Don’t Expect Fireworks
I originally wrote this post almost a year ago to commemorate the launch of my website and what I believed was the inevitable beginning of a meteoric rise to fame and recognition.
I shared what I imagined at the time was very sage advice about the nature of change and smugly pointed my nonexistent readers toward my own triumphant experience as proof.
Reading through it now, a year older, with my naivety thoroughly tamped down by the realities of life, I thought it deserved a different ending.
One I wasn’t ready to accept at the time.
The day I launched my website came on the heels of some of the most difficult years of my life, after a crushing breakup, some unfortunate health problems, and a desperate need to make all the pain I was feeling mean something.
Years marked by intense insecurity, to the point where I averted my gaze when passing mirrors, anxiety attacks while doing something as simple as walking across my college campus, and months of self-imposed isolation, where I sat in front of my laptop from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, neglecting sustenance and human connection for a dream I was rapidly losing sight of.
Until the day finally came.
What I felt was the victorious culmination of countless hours of devotion.
The day I launched my author website with my measly collection of beginner poems that had been rejected at least a dozen times apiece.
And there I sat alone in a dark room, having drawn the curtains on my life and pushed away everyone I knew, believing that everything would be set right now that I had destroyed every good thing around me to get my subpar poetry out into a world that didn’t care to begin with.
That somehow, because I had taken the first shaky step in my writing career, much like a newborn fawn, I would magically come to love myself, and every harsh word I’d spoken to the people who love me would dissolve cleanly into the air.
That all the wrongs would be righted, everything lost returned to me tenfold.
That I would be happy because I finally tried to be, even if it was in my own demented, neurotic way.
How wrong I was.
I write this in retrospect, of course. And it is hard for me to be angry at that younger, lost version of myself, who just wanted so badly a single, sweeping solution to a life that had spiraled out of his control.
For whom it was easier to exist in a state of tunnel vision, fervently hoping that if he could just reach that pinprick of light at the end of it, he would wind up somewhere beautiful.
If my younger self stood before me now, I would not berate him for his shortcomings or his misguided attempts at happiness.
I would step forward and wrap him tightly in the hug I know he needed far more than a successful writing career.
