And maybe no one else is.

That is one of the stranger things about writing now. We live in a time that has made instant gratification feel not only possible but overdue. Everyone is meant to have a platform, a voice, a following, a launch plan, a pre-order strategy, a neat origin story, and some faint sense of inevitability. As though talent were a thing you could announce and then wait to be recognised for while refreshing your inbox.

It is tiring.

The internet has done something peculiar to creativity. It has flattened the distance between making a thing and demanding an audience for it. A person can write three paragraphs in the Notes app while waiting for a latte and by lunch be explaining their “author journey” beneath a professionally lit headshot. Somewhere along the line we stopped quietly becoming and started publicly debuting.

There is now a strange pressure to appear fully formed before the work itself has had a chance to grow bones.

Writers are expected to brand themselves before they have even figured out what they sound like. We are encouraged to optimise, strategise, position, cross-post, engage, convert, expand, monetise. None of these are inherently evil things. Writers have always needed readers. Artists have always needed patrons. But something about the speed and hunger of it all makes me want to gently close the laptop lid and go stare at a tree for a while.

I write the word vomit in my head and heart. I write because I can. Because I am sixty-one and, after years of raising children, surviving life, feeding people, soothing people, building things, carrying things, and being useful in every direction at once, I now have some time and attention to give to words. To meaning. To the slow business of finding out what I think by writing badly enough at first to get somewhere true.

That, to me, is the work.

Not performance. Not visibility. Not becoming a tiny content machine with a curated vulnerability schedule.

The work.

I read something recently by Cedar Jones that said the instant gratification we crave does not exist, that the success some of us think we deserve is not real, that we are not master writers or misunderstood geniuses owed recognition by a world too stupid to clap on cue. Fair enough. It went on to say we are students of a craft that goes back thousands of years, and that we must remain studious.

Also fair enough, though “studious” does sound like someone who owns nicer stationery than I do and means business about it.

Still. The point stands.

Go outside. Look at things. Shut up for five minutes and pay attention. Study bark patterns, clouds, old women at bus stops, the way someone reaches for their coat when they are angry but trying not to show it. Watch teenagers pretending not to care about each other. Watch married couples navigating supermarket aisles like long military campaigns. Watch the woman in the café stirring her tea long after the sugar dissolved because she needs the movement more than the tea.

Get off your screen long enough to remember that human beings existed before they began performing themselves into rectangles.

Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep listening. Do not assume success will mould itself to your desires as though it were your shoe size.

All true.

But I will never be the hungry young writer in a black turtleneck, smoking outside a bad apartment, drinking rough red wine in a dingy bar and eating soup as if that proves something. First of all, I do not smoke. Second, if I am wearing a turtleneck it had better be a nice one. And if I am drinking red wine and eating soup, the restaurant will also be nice. I have paid my dues in less flattering fabrics.

There is a particular mythology around writers that I seem to have missed by arriving late. The mythology insists the serious writer must suffer photogenically in youth. There should be cigarettes. Drafty rooms. At least one affair with somebody emotionally unavailable. You should be broke but intellectually radiant, surviving on coffee, lust, and literary certainty.

I arrived instead with children, grief, recipes, tax returns, mortgages, airport pickups, and enough lived experience to know that most genius is simply sustained attention wearing comfortable shoes.

Writing did not arrive for me wrapped in youth and mystique. It arrived after life. Or rather, after enough life to have something worth examining.

And perhaps that is why I do not panic the way younger writers sometimes do about whether the world is noticing quickly enough. I understand urgency in other forms now. Real urgency. Hospital corridors. Immigration paperwork. Phone calls at strange hours. Watching people you love suffer while the kettle boils anyway because somebody still wants tea.

Compared to that, publishing timelines feel almost theatrical.

Of course I would like readers. Of course I would like the work to travel. Of course I would like the book to find a home and make its way into the hands of people who need it. I am not above wanting that. I am human. I would be thrilled. I would probably become briefly unbearable in private.

But publication is not the reason I write.

I write because something in me is less noisy once I do.

Because I have stories and fragments and old griefs and ridiculous observations and the sort of memory that will not let a thing rest until I have turned it over properly. I write because I want to discover what the story is, not just what happened. I write because words are one of the few places where I feel both honest and hidden enough to keep going.

I think people sometimes misunderstand this about writing. They think writers write because they have something to say. Often we write because we are trying to figure out what the thing actually is. The page is not a performance of certainty. It is evidence of inquiry.

At least for me.

And I suspect that is partly why modern writing culture can feel so exhausting. So much of it rewards certainty. Strong takes. Clear identities. Confidence masquerading as authority. Everyone is expected to become their own publicist while simultaneously remaining emotionally accessible and algorithmically visible.

I find it all faintly grotesque.

