I have been given a unique gift. I know that.
This beautiful world of dreams which keeps my head ever in the clouds and peering at the world from weird angles is a joy and a delight to me. I cannot imagine a life without it. Why would I live if not to live this way?
However, I feel upon my heart an immense burden. Yes, all artists feel the one of striving for perfection and inevitably falling short. I’ve come to appreciate this constant challenge as a friendly adversary who is always forcing me to be better. It is like a tough but trusted critic who stands behind those who applaud and folds his arms, giving me a look that says, I know you can do better. It keeps me from becoming complacent. It is the only reason we ever reach heights we could have never dreamed at the beginning of our journeys.
But I am tormented by a different burden, and not one I have ever heard spoken of by anyone else. A portion of it is common to man: the feeling of my fleeting life, the sands of time racing through my hands, ever evading my intentions. But it is intensified through the desperate lens of one who wishes to make her mark before she is forced to depart. It’s as if I’ve been given some precious item which is not for me to hold but to deliver, and I know neither where nor the way to get there. I feel as if to die with this gift inside of me is to not have lived at all; I may as well have seen the whole world without its ever seeing me.
When trying to describe the feeling, I use this strange but vivid comparison: When I was a kid, my family used to play this game at hotel pools where one of the parents would throw a penny into the deep end and my sister and I would race to retrieve it. The challenge wasn’t just to swim faster than each other. We had to take into consideration our breathing capacity, momentum, and the angle from which to approach. And this was all after we had located the little penny, even more of a challenge since we are both near-sighted and swim without our glasses.
The feeling is frozen in my mind: fighting the water, trying to outmaneuver my sister, pushing myself to swim to the very bottom of the pool and withstand the pressure and lack of air just a little longer while my fingers scrabbled and scraped along the bottom of the pool, the penny dancing away from my grasp with the ripples of motion we made. Even worse was the feeling of having to return to the surface, gasping for air, without having gotten the penny. All that effort, all that strain, and for nothing but a stressful swim across a hotel pool that ended in bitter defeat.
That feeling of scraping the bottom of the pool and begging myself to hang on just long enough to achieve what I came for is just how I feel about my life. Everything that I have to do, the daily regularities of needing to work a regular job and cook and clean are as the water, wrestling me constantly away from my objective. My human need for rest and companionship are like my failing lungs as I plunge below the surface; eventually, I must come up to refuel. And even the writing itself often resembles the scrabbling at the bottom of the pool: all that effort just to get there, and then I fumble through what I actually came for.
Some days I’m too tired to fight. It’s often easier to float melancholically on the surface and bemoan the water for obstructing me. I’ve had to realize that even a little bit of time on the bottom is worth fighting for, and it could mean one more small victory on the road to my goal. But every day, I fear that my time will run out before I’ve done what I was put here to do. What if, due to my poor management of time or some major misstep, I miss my chance and am called away before I make my life worthwhile? I know that such thinking is folly, that everyone touches lives just by being here, but it doesn’t help the frantic feeling in me.
I’ve spent years trying to define what the “penny” is in this analogy. It is not merely the publication of my first book or of making a certain amount of money or having enough fans to be considered “famous.” There is no one goal which I wish to achieve, but an entire feeling of burning alive where my only objective is to put it out by giving relief to its guiding force. In my mind’s eye I see a portal to other worlds both lovely and tragic which, if shared with humanity, could offer great benefit to many, but to which I am the only door. Through me these ideas and beautiful legends must pass, and so far the opening is a mere keyhole. A keyhole. To pass entire worlds through. It’s unbearably stressful, especially since what’s on the other side is my gift, and giving it feels like my mission to earth. Not only parts of it. All of it. And the logistics of this massive transfer are completely up to me.
My only refuge is to keep writing, continuing to pass through laughably tiny pieces. One. At. A. Time. Maybe one day, if I could devote more of my time to writing and still provide for myself, I could wedge the door open a crack and produce more faster. Or maybe it will always feel like this.
