I went to school and continued my education so that I could be a Professor of English Literature and a fiction writer who depicted the victories and pitfalls of a woman’s self-actualization. This morning walking through the refreshed park and smelling the smell of cut grass reminded me of the opening of one of my novellas, The Good Fortune Harvest. When I realized into my master’s degree that I really disliked teaching and that if I wanted to write, I should just do that, I opted not to write my dissertation and graduate.
Yesterday, I was speaking with a world class musician who said when he was young, his uncle via marriage had been an uber talented conductor and musician and had told him the worse thing he could do would be to go to music school. I thought back on my decision so many years ago and knew that I had made a wise choice.
The next step I took was to take tons of jobs to support my desire to write fiction – I announced the California State Lottery results on their hotline in Spanish and English, I did books for the heir to one of the best known Hollywood Agents in the 60s and 70s, I sold tickets for Red & White Fleet, I wrote project descriptions for a well known architectural firm – I did many things so that in the end I could write fiction and write about a woman’s self-actualization. And then the response from so many other writers who I was in workshops with, and writers who became allies, and friends who read my writing was, why are you not writing about your family and your life, which is in and of itself more colorful and compelling. And so I started then to find my voice in writing as I came closer to seeing myself as the protagonist and those I knew filled out the character list. At this time I honed in on the fiction I wanted to write, and met even some writers in my life who truly were talented, and I garnered terrific rejection letters.
Then the next epiphany came, that the closer I came to writing about my own self-actualization, the more I realized I was on a path that was leading nowhere, that my wings were clipped, that the song in my heart was on mute, that my life was my grave and I started screaming on the inside, and once I gave voice to this screaming, I couldn’t stop screaming. And I started writing this new way, this blogging venue, about my life and about the self-actualization that I was hoping to record, and the more I wrote the more the screaming was drowning out all rational sense and the more I felt like burning down the house and suddenly major things began to happen, so major they included relocation and Katrina and dislocation and divorce and love and an undoing that recalibrated my life and my path into this completely rearranged pattern and my writing on my blog felt compelling and energizing and educational (at least to me).
And now that I have a son, I am more interested in the hero’s journey, not just confined to a woman, or one woman’s, or this woman’s self-actualization but rather all of our collective paths that lead us to be who we are. Someone recently said I am fearless and I thought, I am not fearless – I fear losing myself, I fear not being on the right path, I fear I don’t fit into prescribed roles – believe me I have fears. But I know that the path I have taken has made my outward appearance seem as if I am rough and tough, but my insides are all sentimental mush because recently on a phone call on hearing a colleague say goodbye big fat tears came into my eyes and my stomach clenched.
Today walking through the park I realized that we are all on our journey, the one that shapes us into who we are, and that my obstacles have been my teachers, and Tin’s challenges to navigate being a brown boy with two white moms will be only a wee part of his shaping, we all have what stands before us, the journey, to keep adapting and learning and becoming more of who we are.