Not the sharing itself. I love sharing work. I love readers. I love discovering a sentence written by somebody three thousand miles away and feeling instantly less alone. That remains miraculous to me.

What exhausts me is the pressure to convert every human experience into a marketable identity.

You cannot simply write anymore. You must build presence. Build audience. Build anticipation. Build community. Build a funnel, which still sounds less like literature and more like something involving industrial drainage.

Sometimes I think the internet has mistaken visibility for intimacy.

The loudest voices are not necessarily the truest ones. The most viral work is not always the work that lingers. And perhaps worst of all, many genuinely talented people are now convinced they are failures because they are not scaling at the correct speed.

What a terrible thing to do to artists.

Some of the best writing I have ever encountered lives quietly. Small readerships. Tiny magazines. Essays passed between friends. Dog-eared books bought secondhand and underlined by strangers. Sentences that altered me completely while accumulating almost no public noise whatsoever.

The internet would call these things unsuccessful.

The soul would not.

If no one ever publishes me, I will still write.

That feels important to say plainly, because so much of modern creative life is tangled up with the performance of ambition. Ambition itself is not bad. God knows women of my generation were trained to apologise for wanting anything at all. I am not pretending sainthood here. I would love the work to matter widely.

But the writing itself must remain separate from whether applause arrives.

Otherwise, the whole thing becomes too fragile to survive.

Because there will always be someone younger, sharper, more fashionable, more visible, more productive, more disciplined, more online. There will always be someone announcing a six-figure book deal while you are still trying to decide whether a paragraph works.

If your only relationship to writing is external validation, the silence will eventually kill it.

And if that is all writing ever is for me — words from my head to your eyes — then that is not nothing.

That is the work. That is the offering. That is the little bridge writing makes between one life and another.

Maybe one day these words will find the people who need them.

Maybe they already are.

Either way, I will still be here.

Not in a dirty turtleneck.

But still writing.

They know the house you live in now. The long-term marriage that feels like home. The way you take your tea. The fact that you write. The fact that you have opinions about sentence rhythm, bad behaviour, and people who say “it is what it is” as if that counts as philosophy.

They know the woman with grown children, or nearly grown children. The woman who has survived enough to stop explaining every bruise on the inside. The woman who has made a life in Scotland, by the sea, with a good man and a dogged determination to tell the truth in complete sentences.

Then there are the other friends.

The ones who knew you before you had language for any of it.

The ones who knew the girl in the short platinum pixie cut, all legs and cheekbones and nerve. The girl who was 5’9”, thin, pretty in a way that made people look twice and sometimes behave badly. Men stopped. Some women probably did too. I knew I looked different. Not better. Different. I leaned exotic, whatever that means when people say it to a young woman as if she should be grateful for being looked at like a destination.

I had modelled. I hated it. So I waited tables instead. I loved that.

That probably tells you most of what you need to know about me.

I did not want to stand still and be arranged. I would rather carry plates, dodge hands, remember orders, flirt for tips if necessary, keep moving, keep earning, keep myself useful. There is dignity in work, but there is also escape in it. You can disappear into motion. You can be too busy for anyone to ask what hurts.

Back then, we were young and silly and sometimes dangerous. Not in the glamorous way people like to pretend later. Dangerous in the actual way. We made poor choices with confidence. We drove when we should not have. We loved men who had no business being loved by anyone yet. We stayed out too late. We drank things that tasted like poor judgment and fruit syrup. We trusted the wrong rooms. We laughed too loudly. We mistook risk for freedom, which is a common mistake when you are young and nobody has taught you the bill always arrives.

I was a young single mother inside all that.

That part matters.

I could be wild, but only in sections. I always had children to get back to. I had bottles, school mornings, fevers, rent, groceries, laundry, some small person needing shoes, cereal, medicine, a ride, a lap, a mother who could still stand upright after whatever the night before had taken from her.

My friends showed up to party. They also showed up because I had a home.

That was the arrangement, though none of us would have called it that. I had children, so I had structure. Not always money. Not always peace. But structure. A fridge. A couch. A place to land. I offered refuge, which is a lovely word until you realise refuge often means everyone else gets to collapse and you get to find clean towels.

I was the one they called.

In trouble. In need. In chaos. Pregnant scares. Man trouble. Money trouble. Family trouble. Emotional trouble. The kind of trouble that arrives at midnight and does not respect whether you have to be up at six.

I had answers, or I pretended to.

Sometimes pretending is all adulthood is, especially when you become one before your time.

I knew how to call the shots because somebody had to. I knew which panic needed action and which panic needed tea. I knew when to tell someone to come over and when to tell them to go home. I knew how to sound calm while privately wondering how the hell I had become the responsible one.

I think some of them kept me included because they loved me. I think some of them kept me included because I was useful.

