Failing Upwards

Well, the preorder for my first ever book release expires in a day and a half.

No, allow me to rephrase that. “Expires” is such an ugly word and full of gothic foreboding. Great. Now where was I? Right. The preorder for my first ever book release dies in 36 hours. It dies and at long last my days of proselytizing a product most people don’t care about will finally be at an end. No more Facebook statuses. No more Instagram videos. No more long hours spent wondering why the friends I’ve known who once cheered me on so vociferously couldn’t be bothered to buy a book.

You may not think I know who you are, but I do.

But let’s not be petty! This moment isn’t about you.

To tell the truth, it’s not even about me. It’s just about one book of many and a stupid dream.

That’s a weird word, isn’t it? Poe had his line about it, about how all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream and so on and so forth, and to be perfectly honest that suits me just fine. See, I like that perspective and since you’re on my website and I have full editorial control then you’re going to hear why. The honest to god (*citation needed) truth of things is that I used to dream about being a writer. I used to dream about a lot of things but never anything quite so passionately as that. I dreamt of writing in a log cabin, surrounded by trees and roaming bears as I wrote the next in a long line of novels that allowed me to live my life as I saw fit: solitary, quiet, and creating. That’s all I ever wanted and growing up has been a process of understanding all the many ways it probably won’t happen, at least not in the manner I anticipated.

I don’t say that to be dour or depressing, two things I’m quite often and quite rightly accused of. I say that because it’s how life goes. The world does not exist to bend to our whim. It doesn’t dote or cradle, calm or comfort. It just is. It’s an ancient place that will only be around until it isn’t, just like us. And no matter how much we wish it wasn’t the case, it doesn’t care at all about what we want to do over the course of our finite journeys across the earth and stone it allows us to call home. It’ll be here until we’re not and it will exist long after we’ve left these things behind.

That’s comforting in many ways, at least it is to me.

The truth is, I succeeded at my dream. I wanted to be a writer…and I am. I wanted to write books…and I did. I wanted to write poems and short stories not because I cared whether or not anyone liked them, but because I knew I did…and I have. And for all the years I spent angry and frustrated at the world, at myself, and all the nooks and crannies of my perilous dream, I’ve slowly ticked those boxes along the way. No matter how low I got, I did what I set out to do. And it doesn’t matter if I’m not writing in a cabin in the woods. It doesn’t matter if I’m poorer today than I was ten years ago. It doesn’t matter that when people ask what I do and I tell them I write, they don’t understand the totality of what that means.

Because I set out to be what I wanted to be and I’ll be damned if anyone was going to stand in the way.

And yet the nature and tone of the thing lingers. A dream…such a funny word. A dream implies that you’ll wake up from it, that the thing you’ve wanted with all your heart would only be there until it wasn’t. Either you’d sit up in bed and realize an ordinary life was calling or you’d pull a blanket over your eyes in the hope of seeing who you wanted to be in the figments and darkness of your nightly imaginations. Truth is, I never had any interest in that. All I ever wanted is to be exactly who I wanted to be, to tell stories only I could ever tell, and to sit back and remind myself that the only accountability I’d ever have was the strength of my own passion and the annoyance of what failure would mean.

Life is not a dream and neither are our goals. When you know what you want in life, you don’t wait on it. You don’t sit back and hope something more comfortable will take hold. You don't lay your head on a desk and cry at the concept that nothing you do will matter or last, wracked with fear at the concept that in fifty years no one will remember your name. Time remembers no one. Actresses, writers, poets, singers, musicians, politicians, lawyers, astronauts, humanitarians…the list is as long as it is varied…every single one of them wanted to be something. They wanted to make it. They wanted to see their name on a book or a business card or reflected in a child’s eye. And do you know the funniest thing? Most of them did.

They did it. They succeeded. They fought tooth and nail for who they wanted to be and they summited that mountain.

And then they died.

After all that, still they died.

And in one hundred years, most of their names will be forgotten. So much of what they sacrificed will be lost on the wind. All that will remain are the distant echoes of people who became what they wanted to be and did it for as long as they could. And that’s enough. It should’ve been for them and I believe it will be for me, because the only certainty to be found in anything is the humorously and tragically inevitable end of the road that waits for all of us. What a shame it would be if we went to greet it without putting everything we had into who we wanted to be.

It’s not going to wait for us to figure things out, nor will it pause while we struggle with our insecurities. It’s just there…it’ll always be there…and what a foolish thing it would be if we went through our lives waiting until we fell asleep to finally become who we wanted to be.

The odds are good that no one will remember the words I write. They certainly won’t care why I wrote them. And there’ll be no infinite pause of a finite home stretch simply because I have yet to claim my desired status, or live in the house I thought I’d live in, or find happiness where I thought it hid. Simply put, I’m quite tired of waiting for the completion of a bucket list that was written by a child who didn’t understand the world and thought he could only ever be what he wanted to be if he found the money to be it. That’s not how it works because money, just like us, will only ever go away. To believe differently is a childish thing and the best thing about children is that they grow up.

I don’t need to sleep anymore.

I don’t need to find solace in lives and realities that aren’t mine.

I am Poe’s Dream within a Dream, lost tenfold in the stories I’ve told and all those I haven’t.

It’s the funniest thing, really.

I already am a writer and I always will be, remembered or not.