It’s the uncertainty that gets to me. I’m the kind of person who likes to have a backup plan for a backup plan because nothing ever seems to go right. Backup plans fail often too but they bring a sense of security, of having a way out that might save me this time.
But plans fail. There is too much to account for in life that I can’t reasonably make allowances for.
I know it’s a trauma response. Growing up in chaos, having a plan gave me a sense of comfort, of security. If I had a plan I could ruminate on it, and memorize it, on the off chance I could stay safe in the future. So much in my life was up in the air that having a plan, no matter what it was for, gave me something to hold on for.
My plans often failed. And it hurt. But part of growing up was learning how to accept the structured chaos of living in society and learning how to adapt to how things change. Not to say this was easy, or that I still don’t struggle here. I struggle with the chaos living with other people often brings. Learning to go with the flow, instead of trying to control everything around me, is a lesson I’m continuously working on. My desire has never been to control other people, mind you. It was all an attempt to control the circumstances I grew up in, which I’m still struggling to get away from. I can accept my friends doing their own thing, and my little family, but the wide world out there? Where danger, both real and perceived, lurks in every corner? Or the chaos from my family, who for reasons only they know never cared to make sure I was safe. That, more than anything else, was the chaos I sought to control. Because it wasn’t as simple as just walking away at eighteen. Not with the culture I was raised in, where family comes first no matter what they’ve done.
Being a part of society is, in its own way, a universal experience. Or as close as we can reasonably get, beyond such hallmarks as birth and death. And there is no way to account for everything that can happen because society is made up of people. People do all sorts of things that throw a wrench into others’ plans, and we all handle it to varying degrees of success. It’s often frustrating, almost always aggravating, and sometimes the urge to just drop everything and sprint off into the wild never to be heard from again is too much to ignore. And sometimes people do. Look at those that live off the grid. But not every dream is attainable. Dreams serve a purpose, but what are you supposed to do when they no longer fit your well-laid plan?
Learning to change as things around you can is a skill that takes a lifetime to master. No matter how sure-footed and composed you are, there will always be something. Sometimes you have to put the burden down and mourn for things that will never come to pass. But just because your plan changed doesn’t mean that all is lost. I know the plans I laid as a child certainly never came to fruition. Same with the ones I shifted to in my 20s, when I was struggling to figure out what it was I wanted most in life. Writing had always factored into those dreams, of course, but the thought of doing it solely, as my career, was a daunting thought.
When I was a child, I wanted nothing more than to be a paleontologist. I planned to teach at UC Berkeley in the Paleontology wing. I wanted that until I was eighteen,, when I sat down and looked at the requirements. It was all math, math I had to accept I could not do, because of then-undiagnosed dyscalculia. Writing had factored in here too, but my main goal was to work in academia, and write bookss on dinosaurs on the side. But looking at the math requirements, I knew I wouldn’t be able to pass. Not to mention the cost of getting a Ph.D. when my family was barely above the poverty line. I’d have died in debt, it was going to be so costly. So my plans shifted.
For a while after, I wanted to teach psychology. I wanted a doctorate to help mold young minds to be the best they could be, and more than anything I still wanted to work in academia. However, my disabilities were becoming more pronounced. And competition for those coveted spots that I desperately wanted was fierce. But there was no way I could handle school with my advancing invisible disabilities. I was coming to the realization that the accommodations I needed on any level just didn’t exist. That was its own type of mourning, the letting go of the dream of working in academia that I’d harbored for so long. So the plan changed again.
I think it’s important to note here that, through all of this, I wrote. I wrote all kinds of things outside of a school setting because it was fun. It was engaging. It was a passion. But growing up it had been heavily discouraged. The attitude that I would not be the next Stephen King was common. Common advice in Filipino families to establish your career, work in it for ten years, and then do is as a side and or passion project should I decide to do it at all, despite how they felt about it, was rampant. But I don’t want to be Stephen King. There is only one of him, after all. I wanted to blaze my own trail and write stories that were uniquely mine. There are no new plots under the sun of course, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t spin stories that were mine and mine alone. People did it every day. But could I?
I can’t hold down a day job. My invisible disabilities got in the way. It’s something that I still struggle to process sometimes. It makes me feel like a failure sometimes, that I can’t do the grind most everyone else does. But writing, that I could do. Learning how to do it consistently was the problem that kept tripping me up.
It took eight years to write my first novel. I will never show anyone that work ever again because it is a train wreck carrying a dumpster fire as its cargo. But I needed to write it. I needed to write my first novel to get the next one out. It’s not that I don’t love that story. I love it more now than when I originally conceived of it. The problem was the execution. So I saved that old manuscript and will someday rewrite the whole thing.
The following one wasn’t much better, I’m afraid. I mean, it was better. I learned a lot from the first one. But it lacked something. Pouring over it, I couldn’t figure out what it was. So I sent it to some friends willing to read it and give me feedback. But they weren’t writers, so for the most part they couldn’t figure it out either. So I started writing the sequel. The sequel also lacked something, so about 60% of the way through I started my fourth novel, only going back long enough to wrap up my third.
That novel, my fourth, was when I knew I was onto something. It was rough and needed a lot of cleanup, but I knew this would be my ticket to a real, grown-up career. I can’t quite say what it was that one had that the others didn’t. After all it needed a significant amount of work to be publishing-worthy. But I could tell that was the novel where I finally figured out how to do this. And as the sales steadily roll in, I know too that I was right.
My path has diverged so many times, but writing was one of the few constant things in my life. I know I have what it takes to succeed, whatever that success looks like. I’m going to keep going because I want to, and because I know that, through every life may throw at me, I can always take writing with me. The plans I laid out in life have changed drastically over the years, but it was because I outgrew those plans. Teaching is a noble profession, and we sorely need teachers. But that’s not my path in life. It took a long time to accept that, but I’ve finally made peace with it. As I wait to put the finishing touches on my novel it’s a wonder that I wound up here of all places. I’ve always loved stories, and I love sharing them. Storytelling is one of my love languages, after all. Those other paths, I don’t know if they’d have been as fulfilling. They would have been wonderful, I’m sure. But story craft is where my heart lies, and it’s been such a constant figure in my life for so long that it’s a wonder I didn’t find this path sooner. But I had to grow a lot too, in order to get here, and a lot of that was accepting what path was truly my own. Because ultimately it was less about fitting myself into a predetermined role and more about finding out who I am under all those layers of obligation heaped upon me by society and culture. I had to dig under those layers to find what I truly wanted the most in life. And I’m glad my plans got derailed so I could do that.