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I got the latest edition of my adult report card from the federal government the other day. It’s officially titled “Your Social Security Statement” and purports to tell me how many retirement dollars I’ll be entitled to when I take up lawn bowling fulltime, but it makes me feel just like my public school report cards used to.

No — it makes me feel worse than that, because I always had pretty good report cards when I was a kid. As a natural-born (or involuntary, depending on how you look at it) writer, I looked forward to essay questions on tests like they were desserts, knowing I could verbally embroider my way around most of the gaps in my hard knowledge. Math and science were always challenging, but I substituted essays for equations whenever possible. I fondly remember a college biology test where I tried to make up for lots of guessing at multiple-choice questions with an extended, flowery meditation on the extra-credit “thought” challenge that ended the test, resulting in a memorable trophy of my truncated higher education. The test came back marked with a “B-” and a happy face accompanied by the instructor’s remark, “Nice try, Hemingway.” Maybe she thought she saw through me, but I was pretty sure my rhetorical Hail-Mary had saved me from a ghastly “C” nonetheless.

Over thirty years and countless embroidered essays later, I see that the anonymous arbiters of my lifetime achievement marks are not so easily fooled. The Social Security Administration doesn’t hand out letter grades, they just tell you what your taxable income has been for every year you reported to the IRS. The ghost of every April 15th you’ve tried to forget is resurrected in cold black and white — and for a career freelance writer, it’s a chilling experience indeed.

They say that most folks are more reluctant to reveal their financial secrets than their dankest sexual intimacies, but I’ve been in the soul-baring business so long I have hardly any discretion left. So here goes. Since 1972 when I entered the work force as a college cafeteria floor-mopper, through the last reported year of 2004, I made a grand total of about $244,000. Including a peak year when I earned almost $50,000 and no less than seven years when I was in the hole on my profit-and-loss statements — two of them in my first four years as an independent publisher — I averaged an annual taxable income of $7400. While I was variously employed in the early years as a sandwich-maker, faux-French waiter, horse-jump builder, and typesetter, I owe much of my earnings record to the lifelong attempt to “make it” as a writer.

I don’t have a reliable conversion scale, but given my middle-class origins and the earning potential indicated by all those good grades in school, I have the awful feeling that I haven’t scraped by with a “B-” on this cumulative earnings exam. I’m afraid I’m looking at a “D.” And I’m sure glad I don’t have to get this particular report card signed by my parents.

Of course, I am not so materialistic that I gauge my success solely in terms of dollars earned (or not). I am reasonably certain that my magazine writing and book authorship over the last fifteen years have positively influenced the lives of thousands, and I’ve received at least a couple hundred letters attesting to such influence. I fondly remember the letter from a retired, 98-year-old psychiatrist expressing gratefulness that his psychiatrist had given him a copy of my volume A Little Book of Forgiveness. I wrote him back with the suggestion that when he hit 100, he really ought to get a reprieve from therapy!

Then there was the charming and articulate essay from a fifteen-year-old girl who had read my Book of Practical Faith and had a few points to add that she thought I’d missed. (I had.) When I rewarded her with a free copy of my forgiveness title, she wrote back on Hello Kitty stationery to say, “Thank you for that other book. It is not as good as the first one.”

That memory still brings tears to my eyes, but not like the letter from a college coed who wrote to tell me that a counselor had given her my work on forgiveness while she was suicidal, following a brutal rape in her senior year of high school. Were it not for my book, she said, she was quite certain she would be in her grave instead of her first dorm room.

Doesn’t that kind of success make up for all the struggles of staying afloat as an independent writer? Well, yes and no. I have found that the warm feelings I get from such correspondence have a way of fading to black when I face cold and unforgiving documents like utility bills, credit card statements, and my Social Security report card. I don’t know how many times I have gone over all my financial documents to conclude “This is not working” — and then, because I am a born involuntary writer, I am soon back to work on the next article, the next poem, or the next potentially lucrative feature for my literary website.

But I am hardly alone in such madness. Shortly after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the New York Times reported on a hardy band of native writers in Kabul who, in the midst of the near-total destruction of their city and their culture, were meeting to read poems and come up with ways to fund their own literary magazine. Separated by half a world and unfathomable differences of experience, I knew we were nonetheless in the same club, and I found myself wishing them success even as I took a new, more charitable look at my own.

I wonder if there is anyone who is utterly free of worrying about and attempting to measure their success — or if it is an anxiety whose genetic encoding is as sure and undeniable as the will to survive itself. I know where my particular flavor of success anxiety comes from, because it owes a lot to the person who paid the most attention to my childhood report cards. My mother suffered with what psychiatrists call “projective identification syndrome,” and it was my identity upon which she chose to project a lot of her frustrated desire to be a writer. While I owe her my literary foundation — I tackled and conquered the unabridged Moby Dick at age nine, due largely to her coaching — I also owe to her a knee-jerk tendency to appraise whatever success I am having at a particular moment as not enough.

Almost until the day she died, my mom had a penchant for calling me up to discuss the latest six-figure advance granted to some author whom she had read about in the newspaper. Every story had an uncannily similar denouement: “Well, you know they told him he’d never be able to do it, but he just sat down and wrote that book and now they’ve given him half a million dollars for it!” I could never be sure if it was the same “they” who first discouraged and then paid off the latest lucky writer, but her point was made nonetheless.

The fact that her literary tastes declined over the years didn’t help. I remember with special distaste her Dean Koontz phase, when she would call to tell me what his latest advance was, or how much he had made by selling the film rights to one of his horrific yarns. “But Mom,” I always wanted to answer, “he’s the literary equivalent of Satan!” My actual response was always something like “So how’s the weather back there, anyway?”

 

At any rate, I do have a valuable life lesson to impart on this subject: If one is going to play the tortuous game of measuring success, the key to happiness lies in choosing the right scale of comparison. After receiving my discouraging marks from the Social Security Administration, I set out to research just where my earnings total might fall on a relevant scale. On the Web I first searched data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which yielded the general rule of thumb that your typical college-graduate professional, gender unspecified, earns a mean average of $50,000 a year.

Well, I could easily dismiss myself from that punishing scale, as I didn’t finish college and there’s so much about me that’s not typical. Then I ran across the average salary for a newspaper staff writer — $26,000 — and felt a little better. But that’s still not me, I thought. Finally, I found a sense of belonging in a report on writers’ incomes compiled by Nancy DuVergne Smith for the National Writers Union. Gravely noting that magazines’ payments to freelance writers have declined by fifty percent in real dollars since the 1960s, Smith went on to break down writers’ incomes in several categories, including “Full Time Small Press Magazine Writers.” (Yep, that’s my club, even if I never meant to end up with this lifetime membership.)

And it was in those statistics where I finally found some news that was startling, disheartening, and encouraging all at once. My fellow club members earn the least of anyone from writing — “52 percent earn less than $6,000 and the median is $4000.” Well then! Compared to a group mean of $4000, my lifetime yearly average of $7400 doesn’t look so bad after all. One could almost call it an unqualified success.

That’s why I’m thinking of calling home and saying, “Hey Dad, wanna sign my report card?” Even if he doesn’t, we can always talk about the weather.

 

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