Category: personal growth

Rail to Your Friends

I got my first literary rejection the other day.

Tl;dr: On the 3rd of July I came up with a poem I called “Donald Trump Sings America,” I submitted it almost on a whim to an online humor magazine, it was I think rightly rejected, the entire thing took place in the span of one afternoon, and I have some emotions to sort out about it (that’s the tl;dr part).

Here is the poem:

Donald Trump Sings America

Oh beautiful, forsake it, I’m
Bored. Anger’s how we gain!
For fakers, Haters, refugees:
Go home, you’re super Lame!
America! AMERICA!
God’s dead, your Face is me
So crown me Good
White Brotherhood
From ME to shining ME

I have mixed emotions about the poem. Unlike the stuff I’ve been putting on this blog, which I’m pretty satisfied with, I was (and am) slightly bothered by it. “Anger’s how we gain!” sounds like nothing anyone would ever say, also I’m not sure that Trump modifies with “super,” that’s more my generation’s word, and I doubt “forsake” is in his vocabulary (what is being forsaken, exactly?). “God’s dead” is maybe too dark and overloaded. The third line doesn’t come close to evoking the sounds of “purple mountains,” which was kind of the whole point.

But maybe that wasn’t the whole point. And “forsake it” and “God’s dead” could work, in their own ways, if you squinted. Maybe the piece was successful despite these problems. I wasn’t sure, until it was rejected. Overall, the concept had a certain charm to it, and the execution had its moments, I thought. Maybe it would resonate with people. I really had no idea. I guess I still don’t, which is probably a feeling I’ll have to get used to.

The poem’s inception was delightfully serendipitous, and I lived in that mood until I hit “send” and my piece was whisked away on the same creative breeze that had brought it to me. I’d been sitting in my living room, thinking about the 4th of July. I had the misinformed notion that it was the 100-year anniversary of “America the Beautiful,” because I’d seen a headline in an alert on my phone that I must have misread. As I sang the song in my mind I thought about how “for spacious” could sound like “forsaken,” and then the idea came to me. At first the poem contained more direct rhymes with each word in the original song, completely unpublishable stuff like “Unglove my putrid pain.” Then I looked at a rhyming dictionary (sue me), and I spent some time, maybe a few hours, maybe less, editing and trying to get the concept across better, though I couldn’t come up with anything relevant that rhymed with “purple mountains.”

With “White Brotherhood,” I had just left the original line until I suddenly looked at it a different way. When I came up with that, I was like, ooh, this is good.

So then I thought, maybe this is funny and I should put it…somewhere, as my comment about 4th of July. But it didn’t convey what I actually felt about the holiday, and anyway I didn’t really want to upset people. Such a Facebook post would be uncharacteristic and need explanation; it might have been good for Twitter, but I don’t tweet. And it didn’t feel right for my blog, either.

Then I remembered this humor site I occasionally read (present tense!), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, which has an irreverent and politically liberal sense of humor and publishes a lot of shorter pieces. Sort of like New Yorker cartoons, some make me laugh out loud; some I find clever but not very provocative; some make me feel unhip and uneducated and annoyed about this, the way many Americans must feel about everything in The New Yorker; and some I don’t think are that funny.

Still, I would love to be published there, and at times think to myself, maybe I should try to write a humor piece. Then I wait for a funny thought to occur, and then I start writing about something else. Now, I decided I was going about it the right way — I’d had a funny thought, and then I’d remembered how to publish it. But I had to do so quickly, since this was about the 4th of July and the song anniversary. I remembered that the McSweeney submissions page had said something about Timely submissions.

The McSweeney submissions page is intimidating, in a literary and clever way that insists it isn’t trying to be intimidating, but rather to be funny, friendly, and precise. The tone is that the editors are frustrated with the massive volume of incorrect submissions they receive, but they are simultaneously above being frustrated, and poking ironic fun at the position they find themselves in of frustrated editorial staff. One rule reads, “If you submit a piece of writing intended for the magazine to the web-submissions address, you will confuse us, and if you confuse us, we will accidentally delete your work without reading it, and then we will laugh and never give it another moment’s thought, and we will sleep the carefree sleep of young children.” The subtext is that if you don’t find this funny and charming, you probably shouldn’t be submitting, because you’re the type of person who makes the submission process more difficult for everyone and, on top of it, takes everything personally.

I tried to make sure I read all the rules. First, I saw the part about Timely submissions concerning the current news, which I’d already basically read in the past and decided my poem fit into, so I didn’t quite digest the the words “news of the past 24- to 48-hours,” which might have given me some pause, since my poem was about the future.

I continued on:

SOME REASONS WE MIGHT SEND BACK OR DISLIKE YOUR SUBMISSION

The following features do not necessarily disqualify any submission guilty of one or more of them, but they do not help one’s cause:

Your submission was of the poetry type.

Your submission was too long.

Your submission included the words “these days” or “nowadays.”

Your submission did not take place in a jungle.

...

