Wheels, sky, fantasy

Recently, I won a writing contest. It was a shock, to say the least, and I still can’t believe it. I entered on a whim, at the insistence of a close friend who is also a writer. I thought of the exercise as a means of simply finishing the essay, something I struggle to do. “At the very least,” I told her, “This will force me to make the final revisions, and that alone will be worth it.” The deadline was fast approaching, and I spent two days reading over various drafts from previous years, mentors’ comments, and my own scribbled margin notes, replete with red X’s and furious WTF’s and question marks. I am a harsh critic of my own writing. When I found out I was a finalist, I was ecstatic, thrilled with making it this far. This was enough, I declared to myself and others, and I meant it. I also reread the essay, found all kinds of new “problems” with it, and felt quite certain such a flawed thing would never win a contest. Hence the shock when a month later, I found out that it did.

The essay began as an idea—an obsession, really—with skydiving. Something I’d once sworn never to be stupid enough to do, but, when confined to a tiny bedroom with cotton sheets for walls in a basement in southwest Atlanta, I found myself utterly enchanted with the idea. Suddenly, it seemed my life could not move forward unless I mustered the courage (and madness?) to jump from an airplane, hinged to a stranger with metal and nylon. I was living in a (very cheap) AirBnB (did the sheets-for-walls give that away?) looking for a very cheap apartment in the city I’d just moved to while I worked as a cashier in a smoothie shop. My life, it seemed, was circling come kind of drain. I’d left my career as a teacher and the city I’d lived in for five years to “start over”, imagining my resume would be enough to get me some kind of decent job in a city with a growing job market. But, it was not.

Somehow, skydiving felt like it could rectify the massive imbalance in my life. After all, it seemed like all of my fears were doing their best to shrink my existence to the size of a pea. Finding more courage, I reasoned, would force things back open, would allow for expansion, growth, some kind of forward movement. I won’t spoil it for you, you can read the essay if you so wish sometime later this week, once it’s published (I’ll share the link!)

But I did jump, of course; there wouldn’t be an essay had I not. And I suppose that’s what I feel like writing about here: how my life was before that jump, even after it, for a while, how it is now, and how those changes have allowed me to sit down and make creative work, finally, and to finish it.

In my early twenties, I wanted my life to be beautiful, perfect even. I do not know what psychology drove such desire, as this all started in the days before social media—I wasn’t looking at anyone else’s life and wishing it was mine. But I had my ideas, and they were very specific, and I chased them fervently, spiraling into debt, chaos, and instability in pursuit of an ideal life in which everything clicked into place and I made friends easily and I somehow made art and got paid for it. My fantasies all looked and sounded wonderful but they utterly lacked engineering of any kind. I think I really just sort of believed these things would happen by magic.

But when one fantasy failed (and come on, they always did), I’d conjure up another, and another, and chase each in succession. I was always filled with ideas about what city next, which job next, which whatever next. This would be the thing that would work, I could feel it! In the meantime, amid all this chaotic ideation, I worked two or sometimes three jobs simultaneously to pay the bills (for all my intellectual irresponsibility, I always made certain I could pay the bills, so I’ve had many unpleasant jobs). But my frenzied state of employment never mattered, because I was always sure that the next place would be “right” and I could settle down and find a more “long term” job and get to work on my art.

Except that never happened. And maybe it was all one long, painful lesson in learning about what really mattered to me, what I really needed. Because for all my efforts to get far away from home and stay far away, it one day became clear to me that I wanted nothing more than return to where I came from, to abandon the fantasies, to pursue simplicity, stability—things that had (and still have) never been easy for me. But those years of chasing fantasies: perfect cities, perfect careers, perfect men? My creativity was wasted on those years. Instead of working on drawings or essays, my mind tried to figure out what city next, or how to get another job, or tried to decode the various problems posed by the unsuitable (and often dysfunctional) men I foolishly chased. So, I was never bored, never still, never quiet long enough to write an essay, let alone finish one. Equally, I never had to sit quietly long enough to ask myself: what am I really, really, going to do with my ONE and ONLY life? And how am I going to make that happen?

I’ve always been preoccupied with an intense fear of death (the details of which would require another post, possibly a book), which I think also conjures up the fear of wasting my singular and precious life. And so, to ensure I would not waste my life, I refused to settle for anything less than ideal, less than perfection. And, in refusing to settle for anything less than perfection, which does not exist, I ended up, ironically, wasting a lot of both time and energy (a.k.a. my life). In pursuing perfection, I spun my wheels, refused to choose OR made abysmally bad choices (I blame the pressure I put on myself, TO NOT WASTE MY LIFE, TO GET IT JUST RIGHT for some of the bad choices; I generally do not make great decisions under any kind of pressure). And then I panicked when I was 36. It was early days in the pandemic; I was still single (and just out of another deluded relationship), employed as a software developer but dimly aware of my lack of long-term potential in this field. Worse, I’d yet to produce much creative work I was proud of. So, I decided, at last, I needed to change my life.

