When will your accomplishments be "enough"?

On self-abandonment and asking ourselves why we write and spend years crafting book-shaped accomplishments.

Growing up, money was tight and we lived on the outskirts of town by the county dump. Every day meant trying to survive. Peers called me trash. Sometimes I was ashamed. Other times I was angry. I felt at odds at school, like I didn’t fit in or belong, and was often stressed by the inner and outer conflicts I was going through but couldn’t begin to acknowledge them, not to myself or anyone else. I was deeply, irrevocably sad. I didn’t think I mattered much. Teachers didn’t seem to expect me to do well based on my background and where I came from and I felt little support. There was never an obvious helping hand. I believed it was all up to me.

It was a recipe not only for high independence, but perfectionism and achievement-seeking and that feeling I like to describe as make one false move and the entire house of matchsticks will collapse and light on fire and everything will burn. Unlike other girls who kept diaries of their thoughts and feelings or to record their daily experience, I used mine to set target dates for goals I wanted to achieve and by what date to achieve them. For instance, I gave myself two weeks to write a novel, and when the two weeks came to pass and I had no book to show for it (I was maybe ten years old!), I was upset and lashed out at myself.

I believed that not following through on goals meant I would never make something of myself.

Quietly, silently, I thought I’d be a failure no matter how hard I tried and prepared for misery. These might seem like big feelings and, oh, honey, they are. I’m not trying to hide them. I’m trying to speak from personal experience about the real shit that’s entangled in our backstories of how we came to writing.

People to this day bring up what an accomplishment it was to go to an ivy league school for MFA. It’s sweet and it’s genuine but all I can ever do is be funny or make a joke, like, Can you believe my country ass went there. What I don’t tell them is how heartbreaking it was. The competition, wealth, elitism. The whispers, the gossip, the in-crowd, the out-crowd. I was far from home, existing amongst some students who were bullies, full-grown adult bullies. How I never felt good enough. How I took to the bottle. I did risky things you wouldn’t imagine and never said a word to anybody. I’ll leave it at that.

After MFA, I moved back to Iowa and started working at a “family restaurant” off the highway which was really a blue hair diner where the other servers were on hard dr*gs and I came away with about $15-$30 in tips each shift because I was new and didn’t have good shifts. I pingponged to a different bar slash restaurant which made better tips but worked everyday for less than 17 grand a year. I tried to party as much as possible when I was off shift because my heart was lost and pierced. My good friend, one of my closest friends at the time, the one who jumped in the back of my car crying because he had just been to a funeral, the funeral of his friend’s mother, who wouldn’t stop crying, so I said what can I do what can I do what’s wrong, my friend who responded nothing it’s just the pills, who passed away from an overdose only a few months after that.

I’d sit in the ripped recliner in his apartment, talking to him with the sheets taped over his windows, and while he was talking all I kept thinking was that he was talking with the beyond. All I remember thinking is that he was conversing with the night sky, with an other side. He was elsewhere in the stars and his dark eyes shone with it. We weren’t talking to each other. Not really. Hard to explain.

I’ve seen highs and lows and done my fair share of reflection on what really matters in this life. It is not, dear god, about what you achieve and the best thing that happened to me was to figure this out earlier rather than later.

As I work on my true crime about my family, I’ve had to dig deep. I’ve had to ask, time and again, why I am writing this. I remind myself that the book will not magically fit some hole or need. I remind myself that I write it because our tragedy will fade to nothing, not even a story, which is another kind of death — and I’m not willing to let that happen while I am still here to do something about it. It is a responsibility as much as it is giving respect and justice to a rural working-class family who would never see it otherwise. It is to show, up close, the lasting effects of violence and generational trauma. These stories never leave. They cling to our blood. We cannot outrun them. We cannot outrun or out-numb them. They walk with us. They want to tell us something. They want to teach us. What does your story want to teach us? How will you be changed by it?

When I was growing up, I could always count on the black and yellow garden spider clinging to trellis outside our back door, weaving its penetrable web that would rip by wind and rain and it would start all over again. The spider was nearly as big as my hand with a fat bulbous body and long spindly tentacles. I couldn’t look away from it, fascinated. The garden spider spins a zigzag pattern at the center of its web which helps stabilize it. It is known as the “writing spider” for this trademark signature.

This book has taken over a decade to write as I move back and forth, back and forth. It’s not about the time it takes. Nor is it about the destination.

I am allowing myself to be changed while writing this story. I am allowing greater understanding of how the past zigzags into the present. And I hope that by sharing this, my struggles and self-desertions and small steps toward rebuilding, you might feel a little less alone on this journey into the wide open night sky, where stars droop and sometimes their dust sprinkles overhead and gives us the inspiration move forward with our projects, not for anyone else but ourselves. I hope you find the inspiration you’re looking for, my friend.