(The jungle line is an example of something I don’t get.) Ok, my “song” was sort of a poem, this was maybe a problem, but I felt like I’d read poetry on their site before. (Later, as I was reading more of the site’s archives and realizing soberly how witty and well-developed the content was, I indeed found a series of limericks about philosophers, and an iambic pentameter scene called “Guildenstern and Rosencrantz and Hall and Oates.”) Further on in the rules, I read again “POETRY: We’re not considering poetry at this time.” But was my piece really poetry? It was more of a concept. It could have just as easily been written as a paragraph. Also, why did the rules contradict themselves — in one, poetry did “not necessarily disqualify,” but in the other, poetry was not wanted? There was clearly a gray area. I started drafting my email.

I appended my poem(?) with a note: “Sorry, I realize this is kind of poetry, but it’s short so hopefully not too much a waste of your time to read.” Then, I had at first written “Timely because of the 100th anniversary,” but I paused mid-sentence to verify that claim, and realized that the song was written in 1910 and there wasn’t really any Google News about it whatsoever. Shaken, I wrote, “Timely because of the 4th,” somewhat pathetically. I still thought it was Timely; I couldn’t really imagine it playing as well if it wasn’t published tomorrow. “Thanks so much for considering,” I added, which of course I meant. It’s really amazing that you can submit something and a real person reads it.

Another reason they might send back or dislike (is there a difference?) your submission: “Your submission was about being rejected by a literary magazine or website, such as the one’s [sic] whose guidelines you are currently reading.” Another section reads that if you don’t hear back from them, you should “Rail to your friends about the callous insensitivity of free, Web-based content outlets to the needs and feelings of writers. Vow the most thorough and satisfying of revenges.”

The submissions guidelines even have a way of making me feel super Lame about writing this blog post. [sic] burn though, right?

I didn’t really believe my poem would be published. I had mixed feelings about it, and it had been the work of a few hours. Yet, the reason you submit something is because you believe it could, maybe, possibly, deserve to be published. So there was, in fact, a small part of me that believed that my poem might, suddenly and very soon, go from my brain to the pages of the internet. From there, I saw it going viral, of course. I saw hate mail, since I’d included my email per the rules, and my real name per no good reason. People in red hats would be looking me up online and finding my blog and maybe where I live, since (contrary to what my fiancé insists is “just basic probability”) there is definitely only one Paige Dunn-Rankin in the world, and it’s me.

I noticed that my throat was thumping with my heartbeat. In fact my whole shoulder area, awkwardly nestled between the two back couch cushions, was throbbing. I must have had too much caffeine today, I thought, and not enough water.

A few hours later, the editor wrote back “Hi Paige — It’s a pass, but thanks for the look! Best, X.” It was amazing to hear back so quickly (I’m still waiting to hear the fate of a story at 3 different places, which I submitted about 7 weeks ago, and that’s very typical). I thought it was a great reply: simple, friendly, somehow positive. I wasn’t crushed when I read it, I wasn’t surprised, in fact my overall feeling was relief. I was also proud of myself. I think Eleanor Roosevelt said to do something that scares you every day? I’ve been doing that more and more, maybe not daily but with much greater frequency than I can ever recall in my life. Realizing that the things that scare you aren’t actually terrible, and in fact they’re worth doing, hasn’t stopped feeling revelatory. (Although I think that quote should have really clarified: “something you’ve been wanting to do, that scares you.”)

Still, “thanks for the look!” kept running through my head as I made myself some lunch and thought about what I would be writing for the rest of the day. I didn’t really feel like writing. I felt tense, and my face was hot.

Could “thanks for the look!” mean that they’d enjoyed it even slightly (but then wouldn’t they have said that)? If they’d really rejected it because it was a poem, would they have told me? Did that mean that they’d rejected it because it was bad first, poem second? Or did “thanks for the look!” mean they agreed it probably had been worth submitting, just didn’t quite meet the bar? I knew how silly it was to read into this line (An automated email following my submission had said “You can expect a short, quick, and unintentionally curt yay or nay soon”), but I was still doing it.

I read my poem again and felt the cloud of “nay.” “Anger’s how we gain!” didn’t just sound imperfect anymore, it sounded stupid. And yet — “thanks for the look!” — there were still parts of the poem I liked. Was I going to let one rejection convince me the poem was no good? But it was too on-the-nose, for sure. Too one-note. I’d suspected as much, and my suspicions were confirmed.

I was so confused and embarrassed for thinking the poem had been worth submitting that I didn’t tell a soul. I was simultaneously frustrated at myself for being so sensitive about what was, essentially, the most lite form of rejection I could ever expect as a writer. I wanted to get my thoughts right. These posts are the best help I know; there’s something about writing publicly under my name that keeps me honest and fair.

I guess now what I have toward the poem it is a kind of fondness, for something misshapen and interesting and not my best attempt. I still don’t regret submitting it. Because I did, I have a new respect, and perspective, for the emotions that come with.

I think the takeaway is — keep submitting. It’s the only way. Maybe I don’t have the makeup to be a Timely humor writer; I think I need to let things simmer a bit, make sure I have some distance to assess and decide to proudly stand behind my work, because then I won’t feel so affected by another’s opinion. Although I think that’s very hard either way. But it’ll get easier, for sure.

