For as long as I’ve known him—and it’s been nearly two decades—one of my friends insists on introducing me in the following way:
“This is my friend Taylor—he’s a writer.”
I find this introduction both flattering and mildly embarrassing at the same time.
“Well, sort of,” I offer. “He’s being generous with that word writer. I work in marketing, so I write things for work. I’m not really a writer.”
The exchange has always left me deflated, a little kid holding a burst balloon with one hand and a needle in the other, unsure what led me to do it. Why do I continue to blow up this kind, generous, and—arguably—sort of accurate introduction with my ham-handed realism? I mean, I may not be a published novelist, but it is true that I more or less write for a living.
A few years ago, I stumbled on a Cary Grant quote that illuminated something about this exchange to me:
To play yourself—your true self—is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They’re playing themselves…but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one. (emphasis mine)
That bold section there? That was the heart of my concern—that this image of me as a writer was wrong, and that it was up to me to correct it.
But the reality was more complicated: in rejecting my friend’s description of me as a writer (which the presence of this blog alone should counter), I assumed another image, that of the willing self-deprecate, he who self-imposes criticism.
The Grant quote reminded me of something else, too: how I used to answer that most cocktail-party of conversation starters: So, what do you do?
For the first four years I worked in the A/E/C world, I answered in the following fashion:
“Oh! Me? Well…I work at an architecture firm, but I’m not an architect.”
There was more to it, of course—an overview of the RFP/Q process, perhaps—but that was always how it began. When asked what I did for a living, I replied with what I did not do. To a stranger, my response might have sounded like this:
“Oh! Me? Well, I work with a group of people who do something that many consider interesting or admirable, but I don’t do what they do.”
After overhearing this exchange several times, my wife finally called me on it.
“You have to stop answering the question that way. You sound a little sorry for yourself,” she said. “It sounds like you wish you were an architect.”
“But I don’t!”
“That’s not how it sounds when you talk about your job, though.”
And she was right—my answer smacked of jealousy and, worse, a jealousy I didn’t actually feel.
So I dropped it. No more wry self-effacement as a lead-in. When the question comes now, I cut straight to it: “I lead marketing efforts for an architecture firm.” No more shame clouding my answer, because—honestly—I love my job and the work it entails. I don’t sit around moping that I’m not an architect.
More to the point, it now feels like, as Cary Grant would put it, I’m “playing myself” in these conversations. And, the next time my friend introduces me as a writer, I will gladly accept the introduction, because it’s true—maybe not in the way that some would see it, but it’s true to me.
Taylor Coe 