In pursuit of an ideal

once upon a time i wanted to be an author

My friends and I like asking one another random, hypothetical questions like "would you want your parents to tell you if they had an affair" or "if you could hijack a delivery truck, what would you hope that it's carrying?" Recently, I was asked a question that sort of stuck with me because I couldn't come up with a good answer at first. The question was: "What did you really, really want when you were young?"  

I couldn't come up with a specific thing that I'd really wanted. Yes, there was one year that I wanted a Nintendo DS so I could play Nintendogs, but then my parents gave me a DVD of Madagascar instead for Christmas and after a period of feeling woefully denied, I made my peace with the fact that I would probably never own a handheld gaming device. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that even as a kid, what I wanted was an ideal.

The image came unbidden to me, so clear that it was like it had only happened a week ago. I remember being in the parking lot of a store at 15, waiting for my mom to come out. Across the lot, I saw a girl get into her car. It was a cherry red convertible, sparkling under the sun like freshly washed fruit. She had her blonde hair pulled up into a perfectly round bun, and there was a pink bow tied around it. I watched her put her car into reverse, drape one arm around the seat, and easily back out of the spot. In that moment, I felt a rush of aspiration. I wanted to be just like that girl. I wanted to look polished and put-together and like there was a particular part of the world that I inhabited with ease. Maybe it was also my first ever girl crush and I got my desires confused.

Botticelli’s Venus is my ideal Venus

There are a lot of kinds of people I’ve wanted to be. We all like imagining the paths we could’ve led; isn’t that why we love books like The Midnight Library or Before the Coffee Gets Cold? Most of all, though, I wanted to be an author. I used to read a lot of Meg Cabot, so there was a particular type of author I wanted to be: a writer who lived in New York. I wanted to bring my laptop to bright plant-filled cafes and go on meditative walks through Central Park. After doing further research into the matter, I got a reality check. New York is expensive and book advances are, on average, small and unpredictable. I also never go to cafes. I'd rather work from the comfort of my desk at home than gather everything I need for a writing session and then brave the elements on my way to a cafe that may or may not have outlets, seats, or wifi.

That ideal, though, became my north star. The word author went up on the walls of my brain in neon lights. No matter what I did with my life, this dream persisted. Sometimes it slumbered. Sometimes I became ashamed of it and covered it with a shroud. But it never went away.

Ideal is not fantasy, no matter what people might say to you. It can be true. You can make it so. I have chosen to use this word to describe what I wanted instead of a dream, because there was something very particular in my head when I imagined being an author. I was striving towards my own ideal of authorly perfection. In some ways, I got to live that ideal. Ideal crystallized for me on my book launch day, when I got to celebrate with all my friends and sit in front of a fat stack of my books.

But ideal is also only the tip of the iceberg. It belies everything that goes into that one snapshot of perfection. Contrast my glorious book launch where everyone knew my name to that time when I went to a writers' cocktail hour where I didn't know a single person and was surrounded by people who'd published 5+ books, made lists, and won awards. The day I got my book deal felt like a dream, but it was buttressed by the hard reality of rejections, deleting thousands of shoddy words, and spending two hours every night for months working on something that maybe nobody would ever want.

Ideals don’t exist in perpetuity, and they don’t exist in isolation. Oftentimes, when I was living out one of those ideal moments, I was too overwhelmed and adrenaline-drunk to even properly appreciate it. I was so tied up over the pressure of debut that I needed others to tell me, “You’ve made it. You got everything you ever wanted,” and even then it didn’t really sink in. In the weeks after my book launch, I realized I had accomplished what once felt totally impossible. Yet I could not fully internalize the accomplishment, the objective success that is launching a book (a big blanket statement to include writing, editing, promoting, etc.). All I felt was… empty. I had to constantly remind myself of where I’d been 2 years ago to give myself a reference point of what I had achieved. Why did I need reference points? Why could I not stand still in this moment and appreciate it for what it was? I started having the scary feeling that maybe my joy and fulfillment had peaked somewhere between getting a book deal and seeing my cover.

That stress consumed me for a long while. Maybe writing was not my thing after all. I wrote and rewrote, and nothing felt right. I was frustrated with myself for not achieving this ideal I’d had. I was not the perfectly inspired writer producing golden sentences. I was still a fearful girl who thought she’d merely stumbled into a patch of good luck.

Then… I took a break. I traveled. I enjoyed being around friends, and when the guilt that I wasn’t writing knocked at my door, I didn’t answer. I set a 5 minute limit on Instagram so I wouldn’t get my emotions tangled up with others’ success. I suppose I learned a bit of self care. When I returned to my desk in August, I felt lighter, farther away from my identity as a writer. As much as this ideal had driven my thoughts and actions from 2020-2024, it was not my whole life.

I started working on new characters and a story, and I was a little less impatient with myself. Sometimes, I accessed the past version of myself. The naive one who wrote without caring that much what others thought, who had a story and simply wanted to get it out because it was too loud trapped in my head. One night, after toiling away on my draft, I sat back and felt at peace and happier with my writing than I had in a long time. This was the ideal, I thought. The ideal was the process itself. Of loving something while I’m in the middle of it. This time, I had a renewed respect for the time and discipline that completing something requires. My process says far more about me than the single moment that it leads to.

What do I really want now? I don’t really have an ideal in my head anymore, and I’m grateful for that. It means I’ve had a good life. I’ve gotten to experience a range of emotions and events and form some opinions about them. Most importantly, I have stopped internalizing (as much) what is happening to other people as something I want too. I’m sure I will start feeling greedy and ambitious again soon, but for now, all I want is to write.

P.S. Once, I put on a dress and makeup and managed to parallel park in one try. A gift to my teenage self.

Something I wrote today:

The colors. They punch her in the gut with their vividness. The ocean washing up against the white shore of the beach, bright turquoise transitioning into mysterious, deep blue, dotted with smaller islands. A halo of clouds floats around the peaks of one of the nearby mountains, an ethereal necklace on the throat of a great goddess. She can see now how this place inspired such wild myths. “Damn. That’s a view worth dying for.”