I had intended—declared, even—that on my thirtieth birthday, I would get so drunk that I wouldn’t remember most of the night the next day. For a control freak like me, this would have been quite the achievement, because you see, one of the reasons that I largely stay away from alcohol—addictive personality aside—is that I don’t like losing control.
That was four years ago. On my actual thirtieth birthday, I was eight months pregnant, and not drinking much of anything.
Four years later, that original goal has lost its lustre. That a few days ago, after a mellow night out at the pub with a local mum, she would describe it as “a great night” is probably proof that my party days are now well over.
The point is that there is a life and a season for everything. That this is often, though not always, a choice we make, and that every great thing in life comes at the expense of other great things.
I knew when my son was born that the years that followed were not going to be the most productive years of my life. Not in any sort of coherent way, mind you, but more sort of as an intuition. I knew my time and my energy was limited, and that I’d have to make choices.
A few months into parenthood, a friend of ours came over with his kids and noting the exhaustion in the faces of my husband and I, offered up nuggets of advice. “Three years,” he said to me. “At the three-year point, you’re going to feel like your head is finally above water.”
I had balked at him then. Three years?! I was barely making it through year one. Was my career over? Was my life over?
Three years?
It got easier in year two, and has progressively gotten easier since then. But my friend was right—it was earlier this year, after Jude’s third birthday, that life shifted. I worried less. I left him alone more. I trusted things to not go devastatingly wrong if I turned the other way for one brief second.
When I pass on my hard-earned wisdom to parents of newborns and young children, they balk at me, just as I had done. As if I, the messenger, am at fault here and that they didn’t sign up for this and that if they could in that moment, they would hand me their babies and run away, never to return.
All that denying our limitations does is rob us of the opportunity to find solutions around them.
I know—even today—that given my family’s schedule and my son’s routine, live events are mostly off-limits for me. The coordination and expense required to go watch a book signing in central London just doesn’t seem worth it when I know I can watch the same author speak on YouTube. The networking benefits feel less significant given that I probably won’t be able to accept invitations from these people in the short term, that I will have to disappoint, and that most people who do not have those limitations will hold it against me when I turn down the offer to meet up twice in a row.
So I go on YouTube and watch author interviews on there. I network with people over email and Skype. I keep their—and my own—expectations low.
I also write. Not the long feature stories that I once excelled in and won awards for, perhaps, but the novels that I always wished I had the time for and couldn’t make because of the feature stories I was always reporting. Now, in a roundabout sort of way, I do.
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent and bestselling book Big Magic, which I adored, she talks about how in her twenties she made a pact with her writing. She would support her writing, she promised. She would never ask it to do anything for her. Instead, she would do whatever it took to support—financially and otherwise—both of them. And until her massive success with Eat, Pray, Love, that’s exactly what she did, by taking on odd jobs and selling a few short pieces, here and there.
This, as it turns out, is the exact opposite of what I did.
From the very first moment I put my first word on the page, I demanded and expected my writing to support me, which I’m happy to report that it did. I came to writing in the age of the Internet, after all, a time when everything was possible, even to a college student in India, like me.
Even back in 2002, which is when I sent out my first round of book proposals, I absolutely refused to query publishers who didn’t accept proposals by email. “They’re so old school,” I remember saying back then. Then, a couple of years later, I went ahead and self published anyway because I didn’t have the patience to sit around waiting for people to get their act together.
Writing has sustained me, supported me for the last fourteen years, but as it turns out, I’ve not always sustained it. As my career has grown and as I’ve become more successful in some things and not others, my efforts have been directed more at the things that are working financially and less so at the things that bring me creative fulfillment and joy.
Recently, in recognition of that fact, this has changed for me. I had an income target in mind for many years, and I’m confident that by the end of this financial year, I will hit it.
I pushed financially. I got to where I wanted.
Now, there’s a desire in me to push creatively.
With my journalism, I have always asked that it support me, that it pay for my travels, that it fund my lifestyle. If it refused, I understood that I would have to let it go, to do something else with my life.
I make no such demands of my fiction.
If you told me today that my first novel will never be published, I will be heartbroken. But I will finish the second one anyway. And if you told me that both of them are destined to live on my hard drive forever, I can tell you that the third one—which appeared to me in a flash last week—is already something I’m committed to. There’s no going back now. I opened up the floodgates and there’s no stopping the flow.
Here then, two weeks before my 34th birthday, I’ve made a pact with myself: I will write my novels. No matter whether they get published, no matter whether they earn money, no matter whether they’re loved, I will write them.
I will write them for no other reason that I want to and that I am privileged enough that I can. I have fought for this privilege for so long and so hard that to then not use it would be such a loss and such a great shame.
So, I will show up, do the work, and then let it go.
There is a life and season for everything.
Now begins my season to write. Just write.
What season of your writing life are you in?