Yes, it is a grand privilege. My mind is constantly ravished with the wonder of these fantasies that pass through my mind and heart. But that’s not where they stop. They will remain, rankling in my heart and rattling against the inside of my ribcage unless they are released, and to pour them out is not a simple act. I have to actually write. This is where the craft only begins. So it’s less like opening a door and more like giving birth, physically and emotionally demanding and permanently life-altering.
Sometimes I tell myself that there aren’t really that many ideas in me worth bringing to birth; I only have many scraps floating around, and only a few will ever flesh out into something whole. But I only say that to make light of my situation. Other times I say that I must be satisfied with just a few since no one can possibly birth as many as I have inside in one lifetime. But I’m terrified. What if I won’t get to write stories in heaven? What if with the removal of evil comes the removal of references to conflict, and thus all sense of story? I am torn between believing that I will write far more sublime stories in heaven and believing that this is my one and only shot at this.
But before you go feeling sorry for me, know this: I love being this tragic writer figure. In fact, I’m so dramatic that I probably love it a little too much. The fears and frustrations are real, but they’re just life, and to live without them would be to live without the dreams or hopes, and that would be intolerable to me. This idea of a tragically beautiful divine purpose sustains me and gives me the aspects of intrigue and importance that I crave. I want to have something to strive for and a grand adventure to live. So much so that I occasionally imagine my dreamworld beyond the portal and wonder if I will ever be satisfied with the life I can live on this side.
Here, I am subject to the torrents of life and they are never kind nor predictable. Here, I can lose what and whom I love in the blink of an eye and can never guarantee that I will ever achieve anything. But in my world, I have the illusion of near-perfect control. I lose nothing I do not choose to part with and exist in a world free of betrayal. I can live a thousand lives if I so choose! That’s the joy of books, after all. I can let myself be as wildly various as I please, from the softest to the boldest sides of my character, and like a prism, split the light into dozens of different shades that all reflect different parts of me so that not one is left unused. Real life is scary and ordinary and boring. I wish to be adventurous and passionate and beloved.
I am haunted by imagining my story taking off just as I would like: readers love it, movies are made of it, and fans create their own vibrant subculture surrounding it. We create a movie, perfectly executed and everything I had in mind. But while the party goes on behind me, I remain staring at the screen, feeling as if the world in which I was meant to live is on the other side. I have just painted the walls of a world I can never be part of. My dream is complete but unreachable. All my success will be tasteless or seasoned only with bitter tears.
This, as my sister and I have discussed, is where I have to trust my own Author that nothing that is meant for me to do will pass me by. He gave me this mind and this heart, and I believe he means me to use them, but with wonder and not frantic worry. Alas; it is easier said than done to live that way and without fear. Like any character, I am forced to grow. I must choose a life I can bear to have lived, or rather, not to allow my life to pass me by. I then plunge head-first back into the frantic energy with which I long to write, longing to do something brave and reckless and amazing.
Both sensations have been known to bother me the most at night. Too restless to write and too full of energy to sleep, I often pace by a window or, if anyone is near, annoy them with my moaning about wanting something without knowing precisely what.
Have you ever felt that way? As if you’re homesick for a place you’ve never been or missing someone you haven’t met? Like a child, you refuse to shut your eyes for fear of missing something, and when you finally do sleep, you must wrap yourself in blankets as if putting out a stubborn fire. During the day, it’s almost worse. Every hour of your day job feels like a shovelful of sand tossed into your mouth, bland and smothering and painfully irrelevant. Every day you exhaust yourself trying to dig your way out even as you are accordingly buried in order to have the money to even think of doing something else.
Sometimes you’re too exhausted to fight and it feels like your dreams will be buried and never found until you are a mere skeleton of the person you could have been. Sometimes I shudder to think how many such skeletons must be buried under the dunes of the ordinary life we tread every day. I refuse to be one of them, even if I have to choke on sand every day until I build my dream high enough to take refuge upon it.
I do not mean to look down on ordinary work. Not everyone is as insanely restless as I am, and we need every person’s contribution in order to function. I just feel called somewhere else and lose my mind a little every day until I get there. Until I reach that unattainable Something, I do not feel whole. Or rather, I feel no satisfaction unless I’m doing something to attain it.
For me, it would seem, to dream is to forever burn, a willing wick in a consuming flame.
