the linear life
If I had lived my life pro forma, I would be twenty-six years old right now. (Four years for a BA, two for an MA, three for a PhD.) That’s four years of my adult life unaccounted for.
Some people get it right out the gate. They know what they want at the age of seventeen and pursue it. I’ve known only one thing for as long as I’ve been sentient: that I want to write stories. I didn’t care how; I didn’t learn how until fairly recently. That was what I wanted, and I believed that university was immaterial to it. I went to university because that’s what people did; it was what my family expected, and I didn’t have any other plans. Looking back on my seventeen-year-old self, I’m gobsmacked that I got the application in, to the one university I solicited, on time and intact.
My undergrad was not a pristine thing. I didn’t care about school for the first two years, and when I started to care, I had a lot of ground to make up. Those first years still sit like ugly toads on my transcript: they’re there forever.
I don’t mind. In fact, I’m glad.
(My parents might continue to feel differently.)
In my twelve-odd years of adulthood, if not maturity, I have learned this: failure is incredibly important. It might be, in fact, the most important rite there is: real, high-stakes failure. Setting a goal and failing to meet it. It makes self-scrutiny possible, honest critical reflection that has nothing to do with Death and running your fingers through your hair. It brings you closer to understanding yourself, and is the only thing that makes it possible for you to understand others.
In these early stages of the professional writing life, I’ve learned something else that I wasn’t able to properly imbibe when it happened in junior high school: rejection is also important, developing the ability to believe in yourself when others don’t.
Brief History of Me: I grew up in the ‘gifted’ category; I was sent into special programs; I read and wrote early (though walked and talked late); I was sent into kindergarten a year early, just a bit younger than all the others, and my mother believes I’ve been trying to reclaim that year ever since. As I grew older, something started to happen to my ‘gift’ - I distracted more easily, I cared less. I got out of high school with an 87% GPA because I was ‘graded on potential’, a fact that did me no favours in university.
I was six years finishing my BA; it convinced me that School Is Not For Me. Mike and I spent ten months in Europe and I had a plan: we would return to Canada, I would take an admin job, and I would write at night. I loved writing because I wasn’t really doing it; I hadn’t settled into a routine yet. I thought the Muse would be at my shoulder if I only had the time. I spent a year trying this out.
What’s the lamest reason you can think of to enter an MA program? How about ‘My boyfriend’s doing it?’ Well, that’s why I did it. The novel was nowhere, my job was OK but I couldn’t see myself growing old in it; I felt like the teenaged Stephen Fry: My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. I was twenty-five. Mike wanted an MA, so I got one too.
That degree changed the entire course of my life. I went into it a mouse and came out of it a lion. There was my thesis, bound in red leatherette. I could do anything.
I got a degree; I got married; I left Canada. I finished my novel, got it represented, and came here, to Cambridge. I was twenty-nine when I arrived and I’m thirty now.
I met a woman during my first week here who was just starting the last year of her PhD. I asked her what she planned to do afterwards, and she said she didn’t know - she would only be twenty-six, and didn’t want to commit herself to a lifetime in one job. When I finish my PhD (sacrificial slippers forthcoming to ensure this happens), I will be thirty-two. And here’s what’s not in the offing: children. Home ownership. Lawnmowers.
We don’t even know where we want to be, let alone when, or how.
I wouldn’t cast the four years of my adult life during which I wasn’t in school as a monolith failure for the sake of an analogy; they weren’t. I was on the garden path, not the other one. I did fail, at most everything you can imagine. Whenever I did, it’s because I thought something would be easy, and it never is; the things you love are, by definition, difficult, challenging. When I was up for a challenge, I was ready to experience love properly, not just for people, but for vocation.
I write this now because I am being challenged by what I love (if ‘being kicked in the teeth’ is suitably a ‘challenge’). This is harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I know what failure is: not something you struggle against, but something you buckle beneath. As long as I’m still struggling, I haven’t failed. As someone had it, ‘It will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.’
I don’t regret not having lived a linear life. If I had, any strong breeze might have felled me. It pays to put a foot wrong every once in a while. (And, of course, that’s why I did it in the first place. All that drinking in undergrad was calculated to make me strong and bind me to glory.)
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
