Last week I stood overlooking a lake close to my house and thought, I created this life. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in my early years that could have pointed towards this—where I live, who I have married, my career, and in particular, the outspoken and independent person I have become. Where I come from, women don’t often have a public voice. But I do.
I created it. I fought for it. I believed so hard that it had no choice but to happen because I didn’t allow not happening to even be a possibility.
I had come to the lake, as I often do, to clear my mind and to get back to clarity and focus. Back home, my husband and son were cooking dinner and watching boxing together. My agent had emailed me the night before to tell me that we were going to need one more revision on the novel. You know, the six-year novel, and that there were still some issues that needed to be fixed.
When I was fourteen, I decided that I wouldn’t learn how to cook because if I did, then I’d be “good marriage material” and I didn’t want to be that, I didn’t want to be any kind of marriage material at all. I insisted that if I did get married one day, it would be to a guy who liked cooking. Everyone thought I was mad. Now I’m married to a guy who likes cooking.
I want to give up on this novel. It’s been six years and I’m tired. I have done the very best I could and I don’t always feel like I’m going to be able to fix it or bring it to the standard that my agent seems to believe that I can. I’d like to be the person who can walk away, to say, I’ve learned some lessons here and in the next book, I will do better.
But I know I can’t. I won’t. I will stick with this book, not because that is what I must do, but because that is who I am.
I am a person who gets knocked down, gets up, gets knocked down again, gets up, gets knocked down again, gets up, and repeatedly just keeps getting up because staying knocked down just isn’t something she knows how to do.
I get up because it is who I am. It is a part of my identity. I am someone who does not give up. I am someone who says, “Is that all you’ve got? Give me all you have because I may be down right now but when I get up, my sheer power and force will blind you.”
THAT is who I am.
I am the person who keeps going when everyone else has given up. I am the person who keeps believing when everyone else thinks belief is stupid. I am the person who will go to great lengths and take immense personal risks to follow her heart again and again not because it is the sane thing to do, but because it is who I am. I am someone who follows her heart. Someone who fights for her beliefs. Someone who believes in herself when everyone else has stopped believing. Someone who has an unshakeable vision for her life, one she will keep walking towards for all of her days.
Standing up, continuing to fight, that is a natural instinct. It is who we are.
Is that not the true test of a dream, after all? If you quit when things get hard, if you quit when you just don’t want to and can’t be bothered, if you quit in the face of relentless failure and rejection, if you quit when it seems unlikely to ever work out, if you quit then, was it really a dream to begin with? Did you truly believe it the way you said you did?
No, when faced with pressure, with rejection, with defeat, you must come back harder, stronger, with all the intensity that you can.
You must roll up your sleeves and say, “Give me all you’ve got because I’m ready. I’m meant to live my dreams and this one small failure is not the thing that holds me back from that.”
When I look back on my life, I can assure you, I will not be saying, Oh, I was racing towards my dreams but then my agent said that my book needed more revisions and well, that was the end of that. Instead, I want to be able to say, “You remember when she just kept sending it back over and over and over again and I just couldn’t get it right but then eventually, I nailed the damn thing and it was beautiful. Remember that?”
Because that is who I am. I am relentlessly optimistic. I am relentless in my beliefs and I am relentless in my efforts. Half-arsed in not an option in my world. Dreams are not achieved with half-arsed efforts.
I am not giving up. It’s not even an option.
Doing the work is the only option no matter how difficult that work is and no matter how long it takes. Because my commitment wasn’t “I’ll do it for as long as it’s easy,” my commitment was, “I’ll do whatever it takes.” And right now, what it’s taking is absolute and utter belief in myself, it’s taking every ounce of self-belief I have, it’s taking a commitment to stay focused, to know that whatever I don’t know, I can learn. It is taking patience, more than I thought I had to give. It is taking faith. It is taking confidence.
None of these things are coming easy but that was not the promise. Easy is never the promise in art. I was never promised easy. I was never promised anything. It was my choice to do this. I’m doing it. And I’m not going to stop.
Because it’s not a question, it’s a choice. It’s not will I or won’t I?
I will because I’ve already decided I will.