And there’s nothing wrong with testing the waters. I guess that’s what I was doing, without really knowing it. Dipping a toe so I could draw a quick breath at the cold. And dive in anyway.

So You Asked About My Life Coach

I switched on the TV shortly after talking with my life coach, Kristin Brabant. A network sitcom I don’t watch was playing.

“My life coach said those are my ‘strongs,’” a woman was saying, the camera all up in her face as she smiled defiantly. She twitched like she was getting ready to enter the ring.

“Your strongs?” Her husband raised his eyebrows and ate a spoonful of cereal.

“Yeah, we don’t like to say ‘strengths.’” Why was unclear. “And instead of weaknesses, we say ‘stretches’.” (This was at least a little funny.)

“So what did she say your new career should be?”

“A…life coach!” There was a crazed look behind her glasses now.

“Your life coach said…you should become…a life coach?” Over the laugh track, her husband indulged her slowly, like he was speaking to a child. I will note that both life coach and life coach-ee were women in this scenario.

“Well, life coaches need a lot of empathy, and empathy is one of my strongs.” To her husband’s dismissive look, she said with finality, “And empathy seems to be one of your stretches.” End scene.

I couldn’t believe I’d just happened to flip on the TV to hear dumb jokes about a service I’m paying for and finding extremely useful. Except, I could believe it. I’ve been tempted to roll my eyes at the idea of a life coach, too. And now that I have one, I’ve met occasionally with judgment, and more often with my own anticipation of judgment. I try not to mention my life coach, and if it comes up, my explanations feel defensive or shy. That’s why I’m writing this post, to say once and for all what I truly feel about the matter, since I’m not great at thinking under pressure.

I found Kristin, the coach, by accident. It started with a silly video — sent via Facebook message by Kristin, the friend, about six months ago. I burst into laughter when I saw the two of us dancing like fools to “Single Ladies” in front of her Macbook’s webcam. She’d randomly come across it and been transported, as I now was, to our time as undergrads at Berkeley almost a decade ago.

Kristin and I shared an apartment for a semester, our beds almost touching because we both insisted on fulls in a room meant for twins. We sort of lost touch after she traveled to Costa Rica to study abroad and was replaced by a new roommate who was there less often. The last time we were good friends was when I went to her 21st birthday party, at a gay bar in the Castro — the most fun dancing. She was always a great dancer; in the video, it’s hilarious to watch me aping her moves. We both had long-term and long-distance boyfriends whom we cried over and eventually broke up with. We appreciated each other’s jokes. We both, I think, harbored a crush on our next-door neighbor. For some reason, I remember thinking that we were just too similar to live together — I know we butted heads over things, but now it’s hard for me to remember what they were. I’m sure Kristin cared more about the state of our bathroom than I did. My boyfriend probably visited too often. Mostly, I think we just didn’t get to spend enough time being friends instead of girls trying to figure out how to share a tiny room.

In any case, I was glad to hear from Kristin, as I always was — we’d found ourselves living in the same city after college, and occasionally caught up over a drink. I went to her beach bonfire birthday one year and had a great time with her crew, singing and laughing and drinking, blanket-wrapped in the warm glow. I once invited her to a party because I thought the crowd was weird and wanted company (come to think of it, this type of behavior might have had something to do with why we weren’t closer) — she actually came, and made such an impression that a few people fell in love with her. Kristin is beautiful and charming, with a sassy, smart energy. Every time we met, she’d make me laugh buckets; she’s a natural storyteller. And she’d always leave me high on the energy that comes from being well listened to.

That old video Kristin sent me — both of us wearing sunglasses indoors, mugging for the camera — spurred another one of our infrequent meetings. As usual, we had loads of updates for each other. I had gotten engaged only the weekend before, to the guy I’d just started dating the last time I saw Kristin. Now I was visiting her beautiful new apartment, she was a vegan (I thought this was new, but she and so many other people around me had always eaten so healthily that I couldn’t be sure), and she’d made a big move to start her own life coaching business. I was impressed. I didn’t know much about life coaches; about as much as the average sitcom viewer, I guess. And while I might have judged someone for having a coach at that time, I (perhaps irrationally) wouldn’t have judged someone for being a life coach — and definitely not Kristin. I remembered her work in college, supporting underprivileged high schoolers. She’d done a project (ahead of its time, I think!) where she gave away free hugs on our campus’s main thoroughfare. And her previous jobs were in teaching and mentorship.

I came back from that dinner and told my fiancé about Kristin’s new endeavor. In his typical wise and plain-spoken way, he remarked, “Well, it’s nice that you already know someone who’s a good life coach.” He never suggested I look into it — he’s much too polite to have even been thinking that, and anyway I’d adamantly refused the slightest suggestion of “seeing someone” when I was having anxiety issues at my former job. But his comment stuck with me.

