Me, Myself, and the Gourd Who Said I’d Never Be a Writer

The one in control might not be who you think.

In my mid-50s, I moved to Vermont, hired a life wizard, and quit a 30-year marketing career. My career reinvention turned into a menopausal, midlife reckoning with what might have been and what’s yet to be. The following is excerpted from my memoir in progress.

Cathy, meet Cathy

While Diane, the Life Wizard I’d hired to help me change careers, talked, I hunched over my keyboard, tight mouth, and tight shoulders, multitasking instead of listening.

I scanned through the red paint spill of unread emails that had come in while I was eating dinner—fire drills and FYIs, requests for images and messages to review, a razzle-dazzle of PowerPoints to create. My job was some combination of air traffic controller, librarian, and serf.

The packaging for my new watch was scattered across the desk. Among the items on my before-I-quit list was spending the employee awards points I’d been banking since they started the program. I’d selected a Garmin watch. I could track everything. Surely, the data would ensure I’d meet my weight loss, hydration, and mountain climbing goals—if only I could figure out the buttons.

“It’s like there are two versions of you,” Diane said. “One is all action and accomplishment, and the other one is passive, afraid to move forward, suffocating.”

“Corporate Cathy and Creative Cathy,” I said. The words sounded as awkward as I felt talking about my inner workings.

“Yes!” Diane said. “The part of you that is at home in Vermont and content is still aspirational and ill-defined, while the corporate version gets 99% of the praise.”

“Well, she does do 99% of the work,” I said, defending the persona that had grown around me like the invasive grapevines I pulled off the stone wall in the backyard—tangled and attached to every passive thing.

En Garde

Despite all the leaning in and getting shit done, I’d been counting the days since I started this job. With every new opportunity, I refereed the dueling devils on my shoulders. “You should do this!” “You could do that!” I wouldn’t take sides.

Corporate Cathy had something to offer, and her value was affirmed by paychecks and shiny objects. She was also a mother, a partner, a daughter, a sister, a friend. She cherished these roles, and because, finally, in midlife, she had the means (say it, the money), she could at last be steady; she could provide and spoil. She could splurge or at least try to keep up. Pull that persona away, and what’s left is gasping for air.

In 2018, some 30 years into my career, I was failing at my job for the first time. Worse, I had no confidence I could make the new life I’d built stand the test of time—rural Vermont, Felix, a dog? I didn’t have chickens or a garden. Was I committed or playing out a childhood fantasy? And this notion of becoming a writer, what I’d convinced myself I was meant to be? Who was I kidding?

I said all this to Diane, concluding, “I want to write, but I don’t.”

Diane parried, “Why do you think you need to be perfect?” She’d asked me to write letters to myself from the future and then to write a story from my saboteur’s perspective as homework. “The point of those assignments was to explore without accomplishment. Those pages you sent me were overwrought—overwritten.”

Touché. Diane’s comment was one in a long line of confirmations that I’d never be a writer.

A writer writes

That’s what the bookstore clerk said to me. I was about forty at the time. After my second divorce, as a single mother of teenagers in the early 2000s, my Saturday night out was a trip to Barnes & Noble. I’d swipe on some mascara and lip gloss, just in case I grazed fingers with the next Mr. Right over the new release table.

En Garde!

On one such evening, I brought a short stack of CDs and books to the register. The man behind the raised counter was about my age, jaundiced, and bent over with rounded edges—he looked like a butternut squash.

He scanned the CDs and then stopped to look at the book on writing craft—its name escapes me. As he turned the book over, he looked down at me and said, “You know what they say? A writer writes.”

I’m sure I gave a little laugh because that’s what we gals were taught to do when men explained things to us—humor, flatter, agree.

I did not open the book that night, though, and can’t find it now. The point is, it wasn’t hard to find reasons not to write—not to believe. Sometimes, all it took was a condescending remark made by a gourd.

“How can you ever be sure what you’re meant to do?” I asked the Wizard.

“If you want to write, you will write, but give yourself a break. You’ve put so much energy into wrapping yourself in your job,” she said, “it feels impossible to unwind.”

The thought of quitting my job without a solid plan tangled my nerves and left me lightheaded. I could hear Felix downstairs, banking the woodstove, brushing his teeth. It was after nine o’clock.

“I just want to move forward,” I sighed.

Diane was right, though. More and more, the two pieces of me were operating out of balance. Corporate Cathy kept flexing her muscles, but—even though I didn’t quite believe in her yet, Creative Cathy had always been marrow, producing the red blood cells essential to breathing.

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Thanks for reading!

Work hard. Be Brave. Believe.

Catherine