The Danger of Old Dreams

This post was written on April 21, 2016.

There are benefits to being sentimental (which, please note, is entirely different from being a hoarder). For example, the other day I was thinking about the stories I wrote as a kid, and I was able to locate a gem from fourth grade--I took a picture for this letter. I’m pretty sure it’s my earliest existing short story, a typed, staple-bound fourth-grade project titled “Heart to Heart, Mind to Mind.” It’s about ESP, interplanetary travel, and tiny monsters. I got an A on the story and remember being especially proud that I knew how to correctly punctuate dialogue. Representative line: “She boosted us onto her invisible hands and threw us into outer space.”

I don’t have these at hand, but there are also a few old home movies of eight-year-old me reciting poetry, and stacks of diaries. Somewhere, too, are all the many blank books where I wrote poetry as a teenager. I wrote so many poems I had to track their titles in a small alphabetized notebook. 

All along, from then to now, it seems like I’ve followed an arrow-straight path, almost pre-determined, with the goal of becoming a writer. This doesn’t leave much room to show the doubt and frustration and questioning that have always been with me too.

I’ve always loved to write. The problem is that when it came time to start turning the happy childhood sailboat into the rougher, more propulsive waters of adulthood, writing was the only wind I knew. I’d never done anything else, and couldn’t really envision anything else. This can suggest destiny or a failure of imagination, depending on how you look at these things.

You could say I found a passion early on and pursued it. You could also say that it eventually became too scary to give up said passion because I was thirty, thirty-five, even older (ahem), and what else was I going to do, at that point, with two kids and a wild mortgage making the pursuit of another degree or demanding new career path a preposterous idea at best? The brave thing never seemed clear: carrying on, or changing course.

I’ve always found it alarming that so much of a long-term life foundation seems to depend on decisions made at eighteen years old, when a college major leads in certain directions that are often difficult to shift. Still, my own decision back then wasn’t too difficult. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that I’d major in English, do some reading, do some writing, get a graduate degree. I never thought much about the logistics of making a living. The details of my future life were murky. I assumed I’d figure it out when I got there.

That was twenty years ago now, and publishing Each Vagabond By Name seems like a gigantic, weighty exclamation point on this long, and prolonged, life stage. This writing thing, which was set in motion before I even had all my adult teeth, has gone alright. I can say that now, with no small measure of relief. There’s so much time ahead for second, third, and fourth acts--or, more likely, another slogging, hair-pulling continuation of the first, with more writing and more rejection and more ins and outs of the writing life. That’s okay. 

What matters most to me now is finally fulfilling the obligation I’ve always felt to my hopeful childhood self, the one who wanted to be a writer. There’s a particular kind of joy, and, also, a particular kind of danger, in pursuing the very hopes and goals you dreamed up as a child. Who celebrates, if you triumph? Who is let down most, if you fail? And who--the adult or the child--defines, in the end, what success should look like? 

Scary questions, for sure. For now, I can ponder them safely. It will all begin again, the doubt and the questioning, when I turn to the next, and the next, blank page.