I Accomplished a Dream

A little over three years ago I was pushing my daughter on a swing at the park. A friend was chatting with me and I happened to mention a quote I’d always been drawn to. In that moment, truth hit me like the swing barreling toward me on rebound. Life became clear. I was meant to be a writer.

Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. How Children Learn (1967) ~John Holt "How Children Learn"

I’d like to say the first time I read it, it resonated with me in the moment but the truth is it became an earworm for me over several years. While I thought I knew what trusting myself meant, and how that could apply to trusting my children, in reality, the very essence of the quote hadn’t come to fruition yet. The concept was so simple, but in order to get there I had to do some discovery within myself.

How could I trust I could be good enough? How could I trust that I’d have value in something meaningful to say? Who cared about these four characters I had secretly living in my head? I hadn’t finished college, and you had to have education with a piece of paper at the finish line to be determined good enough, right?

In just a moment I realized I’d let the fear and distrust from others define whether I could follow everything in my being telling me who I was meant to be. I can’t even say there were these huge instances that tore my dream down. The fears were little comments. They were little doubts over time that shaped my path and told me to keep turning down a safer one even if my heart sung for something different.

So that night I took my yoga pants wearing behind home with a four year old and eight year old in tow, and decided I was going to be a writer.

The problem of course was that I had no idea how to be a writer, other than visions of characters living out fantastical events, some brief fanfiction practice, and some posts on social media. So I tried to remember books I’d read about writing long before when I’d dared be brave enough, and I read some more books. I outlined, I storyboarded, I made timelines and notes. I set a first draft start date, and began writing.

March 1st, 2014

At first I was soaring through the project. My story was going to be awesome and I was sure I’d have friends and family and even strangers turning pages and wanting to get to know more. And then I joined a critique group and realized I had a long way to go to make this story worth reading.

I wrote a lot more. I started over. More than once, trying to shape this wild and complicated story into something similar to a novel and not just a neverending brain dump of everything I’d ever imagined my characters doing. I tried my hand at other stories, and even published some short and fun young romance I titled Missed Kisses.

Throughout the process, I gave up. Often. I’d take months attempting to talk myself back into the idea that I wanted this, and that there was a reason these characters had been hanging around for so long. I faced the idea of failure. I cried. I fretted people that knew me would look into the mirror I kept facing and realize maybe I didn’t have all the answers. That I didn’t know what I was doing. That they’d hate my beloved characters and would use them to judge me personally.

The same fears that had kept me from writing for years before began to keep me from finishing.

You’re not a writer.

Your interests are juvenile and a waste of time.

You’re not good enough.

You can’t be trusted.

You’re not worth this endeavor.

These fears almost paralyzed me. I didn’t know how to push past all of my insecurities when I felt weighed already from so many challenges. Each time I tried to climb back up our family was hit with another hardship, and I wondered if the universe was telling me this wasn’t meant to be.

This last attempt- which I don’t even think was much different from the rest, but it ended up being the final one- came to fruition because life hit me with how short it was once again. My little sister was thirty-seven with two young kids. She knew my characters well and even chose my lead character’s muse for me many years before. (Message me, because I’m not admitting that tidbit on public media because who am I kidding it’s turned into a fangirl crush at this point. One I happily shared with her.)

One December day shortly after her death the second realization came, she’d never see me finish.

So on January 1st, I started my manuscript over. I fine-tuned the story for who-knows-what-number-of-times. I kept some things, added some things, trashbinned some others.

To make it more exciting, my computer lost my manuscript for a few days. My brain had been struggling to keep up on important things like back-ups. I felt embarrassed, and like I’d been hit with a sledgehammer of truth that maybe I just couldn’t manage this.

Then, a friend kindly recovered my book for me, including making automatic backing up effortless, but through the process my repetitive stress injuries in my wrists got so bad I could barely type.

About this time a friend approached me about a writing workshop she believed in, Renegade Writer’s Group. My friend T had witnessed my challenges I’d been trying to overcome, and she graciously helped me get into the class. Thirty days of writing 1,000 words everyday, which would just about put me at the end of my first novel.

Since I couldn’t type, I began handwriting everyday, then would transfer with a speech to text program called Dragon Naturally Speaking. There were several bumps in this process, besides, you know writing for several hours a day, but I was getting the word-counts in spite of them. Somehow, with the combination of writing in my sister’s memory, committing to daily word counts that I shared with others, doing this alongside other women writers, and giving myself the permission to suck I managed to push through each moment of doubt, each little voice that said how exposed this would make me.

This was at least thirty times I just made that number up more challenging than I could have ever imagined, and really this is just the start. There’s a list of people, blog posts, writing groups, friends, family, books, along with healed and broken bits of myself that contributed to the accomplishment. No matter what comes of this manuscript, whether people love it, or hate it, or never even read it, I accomplished a dream. A big one, that took me thousands of hours and touched every area of my life.

I’m overcoming fears. And maybe I always have, and I’ve just yet to recognize my worth.