Both can be true.

This is one of the things age teaches you, if you let it. People can love you and still use the version of you that serves them best. They can adore your strength and still help themselves to it until you are standing there with nothing left but the reputation for being strong.

I was probably not always the first call because I had kids. I could not always go. I was tied to real life in a way some of them were not yet. But I was often the call when things went wrong.

I was the pretty girl with the couch. The one with lipstick and children. The one who could pour a drink, make a meal out of nothing, tell you the truth, find the number, hold the baby, hide the evidence, call the cab, smooth the room, make the plan.

A lot of life happens inside friendships like that.

Not neat life. Not brunch life. Not matching-jumper holiday-card life. Real life. The kind where you see each other too drunk and too heartbroken and too hopeful and too stupid. The kind where you know who took what, who slept where, who cried in the bathroom, who lied to the man, who lied to herself, who said she was fine when she had mascara down her neck and one shoe missing.

Those friends knew versions of me that no longer exist in public.

I do not wear my hair like Twiggy anymore. I do not have the body I had then. I do not enter rooms with the same kind of charge. I do not need to be seen in that old way, and I do not miss what came with it. Beauty is not free. People act like it is a gift, and in some ways it is, but it also creates a job you never applied for. You become responsible for other people’s reactions. Their envy. Their wanting. Their assumptions. Their little punishments when you do not perform correctly.

I have been the pretty girl, the single mother, the one who worked too many shifts, the one who knew what to do. I have been the one who waited tables instead of being looked at for a living. I have been the one who gathered people in and sent them back out patched up enough to continue.

Then life moved.

Marriage, maybe. More children for me. Different states. Different countries. Safer choices, eventually. A good and loving marriage. A life twenty-plus years away from that earlier version of myself, though not separate from her. She is still in here. I can feel her when I am tired. I can feel her when I am angry. I can feel her when someone assumes I became sensible because I ran out of fire.

No.

I became selective.

There is a difference.

Friendships from those early years do not always end. Sometimes they go dormant. That is the strange part. They do not break dramatically. Nobody slams a door. Nobody makes a speech. They simply recede. You miss a call, then they miss one. Someone moves. Someone marries badly. Someone stops drinking. Someone starts again. Someone’s mother gets sick. Someone’s kid needs help. Someone disappears into a relationship, or a diagnosis, or a job, or shame, or debt, or exhaustion.

Then ten years pass.

Then twenty.

And somehow you still think of them as yours.

This is the part I did not understand when I was younger. Dormant does not mean gone.

I had a good friend I lost in August of 2025.

I did not know until May of 2026.

That sentence is still hard to write.

For months, I had sent texts. Emails. Little reaching-out messages into the silence. I knew she had been caring for her mother, Dollie, who had dementia. I knew she was overwhelmed. I knew she wanted out. Not out of love, but out of the brutal daily grind of watching a parent disappear while still breathing. She had dreams. Portugal. Spain. A different life. A warmer one. A freer one. We had talked about meeting there one day, when Dollie had been put to rest and my friend could finally turn toward herself.

That was the plan.

Plans are rude like that. They stand around acting solid.

When she did not answer, I worried. Then I got irritated. Then I worried again. That is the pattern with people you love who go quiet. You try not to make it about you. Then you do. Then you scold yourself. Then you send another message.

Finally, I Googled.

There she was.

Gone.

People ask this as if the answer should be simple.

A polite little noun.

Teacher. Chef. Writer. Producer. Consultant.

Something tidy enough to hand over at a dinner table without anyone needing background material.

I usually pause.

Sometimes, trying to be clever, I say, “About what?”

Because I have worked too many jobs to answer cleanly, and I have lived long enough to distrust clean answers anyway.

My first job was at the deli counter at Ralphs grocery store on Poinsettia and Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. I was fourteen. I lied on the application and said I was sixteen, which required a forged work release slip from school and a level of confidence I would not necessarily recommend in a child, though it did get me hired.

There I learned how to tare a scale.

This felt very official.

I learned how not to cut myself, which felt more urgent. I learned that customers could be kind, rude, lonely, flirtatious, impatient, cheap, confused, entitled, grateful, or all of the above while asking for half a pound of turkey sliced thin.

I learned that people reveal themselves when food is involved.

Also, I ate a lot of delicious things I probably should not have been eating behind the counter, but childhood crime has its compensations.

After Ralphs came restaurants.

A lot of them.

Short stretches of time, different uniforms, different menus, different ways of learning the same essential truth: most people are hungrier than they admit.

I waited tables. I tended bar. I learned to carry plates, read faces, remember who had the allergy, who wanted attention, who wanted privacy, who was going to complain before they had even unfolded the napkin.

