’t knock it. There are still people who think gummy bears and Frank’s RedHot can’t be a wonderful combination. How is a sensory deprivation bathtub writing space any stranger?

I have a bone-deep faith in the Wizard of Oz business model – hide behind a curtain and fake it! Or perhaps it’s simply this: if it looks like a writer, acts like a writer, and sounds like a writer… then, egad, it must be a writer.

For years, I comforted myself by insisting I simply wasn’t a writer. Other than an admiring English teacher or two – about as objective as your mother telling you you’re pretty – the concept of being a writer belonged to other people. My friends with agents, journal publications, and six fantasy novels – or is it seven? The closest I’d ever come was a three-year stint as a book blogger.

Ask me how pissed I am that it wasn’t my blog that gave Ice Planet Barbarians its big break, but some BookToker’s! Four years after I’d read Ice Planet Barbarian and raved about it.

Ugh.

Not to worry. Here’s my next step toward World Domination: I shall conquer BookTok, bend it toward nonfiction, essays, to be specific.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself. (Another good way to procrastinate.) Six months ago, my self-image was best described as … murky. I was the last one to know writing was my path. Even my internal narrator hadn’t caught on. She just kept talking about stuff. I was like one of those people you read about who show up with a complete tiny human being and earnestly tell people they had no idea they were pregnant.

Perhaps I assumed everyone had internal commentary on their life, the universe and everything going on inside their skull. It never occurred to me that writing any of it down might become a vocation. My entry into writing was more akin to a harassed mother finally exclaiming, "Fine, we'll go to the park NOW!"

So, I began writing without much of a destination, simply following the white rabbit – or, in this case, my demon.

When I shared this disturbing development with a friend, her advice was refreshingly straightforward: “You should take a course.”

Not just any course. Brian Henry’s “Writing Personal Stories” happened to be starting a new session just a couple of weeks later. I wasn’t entirely sold on what I assumed was the memoir aspect.

Memoirs are things people like Greta Thunberg write, not hockey moms in the middle of an existential crisis.

My pieces were certainly personal. I just wasn't convinced they were stories.

None of my bathtub recollections could reasonably be considered memoir any more than a conversation that begins, “This reminds me of this one time at band camp…” before abruptly veering into, “Did you know dolphins and whales are both cetaceans – and closely related to hippopotamuses?”

Regardless, I decided professional help was in order. One of our first exercises was to draw our childhood home, street, or neighbourhood. Brian is a delightfully flexible instructor.

We were then asked to write something inspired by it.

I wrote a confessional about the death of a neighbourhood pet.

We were witnesses, not future serial killers. Rest easy.

But it still amazes me that a rudimentary – not even remotely to scale – floor plan of my childhood home somehow unearthed the memory of a blistering summer day straight out of Cujo, complete with second-guessing ourselves over the fate of a stray cat that had somehow gone from being the neighbourhood’s pet to mine. And then died.

At the end of class, Brian outlined our homework. I’ve since dubbed it the Choose Your Own Adventure approach to creative writing.

Option one: continue the piece we’d started.

Option two: write about something else we’d discussed in class.

And if neither of those appealed?

Write whatever we wanted. Just write.

Week after week, I did.

I wrote.

I started a Substack. I researched; I read and researched some more. All the while, I kept writing.

The essays wandered drunkenly from The Three Little Pigs as an analogy for birth order to a rumination on why Prince Harry gets on my last nerve, from hockey fandom as a meditation on business practices to… well… octopuses.

Lots of octopuses. And crows.

Looking back, none of this should have surprised me.

Even in my twenties, I imagined my life revolving around books. Publishing. Editing. Marketing. Eventually, book blogging. I seemed determined to find every job adjacent to writing while avoiding the uncomfortable business of becoming a writer.

Perhaps it was lack of confidence. Or much more likely procrastination dressed up as practicality. They can look remarkably similar from the inside.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped focusing on what a writer was and simply wrote.

These days, whenever someone tells me they’d love to write someday, I hear echoes of my former self: “I’d love to write, but …

“I don’t have enough time.”

“I need another course.”

“I should read a few more books first.”

“I’m waiting until I feel like a writer.”

I understand the instinct to avoid, to procrastinate; I spent decades perfecting it. But apparently, all those hippies and yogi types were onto something:

Sometimes the doing comes first.

Being catches up.

“Later” has an uncanny habit of becoming “never.”

Andrea Whittle is a writer and market analyst with a longstanding habit of looking for patterns and asking why things work the way they do. After spending much of her career finding patterns in data, she now finds them everywhere – which is either useful for an essayist or a terrible way to get anything else done.

Her creative nonfiction combines personal narrative, cultural observation, and whatever has most recently sent her down a rabbit hole. Previous subjects have included hockey, fairy tales, Prince Harry, octopuses, crows, and the occasional existential crisis.

Andrea previously published "Do you have demons" on  The Intellectual Peacock, her weekly Substack about culture, behaviour, books, media, and the wonderfully strange business of paying attention.

See more pieces about or inspired by Brian’s retreats, workshops and classes here (and scroll down).

For more essays, short stories, and poetry by you fellow writers see here (and scroll down).

See Brian’s upcoming  weekly writing classes (including a “Writing Personal Stories” class), afternoon workshops, and wonderful writing retreats here.