We live our lives by marking milestone years.
For me, a new milestone materialized this summer. Nineteen: make good on a childhood goal.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. My friend would come over on weekends, and we would pretend that we were doctors who saved the rainforest animals while writing books on the side. She wrote fiction, and I wrote biographies with an invisible pen on invisible paper. I was in that Childhood of Famous Americans-series phase of my life, and Clara Barton fascinated me; writing, in general, fascinated me.
My friends told me that I could do it—write a book, that is. They said I had the ideas and the words. I just never did it.
You see, when I wasn’t reading work from the Childhood of Famous Americans boxed set, I was reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, the masterpieces of Judy Blume, and her act is impossible to follow.
At that stage of my life, the disillusioned seven-year-old that I was, my mantra regarding becoming a novelist in grade school was a simple one.
Give up or fall short trying, and who wants to fall short?
This summer, that doom-and-gloom mentality changed. All through my freshman year I had been offered the idealistic messages of a liberal arts college education at Penn, messages charged with possibility.
Explore. Follow your passions. Dream. Be spontaneous. This summer, those messages hit home as I finally listened to my voicemail.
I began: a rising sophomore still completely undecided on a major who harbored a smidge of guilt for not having taken an English class over the course of her freshman year.
Attempting to make good on that dream to be an author, I thought, That should compensate. I sat down to write.
I didn’t begin with a story, though. I began with a particularly vivid image that I had seen in a dream. She was a colorful character—one of those anthropomorphized half-lion, half-fish creatures—with a diamond-studded hangnail and a look of sheer agony on her face. She had bright red hair and wrinkles on her skin and scales.
Why had she appeared in my dream? I wondered. Perhaps she was lost and looking for Narnia? That must be it.
Regardless of where it came from and why it was there, I wanted to capture that image, but I knew that attempting to paint it with pastels and watercolors would bring my canvas great shame. I can't paint...or sculpt...or avoid pencil smudges. I have not one artistic bone in my body, in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, I used my words to capture that character: the paintbrushes that don’t get clumpy, the paintbrushes with which I work best.
With the summer of 2013 now over, I am entrenched in a story that is very real to me, growing not just within the confines of my imagination, but on paper as well.
Although I didn’t pull an altered version of the National Novel Writing Month feat this summer and try to complete a 50,000-word manuscript in July instead of November, I took a step towards a childhood goal. As psychological wisdom tells us, I will someday finish what I began for it is human nature to seek out and tie up loose ends.
When I do reach that last chapter and type that last page, the seven-year-old girl in me who tugs at the corners of my consciousness—the girl who read enough biographies for it to be considered a health hazard by the Surgeon General and dreamed of being a save-the-world doctor who wrote books on the side—will be proud.
And so will I.
Images that are included as part this post were obtained courtesy Google Images.