At Carelli’s on the Beach in Keawakapu Beach, Maui, I learned fine dining. Not just the food, though the food mattered. I learned timing. Pacing. The choreography of appearing exactly when needed and disappearing before you became part of someone’s evening. I learned that fine dining depends on invisible labour staying invisible.

At Dollie’s Pizza in Kahana, I tended bar. Different theatre. Different appetites. More noise. More truth. People tell bartenders things they would never tell priests, doctors, or their own mothers. Sometimes they tell you because they trust you. Sometimes because you are trapped behind a counter and cannot politely escape.

Then came Café Med on Sunset Plaza.

Great food. Beautiful room. Beautiful people. The sort of place where everyone wanted to be seen, though not necessarily known. I worked in that world of polished surfaces and private calculations, where a lunch order could contain more social strategy than a political campaign.

Bicé’s Café Med, their family restaurant, was to be my last.

Not because I had become too grand for table service.

Because an enormous oak window took one look at my hands and ended my restaurant career for me.

That injury closed a door I had not meant to close yet. People talk about career changes as if they happen over coffee, with a notebook and a dream board. Sometimes they happen because your body makes an announcement and refuses to negotiate.

Serving tables had been hard work. Brutal work, often. It hurts the feet, the back, the wrists, the temper, the faith in humanity. It also teaches you things no classroom can.

Waiting tables taught me more about life than almost any job I have ever had.

It taught me how to enter a room and know where the trouble was.

It taught me that the person paying the bill is not always the person in charge.

It taught me that generosity and money are not the same thing.

It taught me that some people say thank you as a reflex, and some say it like they understand you have actual feelings.

It taught me recovery. Drop the plate, fix the order, smooth the moment, keep moving.

It taught me that humiliation will not kill you, though it will try.

It taught me that charm is useful, but stamina pays the rent.

And while I was doing all this, I was raising children.

Sometimes with a partner.

Often not.

That sentence holds more than it looks like it holds.

I was working, mothering, driving, cooking, cleaning, worrying, calculating, getting people to school, getting myself to work, making money stretch, making dinners out of what was there, making it look as if I had a plan because children need someone in the room who appears to have read the instructions.

I had not.

Most of us have not.

We improvise and call it parenting later.

I also worked as a producer for companies like 3M and Motorola. I worked on television commercials, indie films, whatever job came next. I learned production, which is another form of service, though with more cables, worse hours, and men with clipboards who mistook proximity for management.

In restaurants, you learn that everyone wants dinner at the same time.

In production, you learn that everyone wants a miracle by Thursday.

Corporate executives do not like to appear nervous on camera, even when they are visibly terrified of their own hands. You learn how to calm people. How to make the impossible feel scheduled. How to make chaos look intentional. How to get the shot, the line, the lunch, the release form, the location, the client approval, the invoice, the edit, the final version nobody will admit they approved three versions ago.

I worked my ass off.

There is no softer way to say that.

I worked while tired. Worked while broke. Worked while raising children. Worked while starting over. Worked when the work was beneath me and when I was grateful to have it. Worked when I knew exactly what I was doing and when I was pretending just enough to get through the door and learn quickly before anyone noticed.

And through all of it, I wrote.

I have been writing actively since my early twenties. Not publicly. Not always well. Not always with confidence. But writing was there, running under everything else.

When you wait tables, you become a student of people.

When you raise children, you become a student of consequence.

When you produce video, you become a student of story, even if the story is about adhesive products, telecom systems, or a man in a suit trying not to blink under studio lights.

When you cook, you become a student of transformation.

When you teach, you become responsible for making that transformation visible to someone else.

Becoming a chef instructor in my forties was not a random pivot. It was a continuation. I had spent years feeding people, reading people, serving people, managing rooms, explaining things, fixing disasters, and making order out of mess.

Teaching food made sense.

Writing made sense too.

Both require attention.

Both require timing.

Both require knowing when to explain and when to shut up.

Both require an understanding that people come hungry for more than the thing on the plate.

Now I am sixty-plus.

People ask me, “What do you do?” and I still pause.

Partly because the world likes a current title. It wants the cleanest, most recent label. It does not want the whole messy archive. It does not want to hear about a fourteen-year-old girl at Ralphs in Hollywood learning to tare a scale under fluorescent lights. It does not want Maui, Sunset Plaza, corporate video, indie films, injuries, children, recipes, invoices, classrooms, grief, reinvention, or the private stubbornness required to keep becoming.

It wants a word.

I have never been one word.

Maybe that is the problem.

Or maybe that is the point.

What do I do?

I pay attention.

I make things.

I teach.

I write.

I feed people, one way or another.

I take everything I learned behind counters, beside tables, on sets, in kitchens, in motherhood, in recovery, in reinvention, and I use it.

After all these years, I am still working the room.