Thinking back to our dinner, I realized it had given me a taste of what it would be like to have Kristin as my life coach. I’d told her about my recent departure from my job as a product manager in tech, and the options I was looking into: law school, finding another product management job, and trying to…“become a writer.”

“Your body language completely changed,” she told me after I was done talking about how maybe I could make another PM job work. She pointed out that my shoulders were hunched, my body turned inward. With writing, though, she instantly perceived and returned my own excitement. How amazing that I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid! She encouraged me to reach out to acquaintances who are writers (something that we ended up having to work on for six months, since I was terrified). She recommended a few books — You Are a Badass and The War of Art.

I bought Jen Sincero’s book the next day — I’d noticed it on my fiancé’s audiobook queue, so I figured it had two stamps of approval — and I devoured it before the week was over. It was exhilarating, and a balm for the feeling of ennui that had surrounded me in the past few months of playing video games and wondering what could possibly come next. As I read Jen’s writing, I kept hearing Kristin’s voice — they’re both funny, sharp, and spiritual young women. Jen explains at the end of the book that the best thing you can do to continue to invest in your growth is to get a coach. I remembered Kristin told me she had one herself, who was helping her as she struck out on her own and built her new business.

I thought about my fiancé’s comment. What did I have to lose? I had some savings in the bank, and in the worst case of it not working, Kristin and I would go back to rarely seeing each other. As I guessed, and as it turned out, I had so much more to gain.

I could tell you very specifically about the things Kristin has worked on with me. She’s helped me realize what I want, and set goals to get it, goals which have become, through her gentle help, more realistic over time (“writing a novel” became “submitting a short story to a few contests for unpublished writers”). She’s taught me about the different energy levels (basically, states of mind) that we can access when dealing with stressful situations. “Energy leadership” set off my skepticism at first, but it quickly made a lot of sense to me, in theory and in practice. We haven’t really talked about strengths and weaknesses — and even to my untrained eye that doesn’t seem like the best thing to focus on. Instead we’ve talked about my core values, and how I am or am not living in integrity.

I could also tell you what she’s helped me achieve: the time that I wrote 10,000 words in a week because the consequence was having to donate $200 to a political cause I don’t believe in. (It feels like ages ago that we had to resort to such medieval methods.) The short story that I did submit to several contests (Kristin’s idea — the deadline being extremely helpful). The blog I started, which I hesitated on for weeks because I couldn’t think of a good name — Kristin convinced me that paigedunnrankin.com was good enough, and it was. When I shared my writing with my family, for me a necessary first step to sharing it more broadly, it was because Kristin helped me let go of any fears, however irrational those fears turned out to be. I’m now starting to look at what it could be like to have a career where I write (just about every way you can interpret that), and it’s incredibly reassuring to know that Kristin will be there.

Maybe I could have learned and done these things myself. Just like how someone who hires a personal trainer at the gym could have read up on exercises, motivated themselves (!), occasionally asked a friend to spot them, and gotten into shape. If you’ve tried to do this without help, you know how hard it is. And if you’ve ever worked out with a great personal trainer, you know the difference — even expecting to check in regularly with that person, or being able to call them when you have a question or a success to report, goes a long way. Not to mention all the things they see in your tendencies and your technique that you’ve missed. Someone professional has my back as I face the struggles and fears that come along with figuring out my life, and just because that’s more nebulous than physical fitness doesn’t mean it’s silly or indulgent. If anything, it’s that much more important.

And I think it’s important to change the message I picked up, that I saw echoed in that sitcom, which is: by all means, get a personal trainer, get a coach for your golf game or grades, but a life coach? Getting help living in alignment with your values, choosing work that you care about, and achieving balance and happiness? You’d better keep that one to yourself, for now.

Now, a life coach isn’t cheap. Over six months, I’ve paid Kristin what it would cost my fiancé and I to go on a nice vacation. And there may be a time when I decide — Kristin and I were open about this at the beginning — that I could get more value out of putting that money elsewhere. But I couldn’t be happier with my decision. And I want to keep speaking up over the laugh track that maybe exists mostly in my head, but exists all the same.

Kristin and I are closer now, a happy consequence of sharing our gifts with each other (mostly, hers with me). My respect and love for her keeps growing. If anything I’ve written has made you wonder if you could use a life coach, do check her out at www.kristinbrabant.com.

Truth and Fiction

The very first short story I finished after leaving my job to “become a writer” was about a young father whose daughter becomes obsessed with a present he’s gotten her, a virtual reality best friend. The dad becomes obsessed with the knowledge the virtual friend is learning and logging from his daughter and her environment.

Despite what I felt was an interesting premise, the story failed to come together in any way that satisfied me. I’d set out to write about the ways that technology is diving generations — wondering, what kinds of things will our future kids play with that we won’t understand?, landing on VR, which is something that had already made me feel old and alienated, when it became the cool thing to work on among my friends and colleagues while completely failing to interest me. I ended up writing about this dad’s lack of compassion and his pathetic confusion about technology. Because I have never been friends with or even I think known a young divorced dad (to up the stakes and eliminate the number of characters I had to deal with, I made him divorced), I guessed that he would be feeling mean-spirited towards his ex-wife and jealous of her new boyfriend. Because I haven’t spent much time around children, the daughter was always either saying something cute or throwing a tantrum. I had no idea how to describe her interactions with the virtual friend — the very generational gap that I was trying to write about — because virtual reality interested me so little that I didn’t even have the willpower to research how this might work.

