You Are Enough

Like all of us, I've had my ups and down. More than I needed in the past few years. I went through a divorce that upended every facet of my future that I'd once counted on. I had to let go of all of those hopes and expectations, all of those future memories I was looking forward to, and embrace the now. A very different now than I'd wanted, but a perfectly valid, honest, and significant now just the same. I had to rebuild from the ground up. And I did. Because that's what I do. I've been taken down before, and I get up every time. Because what's the alternative?

I'm a little thing: petite, soft-spoken, and kind-hearted. But I'm tougher than I look. Beneath my lofty standards for myself, my perfectionist nature where I exceed every goal without troubling another soul, lies a very hard, stubborn core. I know who I am. I always have. And sometimes, when I wish I could be somebody else, someone braver or more social or more forgiving or less likely to be taken advantage of when I'm in an overly generous mood, being who I am feels like a liability. I'm stuck, you see. And this inability to morph into someone shinier and more impressive than who I am, who I've always been, this flaw of mine? It turns out it's actually my greatest strength. That has been my real journey these past few years. Learning that who I am, right now, flaws and all, is enough.

It started with being alone. I hadn't been single since I was sixteen years old. I'm not afraid of being alone. I like my own company. It just happened that way. As one relationship ended, a new one bloomed, over and over, my whole adult life. But not after my divorce. For the first time in decades, I was alone. I spent a year scrambling to care for two young kids and trying to remember who I was without a partner in life. Then I spent a year in a relationship where at some point I lost myself again. Then I spent another year alone, remembering all over again. It wasn't a fun time. But it served a purpose. Because after the house of your hopes and dreams blows down, you have to rebuild it. And if you build it alone, you get to design it to suit you above all others. I had never done that before. Built my life around me. It was hard and scary and involved a lot of sleepless nights worrying about the future that I couldn't see anymore. And it was amazing and promising and full of infinite possibilities as well. Who would I choose to be, if I could choose to be anyone, without anyone else's input? I'd choose me. Just as I am.

So I did. I let my kids in on a little secret: that I wasn't perfect, that I didn't have all the answers, that I was making it up as I went along. And a very cool thing happened. My oldest, a perfectionist herself, relaxed her ridiculously high standards, just a little. My youngest, even a shade more stubborn than her mother, stopped digging in quite so deep and hard whenever she was challenged. And we laughed, and we cuddled, and we told each other stories, and we made messes and cleaned them up, and we hurt each other's feelings and apologized and forgave one another. And we dreamed up limitless futures of endless possibilities together. 

And I wrote. I wrote every thought in my head down, because without a partner to tell it all to, I had no choice. I wrote a book-length journal about the failure of my marriage, as I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. I wrote stories about heartbreak. Novel attempts about loss. I wrote blog posts about single-motherhood. I put it all on paper, because that's also who I am, who I've always been. A writer, in secret, afraid to own the title. Worried that I wasn't worthy of it somehow.

But in my new house, built just for me, I let those worries go. It wasn't about anyone else, my writing. It was me putting my heart into words. And as soon as I stopped writing to please anyone but myself, I finally had it. A book worthy of an agent, a book deal, a new career.

I'm still learning, still faltering, still making mistakes as I stumble along. And still dreaming of bigger, better futures. I'm still building my house, filling it with myself, owning who I am.

And I can see now how many of us are doing the same thing. Struggling with the idea that we need to be bolder or more successful or funnier, sharper or more sophisticated to get the approval we so desire from those around us. So as this new year rolls out before us, I wanted to share with you what I've learned, and what I personally think of you. That right now, the person you are today, you are already enough. The next step isn't chasing some better version of yourself. It's owning who you already are. Loving that person. Giving him or her a house, or a room, or any safe place, to simply be.  You are enough.

Vision

So, it's 2014. This is the year I've been waiting for. My vision-board-come-true year. Just over a year ago my sister, dad, step-mom, kids, and I got together with a stack of poster boards and a heap of magazines to make our first vision boards. Mine sits on my desk just behind my computer, where I see it every day as I work: Hawaii images, yoga poses, chocolate, coffee, lavender bouquets, and Ganesha, the patron of letters, who keeps me company as I write. Scattered throughout are words like breathe, play, success, wellness, and joy. I put all of my dreams up there, too: agent, publishing contract, travel, balance. And as the year went on I had to keep adding new words, because the wishes all started coming true. I got an agent. I got a publishing contract. I got two trips to Hawaii. I found balance. The board, now framed, still sits in front of me at my desk, a reminder of how far I've come, how much possibility still lies before me.

I've always been a pragmatic dreamer, which means that I daydream up these outlandish notions of where my life could go, all the while working like hell to make a dent in whatever pile of work I've given myself for the day. I rarely need to be pushed by anyone, I drive myself harder than anyone else ever would. This is a great attitude to have when trying to get published. Keep dreaming that it's possible, but never lose focus on the blank page in front of you. Keep coming at it until you get it right. Most days I still have the same attitude. I am aware that I have a novel coming out in six months, which is so ridiculously exciting that I can barely sleep if I think about it too much, but I also know that if I spend too much time thinking about it I'll be too distracted to write more novels. And I want to write more novels. Tons of them.

