Why Here, Why Now?

Trying to figure out how I got here, part 1

If you’d have caught me on a bad day a few months ago and I think I would have told you I wasted my twenties. Not on anything nefarious or risky, but only simply wandering. I would have said I should have gotten it together—figured out what I was “meant” to do, knuckled down, and done it.

Sure, this is unrealistic. I realize that now. But I wanted to settled into something, feel at home in it, go deep with some kind of work.

That’s a part of what Peace of the Whole is about.

These are some small vignettes of my wandering. This is, in a way, a review of what’s led me here. To be honest, it hurt a bit to write.

It’s as much for me as it is for you.

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17 years old, an August afternoon

I’m in my childhood bedroom, all my notebooks and a laptop set before me on my desk. What I want more than anything is to be a published author.

This, I am convinced, is the most profound thing a person can be. Nothing tops having your work immortalized in print. So I am working on my novel, as I have been since I was thirteen. I have short stories going on the side too, because you have to get published in The Paris Review first if you’re going to be a novelist. I am very serious about all of it because that is what I think I have to be. I’ve learned this from having read about Dickens, Dickinson, Woolf and others.¹ I know this from having listened to best selling authors of our modern age speak in interviews and in TED talks. If I just craft my words and plot all perfectly enough, a publishing house will swoop it up, my novel will be on the bestseller list, and I will have Made It.

Every day that I am not working on my novel is a day wasted. Because, as I believe I learned from Liz Gilbert, the very worst thing that can happen to you is that you die with an unfinished novel in a drawer. I refuse to let that be my fate.

How I will make a living as an adult is unclear. I never attempt to make that clearer, even as college looms closer. I must do something of meaning, and nothing is more meaningful than writing.

At this time, I have no friends. Really, zero. Homeschooling makes this possible. I hang out with my grandparents and their friends and think my peers are absolutely ridiculous. I live completely in my head and cannot stand my body.

20 years old, a March afternoon

I’m in a building on my college campus called Hash. I’m too naive to understand why people snicker at the building’s name; to realize that it has any other meaning aside from something you do with potatoes. I’m on the the second floor, in an anthropology class.