Finishing the story felt like finishing a sports game that you know you are going to lose. I pushed the dad towards some kind of epiphany…he cuddled his daughter and removed the virtual reality glasses from her room. “Main character is not likable,” I wrote in my notes. “Look into how VR actually works.” It took me a few more months, a few more failed story attempts, to realize that I’d rigged the game against myself from the start.

Next, I wrote a story about another put-upon man, a software engineer whose team is responsible for a bug that caused a fatal self-driving vehicle crash. This idea was taken from the headlines. I’d come up with a great title: “Post-mortem,” the name of the document we had to write whenever something went terribly wrong on a product at work, only in my story, it obviously also referred to the real death that had happened. The death — that was the problem. I thought I needed to write about something dramatic and important, to discuss tech companies’ great power and responsibility, but I had no idea how to actually deal with the death in a way that felt realistic. My main character’s tears felt insincere; his manager’s whip-cracking did, too.

I tried to picture my former tech leads in the main character’s situation, struggling to find and fix the bug. But I could only recall the ways they acted around me in (less) stressful situations — what happened between them and their monitors had been, mostly, a mystery. And so it remained in my story. My character banged his head on the keys and the code went blurry in front of his eyes, and so on. As the story meandered, sometimes into truthful situations full of details I remembered from office life, I finally had a mysterious stranger come and fix the bug for everyone, and my main character took a new job. I could feel it; another defeat.

I talked about my dissatisfaction with my life coach, who was helping me achieve the life goal I murkily and emotionally announced during our initial conversation: “to create something I was proud of.” She encouraged me to celebrate finishing stories, to show my writing to others, and above all to call myself a writer, something she dubbed “acting as if.” But I wasn’t a writer. Not yet. Would someone call themselves a painter, if they set out to paint a scene realistically, and then the trees came out blobby and the perspective was all wrong? “How will you know when you’re ready?” she asked me; or, of the work, “How will you know when it’s ready?” I was frustrated with the implication that I was being difficult to please, that if I couldn’t be satisfied with my progress so far, I might never be satisfied. I knew that if I wrote a good enough story, I would recognize it, the same way that as a beginning baker, I still recognized a decent loaf of bread from a flat and dense mess that had to be thrown away. “I’ll know when I know,” I said. “I’ll know when I feel like it’s right.”

I was journaling the whole time, getting to know the small voice inside my head, the voice of a young woman. A few of the books I was reading had encouraged me to write about memories, and though I was convinced I’d had a very uninteresting life, I found myself crying as I wrote about walking down to the beach with my family, or my grandmother hanging a fresh-flower lei around my neck at her house in Hawaii. Then, I wrote a speech for my grandfather’s memorial service in April — my first real writing assignment. Just talk about some memories, my mom said, and though at first I worried I wouldn’t have enough, as I sat down and focused, memories of him came flooding back, and of how I had felt as a girl.

The next time I sat down to write a story, I wrote about a young woman, sitting for a tech interview — and quickly her interior thoughts went from skin problems to getting sucked into Wikipedia browsing to riding the bus to outdoor education camp in sixth grade. There was so much emotion as she thought about that time — the excitement of being away from home amid the smell of the pines, how sad she’d been that it didn’t snow, the odd girl she’d been trying to distance herself from that year, but who ended up sharing a cabin with her anyway. What happened between them? I wasn’t sure, but I felt it was something uncomfortable, embarrassing, and confusing. Because of course something like this had happened to me. We were far from the interview now. I was writing a new story, my first true story.

In this story about camp, all the details were deeply felt, and I raced towards the ending with a sense that the truth could win. When I finished, I wasn’t sure if I had a victory or not; I thought some of the character’s choices weren’t fully explained, as if in reaching so far back, I had dropped a few essential pieces and needed to go looking for them again. The story simultaneously contained too many true things and not enough, ending up a kind of muddled reflection in which one could barely see the outline of the plot and the meaning. But for the first time, I made it to the finish line with an exhausted feeling of pride. Looking back, my speech for my grandfather was the first thing I was proud of — the real completion of my goal. But this was the first piece of fiction I was proud of, which had been my real goal.

Or was it fiction? I was afraid, as I wrote, that I was cheating by using so many things that weren’t made up. But this was also exciting, as if I was doing something illegal, seeing what I could get away with. I started another story, pulled directly from my recollection of being almost kidnapped while on a work trip in Shanghai, which I’d written in my journal months back in lieu of posting a #MeToo publicly. My last story had been based on memories of being 12; in this story, I was remembering being 22. It was much easier to remember how I’d felt and acted, but the emotions were duller, perhaps the result of too much drinking or my immature capacity for empathy. I was also creating characters from fragments of former coworkers, some of whom, unlike my elementary school classmates, I still occasionally saw and talked to. My first draft was too realistic, just because that was the only way I knew how to get it down — then I took out the details that didn’t serve the story, and merged and distorted the characters until they became new people, unattached to the real world.

