Career Mulligans

 Who among us hasn't wished for a mulligan in career, relationships, or just life in general? We want do overs for a rough day or a shitty week or, if we really messed up, for an even longer stretch of time. Whether it's wisdom or naivete on my part, I don't entertain regrets about career much. There's no point. If I make a mistake, my only goal is to learn from it and do better going forward because there is no going back.

That being said, I feel pretty strongly that every book offers us a do over for free. I won't lie that I wish some things about my career, my life, and about me in general were different. I do. I wish I weren't a slow writer. I wish I weren't enmeshed in the life circumstance that I am WHILE AT THE SAME TIME recognizing just how privileged the circumstance is. I'm insane and I own that but I don't have to like it.

I did discover something quite by accident the other day about procrastination and I'm still processing it. It feels a little bit like a I got to pull all new cards from the deck, though, so I'll mention it on the off chance it's helpful to someone else. If you self-sabotage and you've done all the regular self-help work around it but can't seem to get traction, it's because you need to forgive yourself for past mistakes. Whatever they maybe. This can be old trauma - anything you wish had never happened. Maybe you hurt someone's feelings and were never able to make it right. Maybe you were a 9 or 10 year old kid home alone when something bad went down outside and you didn't know what to do, even though you tried, and there was no one around you could trust to ask for help and because of all of this, someone died. Oddly specific, I know.

I'm not saying you have to forgive someone else. If you were hurt, you don't have to forgive whoever hurt you. I'm saying it's time to give yourself grace and forgiveness. It's vital because no matter what happened, until you forgive your younger self for not knowing enough, not understanding enough, not being enough - you subconsciously carry around a weight that says you don't deserve any good thing. Forgiving oneself isn't easy but it is necessary. We're monstrously unfair to our younger selves because we look back with the wisdom of knowing what we ought to have done, said, or been and unfairly judge the ignorance of our inexperience.

If you're in a position to wish you could have a do over for just about anything in life, it's a fair bet that you need to practice forgiveness for yourself first. Recognize that you did the best you could with the information you had at the time. Then get busy shaping your future.

Putting Food on the Table™ and Other Wise Advice for Aspiring Novelists

This week at the SFF Seven we're discussing what we were supposed to be - the vocational advice young writers get because writing doesn't put food on the table™.

I really loved KAK's epic tale from yesterday (for some reason Google has decided I'm not allowed to comment anymore), in part because I am also not the author who Always Wanted to Be a Writer.

Not because I didn't love reading and writing - I always, always did! - and I even won a poetry contest when I was eleven or twelve and I wrote poetry (really bad poetry) all through high school. I contributed them to the high school literary magazine, anonymously because I was a weenie. I took AP English and my teachers praised my stories and other writings.

But, dear reader, never did one person suggest that I become a writer. Nobody ever thinks that a career as a writer will put food on the table™. To be fair, it generally doesn't, and it takes a long time to get there, unless you hit the literary equivalent of the lottery. Like all the pretty aspiring actors from the Midwest arriving in Hollywood on the bus, very few of us become superstars. Most of us get really good at waiting tables

Sometimes, though, I wish someone had suggested that as a career for me. Instead, like KAK, when I was told I could be or do anything, those suggestions shaded toward other careers. Science! Medicine! Biology! While I greatly appreciate that so many adults in my life recognized my strengths in the STEM areas and encouraged me to apply myself, I regret that I didn't direct some of that application to writing.

See, when I was headed to college, there was a scholarship offered for someone in English/Literature. You had to write an essay and the winner got... I don't even remember. Free ride? Fame? Glory? I can't even remember, but I wanted it. I had this idea of surprising everyone with my sudden literary talent. So, even though I was enrolled as a pre-med student, I wrote an essay for this scholarship in the lit department.

Now, my mom and I had this back and forth then, where she HATED that I put off schoolwork until the night before. I was a terrible procrastinator - something I had to change about myself in becoming a novelist - and I'd gotten pretty good at gliding by on last-minute efforts. That's what I did on this essay, whipping it out in a frenzy and I still thought it was brilliant.

And someone else - let's call her Brienne Merritt - won the scholarship. You can Google her. She's beautiful, blonde, athletic, intelligent, talented, and she won MY scholarship making her the ideal nemesis for a young me. I'm not tagging her because we aren't friends and never were, though we have a lot of mutuals. I kind of doubt she even knows I exist. I was that gal at the party in Say Anything that comes up to Ione Skye and babbles on about how their competition made her work harder and Ione finally says, "me too!" just to be polite. Brienne was busy doing her own awesome thing and never knew that I thought about her, and think about her still.

(I notice that Brienne is now a nurse, which makes for a funny reversal.)

Anyway, the advice I did get, that was the best vocational advice I received, came at the end of college from my Comparative Religious Studies advisor, Professor Hadas. I was trying to decide between many post-college paths and interests - medical school, it turns out, was not one of them - and he told me to stick with science. 

I know, right? Basically the same as everyone had been telling me all along, but he had wise advice along with it. He advised me to pick a career (and post-graduate education) that would put food on the table™. He told me I was fortunate to have strengths in areas that people would pay me to work on. And that having that income security would give me a foundation to continue to learn and grow, to follow my more esoteric interests. 

It was truly good advice. 

What I'm Glad I Didn't Know When I Decided to Become a Writer

This week at the SFF Seven we're discussing what we wish we'd known when we decided we wanted to write.

It's an interesting question, and a fraught one. I first decided that being a writer would be the perfect career for me back in 1993. That's almost 30 years ago, so it isn't easy to think back to that younger self. At the time, I was completing a Ph.D. in neurophysiology and confronting the bald truth that I didn't really want to be a research scientist. I sat myself down, meditated, and asked the question: if I took away all the if's and's and but's, what would be the ideal life.

No one was more surprised than I was to hear that the answer was to be a writer. But I also knew it was a true answer and that, if I wanted to be happy, I had to do whatever it took to make that come true.

So, I cut bait on my Ph.D., got a Masters and a job as an editor/writer to start building my chops. I took night classes from visiting writers. I began writing, something, anything.

What do I wish I'd known then? It's tempting to say I wish I'd known how long it would take before I truly began earning a living as an author. My conception then of how long it would take was absolutely the largest lacunae of ignorance in my hopeful moonscape. I thought it would be a couple of years, not a couple of decades. I totally thought I'd hit it big. I thought my steady progression of successes, for which I am grateful, make no mistake, would have a steeper upward trendline. 

And yet... I'm actually glad the younger me didn't know how protracted that effort would be, how studded with setbacks and pitfalls. Had I known, would I still have done it?

I don't know.

Sometimes I think our ignorance at the outset of an ambitious enterprise works in our favor. Ignorance truly can be bliss, especially when it allows hope to flourish, hope that carries us through the difficult times. 

Maybe what I really wish I'd known back when I made that decision is that it was the right one. But then, I knew that anyway.