Change for me in early 2020 meant essentially doing the opposite of what I’d always done. I moved home to Buffalo, despite the comparably poor job market. I bought a house, which made it much harder to just get up and leave if things started to fall apart. I constructed no fantasies, or at least, far fewer. The house, actually, a 1950’s Cape Cod that resembles its neighbors almost identically, was the antithesis of what I’d once dreamed my first house would look like, so I took this as a good sign. I also applied for a low-residency MFA in writing. I’d dreamed of someday taking a couple of years off to devote myself to studying writing full-time, but when I looked out at my life, behind me, ahead of me, I realized I was tired of moving around, packing up and leaving, arriving, re-orienting myself every couple years. Taking out loans for a degree that, while important to me, felt in other ways “frivolous” was also out of the question. A low-residency MFA that required no relocation and would allow me to continue working full-time would also allow me to pay my tuition as I went along.

I had to stop moving. I had to stop pursuing perfection, ideals. I had to stop conjuring up fantasies. I think living that way allowed me to keep my fears at bay, but it also kept my real life, and my real dreams, forever out of reach. My life isn’t as turbulent or “exciting” as it once was. It’s sometimes so still and quiet that I feel the panic start to rise in me, asking all those pesky questions: Is this it? Is this really what you want to do with your life? Is this really where you want to be? What if you get to your death bed and regret it all? The thing is, when I was always moving, running, leaping from one city or career to the next, distracting myself with impossible goals and difficult men, those questions were still there, trailing me, calling out but unable to reach my ear for the speed and commotion I maintained. I think: of course it is possible I will regret my life, or aspects of it. But what is certain is that I’d regret a life of running from difficult questions, from difficult, but indeed possible, goals and dreams.

The essay I wrote about skydiving would never have been possible in my former life. I very likely would have started it, written a draft, maybe two, but it would have remained in its infancy. Partially expressed in a file on my computer or in a notebook sealed in a closed box in my basement. In fact, I did write the first draft in 2018, and it sat collecting dust for almost two years before I started my MFA—and since then the essay has been through three years of slow, steady, and patient revisions. What I’ve learned from not moving, not filling my head with fantasy of perfection, is that there is much quiet, stillness, and tedium, required in making beautiful things.

Too, that quiet and stillness not only have the capacity to be boring, but also difficult and uncomfortable because they require one to face an endless stream of fears. Because in making and attempting to share one’s creative work, there is also much failure, worlds of rejection, universes of self-doubt. These are unpleasant things to experience, sometime so unpleasant I want to give up. What’s the point in writing if there are countless writers out there who are better than me? What the hell could my voice really add to the conversation? Why bother trying to get an essay published when it’s already been rejected thirty-three times? Why bother sitting here, facing this screen, facing all this doubt, when I could pack my bags and my car and drive down the cloud forests in Tennessee, and live inside of a dream?

Well, because we know dreams like that are empty, nothing more than glossy, iridescent bubbles waiting to be popped, to vanish in a wet ring on the ground. And because writing, however I may stack up in the grand scheme of writers, is one of the few constants in my life, it is something I’ve always done, something I’ve never not been able to do, lest my head explode. Writing is perhaps one of two things, that, when I’m doing it, gives me a clear sense of purpose—makes me feel like I am doing something I was in fact made to do. It is a belief of mine that we were all made to do certain things with our bodies and minds while here on earth, and that it’s our responsibility as human beings to find those things, and do them whenever we can. For some of us, that thing can be our career, but it doesn’t work out that way for everyone. In fact, I think I was waiting for that, hoping to find that perfect career that bundled purpose with a living—but my sight was so fixed on this idea that I failed to see how these two things might be separate for me. As a result, like I’ve said before, this caused me to waste a lot of time not writing, not pursuing my actual dreams, and instead holding out for fantasy. Scrambling like a madwoman after an ever-shifting mirage.

But it’s also true that my scrambling-like-a-madwoman life provided me with a wide array of experiences and exposures to different perspectives; it indeed gave me a lot to think about, and to write about. And I learned a lot, however slowly and painfully, so, while there was a loss and waste of time, I also do not wholly regret my previous ways. They were very likely my only path to the place where I exist now, as I tend to be a person who cannot extinguish an idea until it’s been tested or experienced first.

Now, I’ve surrendered the fantasy to actually work toward my dreams, to build a life I love rather than hoping it just magically appears. I’m back in the classroom, and no, it’s not the perfect career, but it’s the one I like best, and am best at. I’m dating someone who is stable himself, who does not distract me with endless puzzles of his problems to solve. And I have a small house at the northern edge of the city that is affordable, relatively easy to maintain, and within it exists my cozy studio with yellow walls and a big desk where I sit writing this. My life doesn’t look like the fantasy my 23-year-old self painted—um, where’s the mountain backdrop!? The cool bungalow with the low-slung roof and porch swing? To name just a few—but I’m finally making (and finishing) creative work that I’m proud of. I’m also largely content, at peace. And when I was running around like a madwoman, chasing perfection? I was almost never those things.

I don’t know what my future as a writer looks like. I cannot be certain what degree of success I’ll achieve, or even how I define what “success” means. Will I publish a book? Perhaps. That is the goal, but I all I can do about any goal is work steadily toward it, not guarantee its arrival. Until then, I’ll work hard to protect the degree of calm and quiet and stability I’ve fought hard to achieve—without it, I’d be spinning my wheels into eternity.