To Fail, and Fail, and Fail…Spectacularly!
“Keep your head down. Study. Write. Work, work, work. Get used to being alone. And don’t ever say ‘yes’ to anything unless you are sure you can do it.”
I started university with a plan, you see.
Well, okay. Now that I look back on it, maybe ‘plan’ isn’t the right word. Because having a plan connotes intentionality, discipline, forethought, when, in fact, my strategy was mostly a reactionary response. It was what I was left with when I’d eliminated all the other possibilities: joining clubs, meeting new people, “taking chances” – all those extra-curriculars that university is typically associated with. I was having none of it. In my world of relentlessly predictable scheduling, trying new things – and possibly failing at them – didn’t really factor in.
There was an airtight logic to my basic premise: the less I got involved with, the less chance there was of falling on my face. A pretty irrefutable claim, backed up by centuries of folk wisdom and rudimentary statistical analysis. But what I failed to consider were the slightly less common-sense claims that were hidden behind the first: the fewer chances I took, the more secure I would feel; the fewer people I engaged with, the more I’d love the ones with whom I did engage; and the better I performed on something than everybody else, the more accepting of myself I would become.
Nonetheless, for the first two-or-so years of my degree, I continued to move along with my fail-proof scheme, no happier than I’d been at any other point in my life (and frequently unhappier), but unable to imagine any other kind of existence that I would be comfortable living. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying my program: while I sat in the library transcribing Chaucer word-for-word, I was truly contented, in my own way. (No, really. I have a notebook that could probably be published as a really crappy modern English edition of Troilus and Criseyde. Do they do joke editions of books? Because there should be a market out there for them). But when it came time to share my thoughts with other classmates, I froze up in their presence, my words failing spectacularly to convey even a modicum of what I’d intended. And, in those weeks dedicated to preparing final essays, I felt as if there were a hailstorm blowing around inside my skull. My mind would hover over the same three sentences for hours on end, picking apart every detail until there was nothing left on the page but a blinking cursor. I had to ask for extensions on a couple of occasions simply because I couldn’t accept what I had written as being good enough. Nothing was ever good enough. I was a knotted mess of nerves. My “plan” wasn’t working.
As my anxiety got worse, I did what I always do when I’m looking for a little solace: I reached out to bookshelves. In tandem with recommendations from a therapist, I tracked down manuals, memoirs, and pop psychology books written about life with panic disorders. Some were marginally better than others, but they all seemed to amount to the same thing: I can’t trust my head, and I can sometimes laugh about it, but mostly I just cry and then move on, until the next apocalyptic fear enters my brain. And the beat goes on, et cetera. In the end, this is probably the most honest advice I could receive (if it can even be called advice). But it wasn’t what I was looking for. So, eventually, I just stopped looking. It wasn’t until the middle of 2014, after years of what seemed like a Sisyphian effort to keep my synapses from short-circuiting, that I was handed the very book that I needed, at precisely the right time.
Now, as you may have noticed from past blog posts, my mother is an exceptionally important figure in my life, and not just because she carried me around in her stomach for nine months. She is the one who introduced me to the joys of literature long before I was in school. She is the one who would read me fifteen bedtime stories in one sitting, who listened to me tell completely nonsensical stories about orphaned children and lost cats (I had a bit of a melancholic streak, clearly), and who taught me that a book could be there for me in ways that other people just couldn’t – not even her.
She’s also the one who introduced me to the work of Marina Keegan, a young woman whose collection of short stories and essays The Opposite of Loneliness was published last spring, nearly two years after she was killed in a tragic car accident. Keegan’s death came just days after she graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, and mere weeks before she was to start her job as an editing assistant in the fiction department at The New Yorker. The numerous pieces of writing that she left behind were compiled for publication by her English and Creative Writing professors, including the literary critic Harold Bloom.
When my mother placed the book in my hands, my first thought was that it was a not-so-subtle comment on my hermit lifestyle. “Darling,” it seemed to say, “You really do need to get out more.” (And that should have been the first sign that I had misjudged, because my mother’s speaking voice is decidedly unlike that of a character’s from Downton Abbey.) Nonetheless, deciding to give it the benefit of the doubt, I took the book home and began reading the title essay, which was the final article Keegan published in The Yale Daily News before her graduation. In it, she addressed the ineffable sense of togetherness – the opposite of loneliness – that she feared she and her fellow graduates would lose shortly after walking across the stage to accept their diplomas. But, more importantly, she set out to dismantle the image of convocation as the symbolic beginning of a life-long plateau:
“ We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective consciousness as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late [. . . .] That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.
“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”
When I read those short paragraphs, I felt like a steel belt had been unhooked from around my rib cage. It was a revelation, for me, to hear someone say begin, to think that I have an almost interminable number of beginnings left inside me, and to know that all I have to do – all any of us lucky enough to be here, in this place, sitting in these classrooms, has to do – is say “yes”.
I say “all we have to do” in full recognition that agreeing to take on new opportunities and challenges is a deceptively simple concept. Whether we’re moving to another continent, going rock climbing for the first time, starting our post-grad careers, or submitting a poem to a writing competition, our self-preservational instincts are first in line to volley off all the reasons why it would be better if we just took a nap instead. And deciding to take a chance isn’t always going to make us happy. We’ll hit dead ends, find out we’re dating the wrong people, fail to find meaning in the work that we’re doing, and occasionally walk around in a “god is dead” state of mind, biting our nails over global warming and flagrant human rights abuses and wondering where we got into our heads that we were uniquely gifted to do something about it. But, in most cases, saying ‘yes’ isn’t a contract or a solemn vow. It is simply a step that offers up a slightly better view of the countless directions a life can take.
This isn’t meant to devolve into some empty platitude about living life to the fullest. I mean, let’s be honest: no matter what Dead Poets’ Society taught us about “living in the moment,” we won’t stop waiting in obscenely long line-ups to get a cheap cup of coffee. We won’t stop checking our phones when we’re feeling lonely or isolated. We will still often prefer catching up on a favourite TV show to trying out some new activity with a bunch of people we’ve never met. And we’ll still spend a few more minutes on our morning rituals than is strictly necessary (especially in the bottomless depths of a Canadian winter). But what I’ve only just started to grasp is that putting yourself out there and beginning is, in fact, no more uncomfortable and disconcerting than sitting at home and staring at that punitive blinking cursor.
As I write this, I am still feeling the sting of a rejection letter I received a few hours ago, from a literary conference I applied to in November. I’ve read over the attached comments several times now, and while I would love to say that my immediate reaction was something to the effect of “Oh, isn’t this a great learning experience, thank you very much,” the truth is, I shut myself in my little office space and cried. I was absolutely devastated. I had put myself out there, I had said yes, only to receive a diplomatic but firm “no.”
But that is the very worst of it. A contingent, ephemeral, “try-better-next-time” NO. And when you hear that, fellow members of this Endless Age of Anxiety, be proud and consider it a triumph: because you’re still alive. And, as Marina herself wrote, you are still so young.