I Feel Like a Number<\/p>\n
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My ego was constantly challenged as\u00a0a ghostwriter \u2013 doing all the work, then stepping back and letting someone else\u00a0take the credit. Sometimes it was brutal. In 1999, one of my clients, a widely
known TV anchor, was on the David Letterman show to promote her biography that\u00a0I had penned. Her name was in the center of the cover in large lettering and\u00a0underneath, in smaller lettering, were the words \u201cwith Andrea Cagan.\u201d That was\u00a0me, the \u201cwith,\u201d the person who actually wrote the book.<\/p>\n
I was excited that I was about to\u00a0see my name on national television. Letterman and my client bantered back and\u00a0forth, she talked about the writing process (as if she knew anything about it) but\u00a0when they did a close up on the book, someone had pasted white tape over my
name. There was no \u201cwith.\u201d I didn\u2019t exist. I felt betrayed and I called her agent to complain but he said harshly, \u201cIt wasn’t her fault. Don\u2019t call her and\u00a0bother her with trivialities. She\u2019s very busy. She has a book to promote.\u201d That\u00a0was how it was back then. I was a triviality, and when a book was finished, I\u00a0had to make like a ghost and disappear. Granted, it was something I had agreed to\u00a0do, but it still stung.<\/p>\n
When I stopped ghostwriting, I wrote\u00a0two books of my own, \u201cMemoirs of a Ghost,\u201d and \u201cA Friendly Guide to Writing and
Ghostwriting.\u201d Finally I was telling my own story and I was scheduled to do\u00a0book signings in a few popular book stores \u2013 until the signings were cancelled\u00a0because of Covid. As a result, I had very few sales. I was disappointed, but it\u00a0didn’t stop me from sitting down and writing every morning. For me, it isn\u2019t about\u00a0discipline. It\u2019s just what I do, my form of meditation.<\/p>\n
During the quarantine, I considered\u00a0the things that made me who I am, my victories, my pitfalls, my mental health,\u00a0and I put them on the page. I had no particular destination for my words as I\u00a0recalled my childhood, life in the ballet, leaving my dance bubble and entering
the world at large. I wrote about friendships, relationships, and my struggle\u00a0to balance my anxiety and depression in a cock-eyed world. But what would I do\u00a0with it? My work had no real purpose. I wasn\u2019t trying to find publisher, that\u00a0wasn\u2019t my goal any longer, so who would ever read it? Why should I bother? Should\u00a0I just stop? It felt like I was writing into the wind but I kept reminding\u00a0myself of Vincent Van Gogh. I\u2019m in no way claiming to have a modicum of his talent,
but knowing that he never sold a painting and never stopped painting gave me the\u00a0courage to keep doing what I was doing.<\/p>\n
A while ago, I recognized the value\u00a0and power of my work. A friend of mine was in a great deal of emotional pain. She\u00a0was sobbing and her voice was unrecognizable. I listened and remembered my own
experience of the same kind of pain. I had written about it and I offered to\u00a0send her my stories. I thought they might help. She sent me back a note of\u00a0appreciation and told me that my words had given her strength and solace. She\u00a0realized she wasn\u2019t alone in her darkness and that things would change. When we\u00a0next spoke, she sounded like herself again. My writing had found a purpose. I\u00a0had reached one person and helped her heal. I stopped wondering where my work\u00a0was going. It would go wherever it was needed, whenever it was needed. That was\u00a0enough.<\/p>\n
Soon after my memoir became\u00a0available, I was invited to a friend\u2019s book club to discuss it. There were\u00a0about twenty women in the room and one of them asked me, \u201cHow did you tell the\u00a0truth about that abusive relationship? Doesn\u2019t it make you feel exposed?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt does,\u201d I said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u00a0wrote it. Is there a woman in this room who hasn\u2019t had a similar experience?\u201d Everyone llooked down. \u201cThat\u2019s what I thought,\u201d I said. “If I can find the courage\u00a0to speak up and tell the truth, maybe other women will find the courage, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a writer, I feel a\u00a0responsibility to say the things that other people are thinking but are afraid\u00a0to say. When we expose our secrets and the things that shame us, we have an\u00a0opportunity to heal our wounds. With a few exceptions, I believe that we can\u00a0heal just about anything if we think we can, if we remember that we are not\u00a0alone. Whatever we\u2019re feeling, other people have felt it, too, and come out the\u00a0other side.<\/p>\n
Social media has made our lives\u00a0about numbers, about knowing all the answers and becoming \u201can influencer.\u201d But who\u00a0are we influencing and for what purpose? There is another side to social media.\u00a0It can do a lot of good. We can use it to encourage and uplift others and to\u00a0feel good about ourselves. It can be much more than showing your best self to\u00a0the masses and acting like you\u2019ve never had a bad day. It can be much more than\u00a0how many followers you have. Or how you can make something go viral. Or how you\u00a0can get more DMs. I met a woman who as over a million followers but she lives\u00a0her life staring at her phone which is no life at all. When you\u2019re obsessed\u00a0with doing whatever it tales to rack up followers, it\u2019s easy to overlook the opportunity\u00a0of having such a wide platform to offer something useful. Back in 1978, folk\u00a0singer and political activist, Pete Seger wrote: \u201cI\u2019m not a number. Damn it,\u00a0I\u2019m a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter how many people\u00a0are following you. Inspiring one person to change their life for the better is\u00a0far more valuable than showing a thousand people what you ate for lunch. Whether\u00a0you\u2019re reaching five people or five thousand people, there is no end to the
good you can do if you stay focused on the right stuff.<\/p>\n
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I Feel Like a Number \u00a0 My ego was constantly challenged as\u00a0a ghostwriter \u2013 doing all the work, then stepping back and letting someone else\u00a0take the credit. Sometimes it was brutal. In 1999, one of my clients, a widelyknown TV anchor, was on the David Letterman show to promote her biography that\u00a0I had penned. Her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2378,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions\/2378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}