It also helps to have young children. Nothing keeps you humble like two kids doing cartwheels and walkovers in your office, asking an endless stream of questions about when they were babies, how exactly you chose their name, why there are so many irregular verbs in English, whether they can have a pet chinchilla. My seven-year-old likes to read my writing notes over my shoulder and question every one of them: "But why does she want to move? I think if she liked her house she wouldn't want to leave. Maybe you need to write something about why she doesn't like her old house anymore." My eight-year-old sometimes comes downstairs at midnight and tells me to go to bed. She knows as well as I do that sleeping in is not part of a single mom's life.

My girls have been off school a lot lately. A week for Thanksgiving, a week in Hawaii to celebrate my book deal, then two weeks off for winter break. I haven't gotten a lot of writing done in the past six weeks, and I miss it. But I've gotten to spend a lot of mornings with my girls, sipping coffee while watching them play. They have vivid imaginations and create elaborate games that involve singing, dancing, drawing, creating new forms of currency, granting wishes, punishing evil-doers, and traveling the world. They are my blank page, too.

I already know that this is going to be a great year. The one when I finally see my name on the cover of a novel. The one when I finally take the leap to author. My girls will continue to grow taller and master new gymnastics skills and learn new things and wake me up way too early on Saturday mornings. I expect it to be my best year yet. Maybe it's time to make a new vision board, and dream up some even bigger dreams.

The Call

It happened today. I got the call. Writers talk about "getting the call" like it's some mythical thing, a fairy godmother moment when all of your dreams magically come true. Because it is.

Today my agent, the passionate, brilliant, patient mentor of my dreams, Harvey Klinger, called me to say that my novel revisions are done, my book is ready, and he's going to start sending it out to acquisitions editors at publishing houses. Today I am not just a writer who locks herself up in her office for 5 hours every day and pours her heart onto a blank page hoping someday someone out there will care to read a few words of it. Today is the day I take the next step.

It's been a long journey, to say the least. I started writing short stories when I was 8, after a student-teacher visited my fourth grade class and gave us the first paragraph of a story, and an assignment to write an ending for it. We were supposed to add a paragraph or two. Four pages later, I had discovered a passion I never knew was there. So I wrote, almost daily, from then on. Occasionally I showed a story to my mother or sister, but rarely anyone else. Writing was a private thing for me, best done by flashlight in a journal after I was supposed to be asleep.

I had awesome English teachers in both junior high and high school (let's raise a toast to public school teachers who can reach through the bureaucracy to inspire kids!). These teachers recognized a glimmer of talent in the super shy petite girl who never raised her hand or spoke above a whisper. They made me read my papers aloud to the class as examples of good writing. They made me believe in myself and stop thinking of writing as purely a private thing.

On the encouragement of those teachers, I went to college as a writing major, where I learned to love writing workshops and critique groups and hanging out with other writers who were crazy talented and chasing the same big dream. I generated a ton of writing in college, but I never tried to publish any of it. That still seemed like something for other, better writers, not me.

But from the moment I finished college, I missed it. The camaraderie of writers. I lucked into an editing job with no editing training. I loved my job, but it was mostly correcting grammar and drafting department newsletters and brochures, and it didn't feed my creative writing side. So I decided to go to grad school, to immerse myself back into the stew of writers taking risks and pushing themselves and dreaming big. It was a hard two years. I was in the middle of a divorce which I insisted on doing myself, because why hire a lawyer to do a bunch of paperwork I could do myself? I was working full-time and going to school full-time, leaving me with about thirty seconds of down time each day. I gave up eating and sleeping and TV and movies and seeing friends and family. I came down with mono and refused to miss a single class because I had no free time to make up missed assignments. And I loved every minute of it. I was in workshops with some of the most talented writers I'd ever seen. I was inspired by them, pushed by them, and I stretched and grew as a writer.

And then I graduated: exhilarated, exhausted, totally burnt out, and took a break. I got remarried. I had kids. I settled into the life of a mom and wife first and foremost. Writing became a sometimes-hobby, not a passion. I squeezed it in around the edges, never giving it my full attention. I was freelance-editing from home while caring for two kids a year and a half apart, two babies at once, really, with a husband who was gone a lot for work. I was exhausted, sleep-deprived, friend-deprived, passion-deprived. And as it all slowly began to unravel, the marriage and the life I thought I'd always wanted, I realized the only thing that had always made me 100% happy was writing. And I wasn't writing.

