Zibby Mag

By Victoria Barret

I could hear Judy’s sharp trill, loud enough that the other midmorning walkers circling Alta Plaza Park could make out her words. “You will always be a writer,” she said, pausing for effect. Judy had authority. Even her walking stride at eighty-two was long and confident.

She had been one of my father’s closest friends, my adopted “Aunt Judy.” When I was a teenager, we went to her Mediterranean condo for home-cooked meals; she taught me how to press parsley leaves into potato wedges and pan-fry salmon, a fill-in for the mother I had lost years before. She was an author of several corporate books and a highly-paid speaker. I wanted her success and life knowledge to rub off on me.

That morning, I bristled as I nodded. Sure, always a writer.

Being a writer meant writing, and I had abruptly stopped the day I packed up a box of a decade’s worth of notebooks, a fancy stapler, and magazine back issues from my Forbes office in downtown San Francisco. I was pregnant with our third son and tired of writing, frustrated with the industry in which I had spent my entire career.

What if I didn’t want to be a writer? Wasn’t that freeing?

“If you can write, someone will hire you,” my father had told me when I turned sixteen. My two-door Honda Accord came with the understanding that I would get a job at our town newspaper. He had been a writer for Fortune. His mother, widowed when he was just two years old, carried them through the Depression writing radio ad copy. There was security and heritage in writing.

I was willing to write, and I see now that I loved the ego of it more than the process: my name in bold print below article headlines in Business Week, TIME, and Forbes, and the access that came with being a reporter.

It took the isolation of those early pandemic weeks to bring me back to the page. My sons were finally all school age, and seeing them learning in classes full of Brady Bunch Zoom kids sparked my interest in doing the same. I enrolled in a Stanford memoir writing class and started thinking in stories and words and rhythm.

The part of me that wanted to speed through the process to get to the glimmering outcome had dimmed. I was finally writing for myself, to see where the words might take me.

Being a writer meant writing, and I had abruptly stopped the day I packed up a box of a decade’s worth of notebooks, a fancy stapler, and magazine back issues from my Forbes office in downtown San Francisco.

It is a difficult thing to find the balance in writing between flow and the inner critic who wants to protect my ego with her lashings. She is sometimes quite useful to me, catching logical gaps and enjoying looking up words to understand their nuances. She is also suffocating, telling me it’s “too precious,” echoing voices of my past. She tells me my friends are probably happier because they don’t spend their predawn mornings pecking away at a keyboard. With no clear goal, she might add. More of a hobby than a job, you know? Try gardening!

I have listened to Dani Shapiro’s classic Still Writing too many times to count, sometimes starting in random chapters, as if this randomness is really fate, and the chapter I land on is the one I need to hear to get to the next place in my writing. Wherever that is.

In her soothing voice, Shapiro assures me that writing is an imperfect undertaking, that it does take courage and discipline. She reminds me: “There is joy—rather than industry—in putting pen to paper. A sense of possibility, discovery.”

I am in two vibrant writing groups, one that came from the Stanford class none of us can remember the name of, and another from a writing retreat. We meet over Zoom. Their stories have brought me to tears and have shaped my view of the essential things—love, grief, family, growth. Most of all, their work encourages my own.

What began as a rigid routine—writing in the calm stillness of the morning, with a strong coffee, before my three boys got up—has loosened. Now I write when I can, and I tell myself it’s okay if it’s twenty minutes or an hour. Just do the thing.

In line at Walgreens recently, I noticed a fellow mom clutching seven bottles of Diet Coke. “Back to work after a sabbatical,” she said. I smiled and we talked about her new startup job. “You still writing?” she asked. Own it, you are. You do this every day. You write.

“Yeah, I am.” Gulp. Why is that so hard to say?

I admire how others choose their words: how they are strung together, the gaps between them, the things that are not written but implied and how artful that is. Books, audiobooks, newsletters, blogs, these are the spaces I seek out—comfort, explanation, perspective, beauty, mood, and empathy I would not otherwise find.

That’s how I am finding the courage to call myself a writer.

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Victoria Barret lives in the Bay Area with her husband and three sons. She spent over a decade as a business journalist at Forbes Magazine writing about entrepreneurs, innovation, and education. She also was a guest debating business and personal finance topics on the weekly television show, Forbes on Fox. She is currently working on a book about loss, renewal, and the stories we tell ourselves about where we came from.