About Me - Izzy Constant

If the internet had been a thing when I was born, I probably would have been labeled an indigo child. Luckily, it came later and I wasn’t. What a title to live up to!

People gave me plenty of titles to live up to, the last thing I needed was one more.

I am of the only generation to know what it was like to have a childhood before the internet and what it’s like to grow up “getting on the internet.” Hopefully that’s enough to tell you my age.

I had a tough childhood filled with things only horror movies dare talk about and yet, I still turned out to be the cycle breaker, the black sheep, the one who got the fork out. I was always so proud of that but I held onto that as my identity for far too long.

Back then I didn’t see that attaching my identity to something about them and what they did to me still gave them the power but I do see it now.

It’s taken me years to untangle the web that is me, but having finally done it - I can actually write something like this.

I was raised by my great grandmother because both of my teenage parents were ill equipped to handle having a baby. She grew up during the depression and I think her teachings made me a little bit different than most of the kids around me. Their parents were working a lot and they went home to watch TV after school. They went to the movies and the skating rink on the weekends.

I didn’t really have that type of life until my mother returned. Instead, my Nanny as I affectionately called her, gave me some of the greatest gifts I could have ever gotten.

She was an avid reader. She was rarely without a book. I learned that early on and began to mimic her as much as I could. Of course I couldn’t read, I was only two.

My Nanny could tell I was more intelligent than the average kid because I had completed all the markers and was speaking in sentences quite early on, so when I started picking up books and pretending to read them she took it as a sign to get me to the library.

My love for reading and my dreams of writing really started then.

She would take me to the library 2 or 3 times a week. She enrolled me in a reading program that she had to beg to get me into because I was too young. I was immersed into reading as a hobby before the age that most kids could even read. I read my way through the kids section, the adolescent section, and the young adults section before 4th grade.

I escaped into my books and it got me through the big feelings I had about the trauma I was enduring. Books made life ok when I was being neglected and harmed.

Once my mother decided on a man that wasn’t my alcoholic father, she told me I had to move in with them.

I was furious, but as a 10 year old I had no choice.

My mother didn’t read. Her husband made fun of “bookworms” and my interest in reading became something I only indulged in for school. They didn’t make fun of me that way.

In fact, any time I attempted to do anything artsy, crafty, or intellectual my mother said I was just trying to act “above my raising.” I know now that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her self esteem as a battered teenage mother but that doesn’t change that her pain took away my love for reading. Albeit, only temporarily.

I lived a life without reading and started to journal.

My mother decided that was threatening because she thought I was writing about her. She tore me down every time she noticed me journaling. So I stopped that too.

A couple of years later, computers became this big thing at school. We had to take computer classes and keyboarding. I was working really hard at learning keyboarding but I didn’t have a place at home to practice. I remember telling my Nanny of my woes.

She couldn’t afford a computer but she could afford a used keyboard from the thrift store.

I took it home and was so excited to practice the keyboarding skills I had learned in school. After doing about 15 minutes of typing drills, I naturally started typing a story. I typed and typed on that story for hours.

I didn’t notice dinner time had passed.

My mother’s pounding footsteps coming quickly across the trailer toward my room shook me and I felt myself get really nervous.

She swung the door open with force, as she usually did. Her eyes darted from me to the keyboard on my lap and a look of confusion flooded her face.

“What are you doing?” she spat at me. “Dinner’s cold.”

I looked down at the keyboard on my lap. Her confused look instantly made sense. She had walked in on me typing a story on a keyboard attached to thin air.

Trying not to laugh at myself, I said “practicing typing for school.”

She shrugged her shoulders and shut the door.

I wanted to celebrate. She didn’t make fun of me. She didn’t even know I had been writing. I had found a way to write my stories and express my imagination without her or her husband being able to criticize me.

I sat there on my bed and typed story after story. Novel after novel and entire series of books came out of my fingers and into that keyboard attached to nothing. Even after we got a computer in the house, I sat on my bed and typed my stories into the ether.

By the time I got to high school, I typed about 65 words per minute.

High school gave me the opportunity to get credits for writing. I wrote ads for the yearbook. I was an editor of the school paper. I took creative writing and wrote children’s books that got published and read to kids. My teacher even said, “you could be an author one day.”

I had no idea that one day I would actually make a living writing.

After several years climbing (and getting to the top) of the corporate ladder, I decided enough was enough and I would lean on the little side gig I had created - writing blogs.

I had started doing that for companies almost right out of high school. I wrote social media posts, blogs and website content on the side for a lot of people for about 7 years and then I decided it was time to quit my full time job, which I did in a way that clearly meant I wouldn’t get a reference.

And then I made a go at writing, full time.

Truthfully, I didn’t think it would work out. I was so certain it would fail that I even started a dog walking business at the same time as going “full time” with writing.

I had to move away from that dog walking business as soon as I got started because ghostwriting had become full time in a matter of weeks.

Well, more than full time. I ended up needing to hire a team and feeling like I had to force myself to write.

Writing had given me an entirely remote business and I was traveling around the US living out of a camper. I had some of the most beautiful places in the world to write but I just couldn't do it. I had turned it into a job and not a joy.

After a couple of years of feeling forced to write, I closed my last ghostwriting gig in March of 2020, just before lockdown hit.

It’s not because I don’t want to write anymore. It’s because I want to write for me and as me.

Well, I’ll still write fiction under a pen name, which I guess is kind of ghostwriting, but that’s not the point.

I write for me now.

Sure, I still make money doing it but I also have other sources of income, like farming, creating things, and energy healing so I don’t feel forced to write.

The evolution of who I am as a writer happened simultaneously with the evolution of who I am as a person. Today, I am a strong willed and overly loving human with a lot of stories to tell, both of my own and of the characters in my head.

I am a believer in compassion and empathy. I love love and love living this beautiful life. I cherish who I am today as much as who I was and who I will become.

I have a dog that is nearly as big as me and a large collection of rocks, even though I live in a small yurt.

I own more notebooks than shoes. Actually, I never really liked shoes all that much until I moved out to New Mexico. The ground here is a lot more pokey than in North Carolina, where I came from.

Someone I worked with once told me that I was cool in my own “Velma from Scooby Doo kinda way" and I will hold onto that forever.

My way of life is what most people consider “camping” but that’s how I like it. Simple.

Although my life is simple, my stories are not often that way.

I am an essayist at heart but I can’t stop writing fiction.

I often write what my friends call “think pieces” too, but I haven’t published many of them. That’s a new goal of mine. I’m trying to share my work and I hope that Vocal will be a place I can do that.

I wish I could tell you what type of writing I’ll be sharing but it will be a little bit of everything. Non-fiction, fiction, news, creative non-fiction, anything that strikes my fancy really.

One of my clients once called me a chameleon writer, and I guess he was right.