Yeah, I'm a writer... But please don't tell anyone! (Or leading a not-so-secret double life)

A while back I read a post on Roni Loren's blog about admitting you're a writer and the six stages of response you'll get from others. "Some of us choose not to say anything at all when we first start writing," she wrote. "We keep it our little secret because we're worried about what people will think and our little dream is just too fragile to be picked on at that point. Then, when we do get up enough courage to start admitting it (this sounds like AA--My name is Roni, and I'm a writer), we often brace ourselves not knowing what to expect."

When I read that, I felt like waving my hand in the air and screaming "me, me, that's me!" Yes, I'm a writer. And no, I haven't quite gotten around to admitting that...



And then you tell me the obvious. "You have a blog called An Aspiring Writer's World, you have a word-count widget, you tweet as a writer, you tweet your blog posts, you have a critique group. How on earth do you think you haven't admitted you're a writer, you big lunatic?"

I know. It sounds freakish. But here's how it works: I'm a journalist by formation, but I don't work as a journalist, and I've had a book published in Portuguese but that was a long time ago (and it wasn't a really great book). I'm Brazilian, but tweet in English, which means very few of my Brazilian friends follow me on twitter. And that means I have several groups of people in my life.

Group 1: The Brazilian friends who do tweet and notice my writing tweets. Those are a minority, mostly my journalist friends who say "omigod, I have a fancy writer friend who's writing a novel in English, that's just so awesome, I wish I were that amazingly smart!" (Okay, that's just one friend, but she does boost my ego.) The point is, these people know, and they think it's awesome.

Group 2: The Brazilian friends who do follow me on twitter, but apparently don't know how to deal with a Brazilian tweeting in English about being a writer and using a whole bunch of writer community words and abbreviations they don't know. So they just ignore that and don't make any comments.

Group 3: The Brazilian friends who have known about this MS for a while, because they have given me authorization to base some of my characters on them. Those are in on the secret, and it does come up every once in a while, but not too often.

Group 4: My "real life" people. My family, my job (those two things walk hand in hand, since I work for my family's company), my non-writer, non-journalist, non-artsy, non-tweeps and non-inspiration-for-characters friends. My family kind of knows there's a novel in the works, but they don't know much about it and they probably think what Roni Loren describes as stage 2: "What a fun hobby to keep him/her busy."

Group 5: The people who think being a writer is just so glamorous and they're always asking when the next book is coming out (the first one was published seven years ago, in Portuguese, by a small publisher, but still lots of people think this is a big deal because they could search for my name in bookstores). Those usually include my parents' friends, and I usually avoid their inquiries about my writing.

Group 6: The people who know nothing about it. To them, I'm just someone working with ISO certification and quality systems and stuff like that.

And then we move to the other side of my life, where we have...

Group 7: The English-speaking writers I know through twitter and blogging and through my critique group. The ones who know I'm a writer, who interact with me about the subject of writing, who share that other section of my life with me.

Conclusion? I lead a double life. I connect with the blogging community and, on twitterverse and the blogosphere, I feel like a writer. I can open myself up, talk about my manuscript, interact with other writers. But, somehow, it feels like another life. I know my face is there, but there's something about being a writer on social media (and in my second language) that feels like a shield. It feels like I'm one person in Portuguese, another in English. And I'm always watching my back, wondering who should be let in on my secret, who knows, how much they know.

Which is why I felt the wind knocked out of me when one of my internet-versed employees mentioned he googled me and found my blog. I freaked. Does he read it? Are people I work with watching my other personality? Will that affect my "real life"?



I don't know if many people feel like this, but I'm guessing I'm not the only one. Social media can feel like such a good shield from the real world, and long-distance friends I've never met in person give me the comfort of belonging to a community, without the pressure of having my family and friends know about this. It feels like I'm allowed to fail. Does anyone else feel that too?

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's another stage to Roni Loren's theory. There's the "I'm a (insert your real life position here) by day, writer by night and I'm not ready to deal with the pressure of putting those two together" stage. It's an exhausting one, I'll tell you. But it's the one I can't get out of right now, at least not yet.

And what's the point of this post? There isn't one. Consider it my Writers Not Quite That Anonymous introduction. And feel free to share yours.

I'm Gabriela, and I lead a double writing life. This is my story. What's yours?