This story, after several drafts, finally felt right to me — it was accurately saying something I wanted to say, something I cared about. I hadn’t known what I wanted to say when I set out to write the story — unlike in my first attempts — only that there were some emotions back in Shanghai, some unfinished business like in my story about camp, that asked me to dig deeper. And in the end the truth seemed to emerge out of getting those details and those feelings as right as I could make them. I was happy and invigorated, but confused. Sure, I had made up some things; if you figured that all memories and perspectives are “made up,” I had made up everything. But this didn’t feel like fiction to me — the way I had written stories in college from the point of view of a poor woman in Costa Rica or an artist’s muse, neither of whom I knew anything about, neither of whom I could even picture in my mind’s eye.

When I learn a new way of doing things, my first feeling is always skepticism. There’s always something foolish and ridiculous about myself, trying something so out of character. There’s often something just too obvious about this new way. In this case, I was learning to “write what you know,” which meant exactly that, and which must be the oldest piece of writing advice. I’d been resisting it for so long, justified by the fact that so many books or interviews had told me it was wrong and limiting — everyone is allowed to write about anything, and this rule can be followed too strictly, used as a way to play it safe.

But for me, writing what I knew was my artistic risk. For one thing, it involved getting a close look at myself, which I hadn’t done perhaps ever. For another, I was sure that what I’d written would reflect badly on me, and possibly hurt other people — as I started writing blog posts that were sort of about my parents, or as I handed my fiancé, my first reader, that Shanghai story, in which the main character dances dirty in a club and has a crush on an obnoxious guy.

“Just please don’t think that it’s about me,” I told him, unable to be in the same room as he read, and unable to sit still, either, scribbling in my journal. When he came over, he reassured me that was easy to think of the protagonist as someone else. Affection in his eyes told me that this pretends mattered much more to me than it mattered to him. He wasn’t mad. He liked the story.

I submitted this story to a few writing contests. As I wrote more and more truthfully, with that same fear I continue to force myself to reframe as a thrill, I gushed to my coach about my epiphany. “Acting as if,” had, in fact, been a necessary step — I had to just type every day, I had to finish a few bad stories, to figure out how to do things better. But acting as if, I was excited to report, was really no substitute for being.

Replanting

About a year ago, my boyfriend impaled himself on a metal post. We had just moved in together into a miraculously affordable bungalow with a backyard, and we were cheerfully ripping out piles and piles of invasive weeds, uncovering planter boxes and the remains of an old fence. We left the posts sticking up, small tubes about an inch or two wide with blunt ends, while we hacked and pulled our way through a mass of ivy. I’d been afraid to find snakes and rats, but there weren’t any, and after a few weekend days of hard work, we were almost done.

Then an ivy root snapped in my boyfriend’s hands, he stumbled downhill, and his armpit went down onto one of those metal posts. He came up off of it and I ran after him inside, he was saying it was probably bad, pretty bad. We somehow got his shirt off him, and he lifted his arm to show me. I thought I was prepared for something bad, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw: a huge black hole in his armpit. I almost fainted.

He became incredibly, eerily calm. Should we call an ambulance? Probably, I sobbed. I had never really driven in San Francisco, had let my license expire, and I just imagined him passing out on me on our way to the ER, as I struggled with traffic and the narrow, hilly streets outside our house — he didn’t think he was going to pass out, but he didn’t know. He apologized for not being able to drive, because he is a wonderful person.

I dialed 911 on my phone, a tester phone for my job, and it didn’t work; the operator couldn’t hear me. So I found his phone, dialed again. The ambulance would be there in five minutes. He asked me to get him a change of clothes for the hospital, and I frantically cast aside T-shirts and pants until I found what I thought might be his favorite, comfiest ones. We sat on the bench by the door. I kept telling him I loved him. He kept telling me it was going to be ok, he was going to be fine. He was mostly dreading the needles (his phobia). Oddly, the gushing blood we expected never came, not even as the first responders arrived and drew back the shirt my boyfriend was now using to press against the wound.

I thought this seemed like a great sign, but the doctors looked very concerned. They took my boyfriend into the back of the ambulance and put an oxygen mask to his mouth. One of them asked me, “Is he usually this pale?” I wasn’t sure. His chest did look pale, but was it more pale than normal? Had I even been paying attention to anything in my life? I overheard the head doctor say that they needed to go to SF General, even though my boyfriend was a Kaiser patient. SF General was the only place equipped to deal with a puncture wound to the trunk area.

I climbed into the passenger seat, and started calling family members, who answered the phone brightly; it was a pleasant surprise to hear from me. I had never had to call 911 before, much less tell people about a bad accident, but it was all very straightforward, as it turned out, which was both relieving and chilling.

