— From Writers Weekly, 2001

I'm a Writer, Thanks to a Brain Tumor

I'm constantly intrigued by the many paths writers plod in previous lifetimes. For example, I became a freelance writer thanks to a brain tumor. Let me explain.

In 1985 I was a card-carrying Peter Pan thinly disguised as a hard-drinking bartender. Responsibility was not my strong suit.

The tumor introduced itself during a poker game, blinding and paralyzing me. Suddenly the lights went out, and I went facedown on the tabletop like a puppet with its strings cut.

As my face pressed against the Formica, I remember thinking, "So this is how it happens. I'm having a stroke; I'm dying." Not the way I pictured the end. And it wasn't -- the end, or a stroke. So much for the good news. The bad news, somberly announced at the local hospital: a brain tumor. "Bigger than a golf ball," is how the neurosurgeon described it.

After six months, six surgeries, spinal meningitis, and several close calls, I emerged damaged, shaken, but to my surprise, alive. Next, a rehab program.

A year or so later I was healthy enough to...to what? My sister summed it up nicely, "Let's see," she said one day as we discussed my future, "you're disabled, flunked out of college, no marketable skills..." She paused as we both pondered that resume. "Maybe you should take some classes at the junior college. See how you do." And that, in a nutshell, is how I found myself waiting to register while wondering if I was too old or too damaged to do something with my life. I got in, of course — junior colleges admit anybody with a pulse.

For a freelance writing course assignment I submitted an essay about my brain tumor experience to a magazine. It seemed to me the rejection letter arrived the next day. Crushed, I didn't submit another thing for a decade. Not until a dissertation drove me to it. Penning nothing but academic prose provokes even the most stable individuals to commit irrational acts. I submitted another essay about my brain tumor experience. It was published.

I'll never forget the first time I saw that published essay. It felt like I was fourteen again and I had just sighted the girl of my dreams. Naturally, along the way I've accumulated a stack of rejection letters thicker than a New York City phone book. But after reading an interview with a successful writer who revealed how many rejections he accumulated, I realized it goes with the territory. If it were easy, a sage friend observed, everybody would be a published writer.

Of course another benefit of selling something I'd written proved to be getting paid. For someone who'd only written for college grades this was a novel experience. And although I often take less exciting writing gigs -- like writing for a medical encyclopedia, I often get paid to write about something I want to write about. And that's like giving an eleven-year-old boy money to play baseball.

It's been an interesting and rewarding journey. But whenever I'm congratulated for my accomplishments it reminds me that for someone whose brain's been fondled more than my mother handled the Sunday meatloaf, I'd probably still be tending bar if hadn't been for that brain tumor.

If there's a message in my story for other aspiring writers, it's probably this: Don't give up your writing dreams, but develop dependable writing assignments to pay the bills. And I can't stress this enough: persistence pays.

Bill Asenjo completed his PhD at the University of Iowa in 2001. A certified rehabilitation counselor, he consults for a healthcare management company to supplement his true love: writing. Contact Bill: basenjo@avalon.net; visit Bill's web site at www.consideration.org/asenjo/.

© 2009 Bill Asenjo

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