The Weight of a Name

On identity, coherence, and spare time

For years, “novelist” has been the most efficient way to explain myself. It tells people how to identify me; it answers their questions before they’ve asked.

Recently, though, “novelist” has started to feel a little heavy, as if it’s carrying more than it should—assumptions (right or wrong) of fame, momentum, and a quality of forever-ness, like this is who I will be for eternity.

Names can be useful, of course. They collapse complexity into something manageable, and once a name sticks, it saves everyone time. Conversations move more smoothly. The world knows what to do with you.

For a long time, that felt like relief.

Before I was a novelist, I was a lawyer. That name never quite fit. When I finally left it behind and became a writer, that felt less like a career change and more like alignment, like I’d finally landed inside the right outline.

I stayed there for a long time.

But I’ve started to notice how identities can quietly narrow us. Not dramatically or cruelly, just through repetition. We can become (in both the eyes of others and our own) two-dimensional.

After turning in my eleventh novel, I expected the familiar pull toward the next one to arrive on schedule. But it didn’t. That space in my heart where ambition and fire used to live was just blank.

Burnout, I told myself.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that that wasn’t it. Something more fundamental had shifted.

What if the problem wasn’t writing at all?

What if the problem was how tightly I’d learned to cling to the word “novelist”—how it’d begun to decide what I was allowed to be interested in, and what counted as worth my time?

So much of adult life is spent maintaining coherence. We keep the story intact because it’s easier, for us and for everyone else. Identities are efficient that way. They save us from having to ask, again and again, what we’re drawn to now.

But spare time does something different. It interrupts the story. It creates small pockets where nothing needs to be justified yet, and where interest can exist without a plan.

It’s a little uncomfortable not to let “novelist” be my sole identity anymore. I do want to explore other interests, but part of me wants to hold tight to “novelist” because it is safe, it is known, it is a name that means something.

However, I’m trying very hard to sit in this sense of being temporarily unplaced. I am not quitting writing; rather, I’m opening up to the potential multiplicity of me.

I don’t know yet what belongs on the other side of this feeling. I only know that loosening the grip on a name—any name—creates more room than I expected. Room to notice what still pulls at my attention when no one is asking me to explain myself.

And that feels like a worthy place to linger.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

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