When we got to the hospital, a phalanx of doctors swarmed around my boyfriend and whisked him away. I was left standing with a social worker, who had a serene face and a soothing voice, and I loved her immediately, but I was very afraid of what she was saying, and moreover what she represented. He was in the OR, and they might have to operate on him. Apparently, your armpit is right next to your lung.

The social worker led me to a small room with brown chairs, brown walls, and brown floors, and left, closing the door behind her. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so obsessed with my thoughts, so unable to think of anything but the worst outcomes, so alone. I now realize most people, past a certain age, have probably experienced their own brown room, but at a very lucky 27 years old, this was my first. I tried to text my mom, but I didn’t have service (you would hope to have service at a hospital — I blamed my tester phone again). I felt heavy with helplessness; I put my head on my knees. I was still wearing my sports bra, and my perfectly intact armpits were rank. I peeled a few sticky weeds off my yoga pants. I told myself it would be ok and I tried to believe it.

And it was ok. They didn’t have to operate. Miraculously, the post had missed all his major arteries, and hadn’t nicked his lung after all. He’d need stitches, if only because the hole was so big, and it had done a little damage to his nerves, but that would heal. The air bubbles in his chest cavity — a normal result of having a hole in your armpit — would go away on their own, although they still wanted to monitor him for six hours to make sure the bubbles didn’t make his lung collapse.

He squeezed my hand while they cleaned his wound, excruciating pain on his face, despite a hefty serving of fentanyl and his natural fortitude. He had told me, at dinner one night after we moved in together, that he really needed me; he’d told me he would probably propose within the year. “I can’t wait to marry you,” I said as he lay on the hospital bed. I really needed him too.

In the weeks that followed, I washed his armpit and replaced his gauze and made sure he took his antibiotics. When we went to Hawaii about a month later, he had healed well enough to swim in the ocean. It feels a little weird to him now when you touch his arm or hand on that side; in a more positive development, his impaled pit doesn’t really smell anymore (we think the glands got messed with, and we might be onto an innovative new procedure for bad B.O.).

The changes for me were more psychological than physical. I felt more sure about my boyfriend than ever, and I suddenly felt it was important to be sure about everything, as sure as possible — because any of the things I took for granted about my life, including my life itself, could change or disappear in an instant. Maybe this was something that my boyfriend, active and accident prone since youth, didn’t need to learn. He’s an entrepreneur, engaged with life and aware of what he wants in a way that seems to come naturally. I was the one who needed a wakeup call.

I appeared to be doing splendidly. My work provided me with a great salary, unbelievable benefits, and exotic travel opportunities. When I talked about what I did at parties, it sounded objectively interesting and important. I got to meet Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson when they filmed a movie about how crazy amazing it was to have my job.

Inside, I was sick, and barely surviving. I was wasting hours reading about other people’s relationship drama on Reddit and looking at pictures of adoptable cats and puppies I had no intention of adopting (for some reason, that was how my sickness expressed itself via the internet). My face was broken out in painful acne cysts that I poked at feverishly. I avoided talking to anyone at work more than was absolutely necessary, eating my lunch alone. I smiled and nodded and did just enough to keep afloat, all the while feeling that I could barely contain my true listless, selfish nature. Any misstep, however small, became confirmation, which cycled into guilt and avoidance, which led to more missteps.

After my boyfriend’s accident, I began to have a small, insistent feeling that what I was doing with the majority of my time was truly wrong, wasteful, and needed to stop. The feeling followed me around for a few weeks, as I explained to coworkers that I was a bit shaken up. Then I suddenly hit rock bottom.

Our team was hosting partners from another company, and I came into the engineering meeting late from unexpected traffic (a common enough occurrence that it should have been expected, but I also refused to get on the shuttle at 6 in order to get to work by 8). The complex design tradeoffs and negotiations, already underway, went over my head completely. I spent the meeting among all these well-meaning and well-informed men, confused, distracted, and feeling like a kid in class who hopes they won’t be called on — and I was never that kid. What’s more, I was supposed to be a leader on the team, the manager of the product.

As we walked back from lunch, my lead engineer asked me, very kindly, “Is everything ok? You have sad eyes.” (Picture this in a faint German accent.) I told him everything was fine, and excused myself from the meeting. I went out to a field a short walk from the office and lay under a tree in the fetal position and cried uncontrollably.

A year before this, I had gone through a similar crisis, including the fetal position crying (and looking back, there had been many lite versions). And I’d come out of that rock bottom deciding to recommit to my job and move to a new and exciting project — building phones — with a great manager. Now I felt like an even bigger failure.

The work on my new team was, again, so objectively interesting and important, and the people were, again, for the most part so supportive and smart and just trying to do their best. But looking towards the future — days, years — I saw nothing but endless things I didn’t want to do. Success would mean more of these things, with higher pressure and higher stakes. Failure would mean less attractive and interesting versions of these things (did I even care?). Interminably.

