By Allison Kirkland
As a teenager I lulled myself to sleep with fantasies of a literary life. Lying in my white four-poster bed, I’d stare at the ceiling and imagine myself other places:
On glamorous vacations with other writers, feeling like part of the club.
Giving keynote speeches at universities, followed by parties with free-flowing wine and copious cheeses.
Being told I was genius, that I’d written a great American work of art, that I’d changed the world.
Back to reality: In 2023 I began sharing an office at a co-working space Mondays and Thursdays, which means that for the past year, those are my writing days.
So on Mondays and Thursdays I stuff my laptop and my lunch in my backpack and grab a piece of chocolate if I can find one. I drive to my co-working space, open the door to my office, set out my laptop. Hearing that office door shut behind me cranks my brain on—suddenly, I’m back in the manuscript. I write new words. I erase some of them. I build new paragraphs, and sometimes re-arrange them. I get up to stretch. I break for lunch.
I write for an hour; longer if I can squeeze it in and the words are flowing. It’s an absolute luxury—two full mornings to write, every week. It’s also a lot of solitary work, a far cry from the literary parties and conferences that I imagined as a teenager. Forget changing the world; I’m barely in the world these days! Just me and a computer, week after week, showing up and doing the work.
First I wrote 100 words in that little office, then I wrote 1,000 words. Soon I’d written 5,000 words. Then 15,000. I watched the word count climb. 20,000 words. Bird by bird, as Anne Lamott so famously says.
This month I hit a milestone: 33,000 words. Most memoirs average 60,000-75,000 words, so I’ve hit the halfway mark, more or less.
***
About a year into this process I saw a tweet that haunted me: Your writing might not change the world but it will change you and that’s enough.
No! — was my first thought. I have to change the world. That belief had sustained me through pages and pages I’d crafted alone every single week for the past year.
If I wasn’t going to change the world, what were those hours worth? I’d been sitting alone in my office, tangling with old memories, blowing off friends and being the opposite of who I’d been for many years: someone who didn’t take her own work that seriously. If I didn’t change the discourse, and change the minds of millions, why was I even writing?
I screenshotted the tweet. I wanted to remember it, to see if it was true. It seemed like something people would say to make themselves feel better when their original dreams didn’t pan out.
Now, looking over my 33,000 words, I have another thought: Why was I valuing everyone else above myself? Did I matter so little?
***
When I started this memoir, I had a million ideas for what the finished book would look like. I wanted it to say a certain thing about what it means to be human. To be done by a certain time. To be acquired by a certain publishing company, with a certain agent.
I had a million ideas for how this book might change the world: it would show people that ableism was real, it would right some wrongs, it would become a part of the canon of disability writing.
And I hold these desires close to my heart, because marginalized people write to take back power where they’ve had little; to light a path for others who’ve had similar experiences.
But here’s what I’m left with now: all of this thinking, and still I hadn’t given any thought to what I might look like when the book was finished.
I am not the same person even halfway through this manuscript, and I still have miles to go.
I didn’t start writing this memoir for personal growth. That seemed like the opposite of literary. I wanted recognition, the opportunity to change the world.
You can roll your eyes when I tell you that I’ve gotten so much more. I’ve found delight and confidence in learning to put my experience down on paper. I’ve found satisfaction in seeing the work grow. I’ve found compassion for my younger self, a better understanding of choices I made in the past that didn’t make sense to me at the time. I’ve found that I am not who I thought I was: I’m someone who takes her work seriously. I’m someone who can delay gratification. I am someone who belongs.
It’s true what they say—the work we make, remakes us.
And I guess I still want to change the world a little bit. Because I can’t stop thinking about the kind of world we might create if everybody knew they were worthy of taking Monday and Thursday mornings to put their life down on paper—just for themselves.
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Allison Kirkland holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and leads writing workshops online and in Durham, North Carolina. Her publications include personal essays, interviews and arts journalism, and her work has received support from the Norman Mailer Center and the North Carolina Arts Council. Subscribe to her Substack about creativity and the writing life, the intangibles .
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