I started again. Small at first. A couple of hours a couple times a week. Short stories and outlines for books and random scenes for screenplays. I wrote my first (terrible) novel that none of you will ever see, but I learned a lot in the process. I took a risk and started submitting short stories. My first story was a finalist for a Glimmer Train contest. That's not a small thing, but I didn't know it at the time. I just thought: wow, recognition is great! And it lit a fire, and it made me happy, every second of every day that I spent writing eclipsed the sadness of my failing marriage and doubts about my skills as a frequently-solo mother. So I kept at it. Writing, submitting, writing, submitting. I made a choice, to pursue writing with all that I had, to pour every feeling that I had bottled up inside onto the page. Writing is a solitary thing, and one of the hard things about my life was that I was alone too much, always with kids in tow, but without enough grown-up friends or family around to remind me of who I was aside from a mom. Writing became that friend. And then a funny thing happened. The joy that writing gave me opened me back up, and suddenly I had a whole slew of great new friends who knew me as a writer and not just a mom. And then I began to see myself that way.

My kids know that I'm a writer. When people ask them what I do, they are quick to say "My mom's a writer." It took me years to own that label, to introduce myself to people as a writer. Even after getting published, I had only ever earned income as an editor. How could I call myself a writer? Even after getting award recognition for a novel, I was reluctant to use the term. Even though I was spending hours each day writing, I had trouble owning it.

So that's the big difference that getting the call makes. I still earn my income editing other writers' maniscripts. But now, now I feel like I can own that "Writer" label with pride. Now I have people in the business who know a lot more about writing and publishing than I do calling me a writer. Now I have a voicemail that I will save forever from the best agent ever telling me: "You did it. You're ready." That was the call. And it's changed everything.

Dream-Chasers

This whole crazy journey I'm on started when I was about my daughter's age, and had no idea I was even on a journey. I wrote my first short story when I was 8 or 9, and never looked back. I wrote from then on, without even thinking about why. At first I just wrote stories for my sister and step-sister, made them characters in adventures, because while they were hogging the Atari controls, I had nothing better to do. They were experts at Pong and Combat, and I was figuring out the art of storytelling. It was no big deal. Except that it got into my bones somehow, the need to write, to make up stories, to move people with words. By high school I knew that I wanted to be a writer, without having any idea what that meant. Did writing even count as a job? I had plenty of naysayers to inform me that, no, it did not. Writing was a skill all adults needed. It was a fine hobby. It didn't count as a career. But one thing about me: I'm ridiculously stubborn. I mean, most of the time I'm easy-going. I don't care where we go for dinner or what movie you want to see. I'm flexible on that stuff. But when someone tells me I can't do something that I really want to do, that easy-going nature disappears. Give me something to prove or disprove, and you get a whole different girl.

So I went to college and got a degree in creative writing. I loved my program, my professors, my fellow aspiring-writer students. I loved everything except the way everyone kept saying "Yes, but what will you do for a living? A writing degree won't get you a job." So I got stubborn about that, too, and only applied for writing-related jobs. And got one. I started out as an assistant editor just after graduating college. By the time I decided to go to grad school to earn yet another writing degree I was an editor. By the time I finished my master's degree, I was a senior editor. A senior editor with an MFA in creative writing and a head full of epic dreams of publishing novels. But no idea how to make that dream come true.

I started with short stories. I wrote one after another until I felt like they weren't grappling with me for ultimate control anymore. I started sending them out, and got some award recognition, and then I started getting published. I crafted and recrafted them until I'd published almost all of them. I tried my hand at novels, fighting the unyielding beast until I'd figured out the form, the arc, the pacing, the character development, the heart. The first novel I ever dared show the world was a semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I figured I was on the right track. But as I sent that book out to literary agents, I knew something about it wasn't right yet. I started a new novel, with a better understanding of what worked and what didn't. I finished it in a few months, quickly revised it with the help of awesome beta readers, and sent it out to a handful of literary agents. And one of them loved it. A huge agent. One of the big dogs.

So here I am. We're in the revision stage now, where my agent, the amazing Harvey Klinger, sends me challenges for each section of the novel, to make it stronger, deeper, more compelling. He is helping me find the heart of this story, and he is an amazing mentor. I wake up in the middle of the night so excited to wake up and write that I can't go back to sleep. I get up each morning so thrilled with my life that it's ridiculous.

And then I get my girls up, make their breakfast and school lunches, drive them to school, volunteer in their classes, all before getting to tackle those pages that have been calling to me since the moment I woke up. And that is perfect. Because being a writer is my passion, no doubt. But being a mother is just as important. And my joy at being this close to seeing my lifelong dream come true is twice as meaningful because of my daughters. I want them to see this happen for me. I want them to remember back when I got my first story published and we celebrated with sparking cider and cookies. I want them to remember the early versions of my short stories that I read aloud as I worked out the kinks. I want them to remember a mom who had a ridiculously huge dream, the kind that is so big that it shouldn't be possible, and I want them to remember the moment when it came true. I want them to dream their own big, huge, ridiculously impossible dreams, and to know in their bones that with passion, persistence, discipline, and focus they can have it, whatever it is. I want them to be unaffected by naysayers, because they know better. I want this dream for myself, as I have always wanted it. But I want it even more for my daughters.