I thought a good, sane person would have focused on the opportunities to have a positive impact on millions of people, and the lifestyle the job afforded me — which was what everyone told me to do whenever I had one of these crises of faith. Unless I really wasn’t happy, of course; no one wanted me to be unhappy. It seemed I had to decide for myself: was I unhappy, or was there something wrong with me? I knew “imposter syndrome” is common among women (at my company there was even a group devoted to this syndrome, with hundreds of members). I knew I had a tendency to be dramatic and sensitive. I knew I’d lived a sheltered, privileged life, and now, in my 20s, had a job that people twice my age dreamed of having.

It had been my dream too, ever since I was in college and met a few older guys, freshly back from their product manager training trip around the world, which sounded like the best thing ever. And my dream came true, despite the fact that I didn’t even make it past the phone screen the two times I’d interviewed for the summer internship version of my job. Surely this was the golden opportunity of my life; well-meaning people were always telling me that I couldn’t do better.

In the field, under the tree, I wasn’t crying because I was unhappy. I already knew that. I was reminded every time I dreaded going to work (every morning), every time I imagined the future with a nauseous shiver. I was crying because if I couldn’t be happy here, I didn’t think I could be happy anywhere. I was unhappy, and there was something wrong with me.

My boyfriend spent hours with me on the phone, telling me that I was not a bad person. But I wasn’t easily convinced. When I did leave, about a month later, it wasn’t with my head held high, moving on to bigger and better things. I teared up talking to my boss and my engineering lead, in conversations where I admitted that I didn’t really know why I was unhappy, or what I wanted to do, but I supposed I had to go figure it out, since my boyfriend just had this accident and I realized that life was short. They were incredibly supportive, but except for the fact that nobody was mad and everyone understood, it was like initiating a hard breakup; I felt confused and ashamed.

I said goodbye to an organization I had loved and been sheltered by, that had treated me kindly and generously, given me fun and fond memories, and taught me things I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. Mostly, I said goodbye to my old identity, which was completely wrapped up in that job — it was where I ate, played sports, and made many of my adult friends; it provided my phone, my computer, and my transportation; it was mostly all I talked about.

I cringe to say this, but for my entire life after college, my entire real adult life, everyone was always asking me what I did, and I usually replied, “I work at Google.” Only then would I explain my position (not many people know what a product manager is). That was how I saw myself — I wasn’t in an industry or on a career track, I was a Googler, like I was an American.

The version of me with that job had been certified smart, wealthy, and successful, and people were proud of her, even admired her. She wasn’t the very best at her job, and she wasn’t the very worst. The problem was only that she wasn’t happy. In fact, she was so negative and dysfunctional that I couldn’t stand to be around her anymore. Maybe I was really breaking up with her.

I felt empty after I left. I didn’t think I wanted to do anything, and so for a while, I didn’t. It wasn’t that terrible, or that different from what I’d been doing at my job — only now I didn’t hate myself, I just felt bored. I slept a lot. I played video games. I took a few trips. I took the LSAT, which was intense and weird and kind of fun. I’d told everyone that I was going to maybe apply to law school, because that felt productive and like something I could possibly succeed at, but I let the application date come and go without really researching a single school. That was somehow fine, though; if I could be ok leaving my job, I could be ok not doing another thing I didn’t want to do.

The more I spent time with just myself, suddenly with no expectations to meet and no identity to uphold, the more I felt drawn to strange and surprising things. I learned to knit, to bake bread, and to garden, three skills I’d never had even a hint of inclination to study in the past. I stroked those hats, loaves, and leaves with an obsessed, amazed feeling. It was a feeling of love, for what I had created, and even more for myself, the creator. It was a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

Except I had occasionally gotten a whiff of this feeling at work, when I would reread a particularly thoughtful email or doc I’d written (which I did somewhat compulsively). I cared too much about these things — people were always asking me, “What’s the tl;dr?” This stood for “Too long; didn’t read” (a term appropriated from Reddit, I think), and the unspoken rule was that it should go at the top of anything longer than a few paragraphs. I wouldn’t have minded as much if it was called “summary” or something, but “too long; didn’t read”? Wasn’t that a bit insulting to everyone involved? Anyway, it felt secret and weird, my pride in the things I’d created that were always tl;dr. But it was something.

At home one night with my brain’s newfound silence, I remember looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and hearing with absolute certainty, so clearly that it felt like I was saying the words aloud, “You are going to become a writer. That’s what you really want to do. That’s what you have always wanted to do.”

I didn’t know what to do with this information. It felt kind of absurd and impossible. I hadn’t written a single story or essay since college. But I couldn’t deny that the voice was vigorous, by which I mean full of life.

I left my job last August, and I started trying to write in October, hardly managing to finish even one very bad and frustrating piece. It’s now May, and I’ve submitted a short story to several writing contests. It’s maybe still very bad, but I’m proud of it, and the important thing is, it was joyful, not frustrating. More to come on my journey as a writer, and the support I’ve received and am still receiving from wonderful people.

It’s spring. My boyfriend proposed last November, when I was newly unemployed and anxious, and it was perfect. I can’t wait to marry him. In our backyard, a vegetable garden is flourishing — I planted tomatoes in the place where we yanked out that post.

I think everything will be ok.