Fragments of Memory #1

Growing up, I wanted to be an author. Not a writer, but an actually published and well-respected author. But, over the years, I had somehow morphed this dream into a plan to become a professor. And it wasn’t until recently, when a fragment of memory surfaced, that I realized how fear had warped my childhood dreams.

In my memory, I’m a young girl, perhaps five years old. I am sitting on the green carpeted floor of my family’s living room, staring up at the white built-in bookshelves filled with my parents’ books. From later adventures, I know that their collection contained black encyclopedias that I believed contained all the world’s knowledge (and I even had a plan to read it all the way through…I was always a nerd), Rosamunde Pilcher books my mother collected in England, and a Catholic Bible passed down from my grandparents (even though we are no longer a Catholic family, I always felt connected to some mysterious, rich family history). But at this age I couldn’t read. The books’ bounded and colorful covers contained adult symbols that my mind had not been trained to interpret, like hieroglyphics in a tomb.

And so, the best I could do was to pull down each book—the bigger, the better—and flip through it, mimicking the slow turning that I had seen adults do. Then, after flipping through each book, I would run to my mother and tell her about the adventure I had just “read”. Of course, I assumed Mom believed my tales; only now do I realize just how hard my Mom had to hold back laughs as her five-year-old skipped into the kitchen, clearly holding a dictionary, and told her that the book contained knights and dragons.

Even at five, I realized that all I wanted of life is a quiet room filled with books, and the ability to read so that I could teleport myself into magical realms.

At six, I was introduced to Reading Rainbow, a wonderful PBS children’s series where LeVar Burton narrated stories for children and encouraged kids to truly love reading. But Reading Rainbow was more than a reading show—I remember episodes where Burton would tell us all to jump into the book with him. By literalizing the metaphor of “diving into a book,” he caught the truly magical feeling of cracking a book’s spine and wondering what story lives inside. But, of course, I did attempt to jump into many of my children’s books, convinced that this was how I could love reading even as an early reader.

Somewhere along the way, in fragments of memories still hidden from me, I learned to read and dreamed of becoming a writer. I would write little stories about the dinosaur figurines I had collected, the Polly Pocket dolls on their horse ranch, and even a mock-fable of a Hawaiian volcano come-to-life. My parents humored me by sending off my volcano story to a publisher (which one, I can’t remember, but it’s funny to think of the editor’s expression when my yellow legal pad story slid across her desk).

But I was an anxious child, who grew into an anxious adult. I hated failure, clung to perfectionism. And, as any writer knows, writing involves a LOT of failure. I don’t remember ever sitting down and thinking about how hard fiction writing must be, but I must have realized subconsciously that I wasn’t trained to write fiction “properly.” So, somewhere along the way, my dream switched to becoming an English professor. My academic writing in high school and college was strong and I loved literature. Sounds like the perfect fit, right? And, with my master’s degree in English, I am a highly trained writer of literary analysis essays.

So, why haven’t I become a professor? Well, that’s another memory fragment for another time. But, in short, I think the dream never materialized because it was never really my dream. It was a fail-safe (ironic, considering how difficult it currently is to get a PhD and a tenured English professor job…but I didn’t realize this until recently)—a dream I thought would be enough to make me feel satisfied. But all this time, five-year-old me is sitting on a green carpeted living room floor, staring up at me, demanding, “Well, you can read now, right? Get a move on, write something.”

Even if I never make a living off writing, even if it only remains a “hobby” (the most scoffed-at of activities, though for the life of me I cannot figure out why everything must become a side-hustle), I want to write. And, it wasn’t until after finishing my master’s degree that I began to wonder, “Well, what do I like? What would I even enjoy writing?” Now that I didn’t have assignments telling me what to read, what to feel impressed by, what to write my essays on and when they are due. What do I really enjoy?

With time, I fell back in love with my tucked-away historical fiction novels (did anyone else grew up as a die-hard American Girl series fan?), high fantasy, and the high-brow literature that I had fallen in love with unknowingly as a girl pulling novels at random from her parent’s bookshelves. And naturally, just like when I was younger, I began to ask, “OK, I know what I love to read. What do I want to write?”

This question felt unreasonably hard for me. I was conditioned to write formally, like a distant academic with no thoughts of my own (that is, no thoughts I can’t back up with a citation or two). And after over a decade of social media use, I began to also worry, “What will sell well? What is popular? How will my readers feel about this character?” Thus, I shot myself in the foot again and again, too worried about an end result that hadn’t even materialized yet.

So, now I am working to reconnect with my inner five-year-old, the girl who hasn’t yet learned cool from lame, best-seller from forgotten novel. I want to return to a world imbued with magic—the mystical symbols locked on the page, the possibility that I can leap into a book and be swept away.

While I can’t keep jumping into my books (surely, the spines will give out soon), I am giving myself permission to write badly, to write in the wrong direction, to enjoy the fun of planning out novel beats, to revel in the process and not worry about the end result.

If life is meant to be enjoyed, then perhaps my end-result doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I had fun dreaming up a realm that I may never perfectly communicate through written words. But a world that I enjoyed puzzling over day-after-day. That’s a life worth living.