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Scintilla Project Day 2: Growin' Up
Mar. 15th, 2012 07:10 pmIt's hard for me to think of myself as a grownup, because not only am I the youngest in my family, but I'm also the youngest in my family's generation, so I'm always thought of as "the baby in the family." Not to mention that even at 41, I enjoy being the silly comic relief. I still watch cartoons, and well-performed slapstick still makes me laugh. I still make bad puns and laugh at bathroom humor. To this day I still don't often consciously think of myself as a grown up, even when I do lapse into the occasional 'get off my lawn' rant.
I think one of the first times I realized I was a grown up was the summer of 1995, two years after I graduated from college. I pick that time, because it was the point where 'Where I Want to Be' was nowhere near 'Where I Really Am' in terms of starting said Real Life. While my college friends had gone out to southern California to start a career in film or acting or had started their writing or radio careers here and there (I went to Emerson in Boston, where these are majors), I was stuck in neutral, working at dead-end jobs, and had no real idea what I really should be doing. I was seriously in debt from credit cards and student loans. I was working at a dead-end job and never had enough money. I stayed up way too late and slept too little. I was in a relationship that was not healthy for either of us. I'd lost touch with pretty much everyone from college and elsewhere, and I was too broke to be able to call them. Keep in mind, this was before the internet was ubiquitous (it was the time of AOL, which I had briefly, but again--too broke to keep it), so it wasn't as if I could email or tweet someone. This was also during the mid-90s when trying to find a decent job was getting hard as hell to find.
That August, I'd made an extremely tough decision, after all my plans for staying in Boston fell apart: I moved back in with my parents.
On the other hand, it was probably the smartest move I'd ever made. Not that I really knew it at the time, because I was angry at my own failure and my rising debt, but it also put me in a position to seriously think about what I was doing wrong and how I could fix it. I could have easily fallen into a depression, gone jobless and listless, but I didn't. I didn't want to put my family through that. I gave myself a month to get this anger and failure out of my system and do a bit of soul searching.
I had to decide, once and for all, what I was going to do for the rest of my life as a career. I knew it wasn't going to be an office job, or a factory job, or anything like that. Not that I saw myself above such positions, of course...it was that I saw them as "the paycheck." The career was what I truly wanted to do, and would love doing until or if I retired.
And every time I thought about it, I came back to the same conclusion. I'm a writer.
I went through a succession of 'paycheck' jobs at a movie theater, a radio station, a bank, a record store, and a candle warehouse, while I lived with my parents. I of course did what was asked of me in these positions, and I never slacked off at them, but from the the spring of 1996 onwards, I did my damnedest to write something every day. I wrote poetry to get the lingering depression and anger out of my system. I wrote bits of scenes and story ideas that were never expanded upon just to get the flow going. I picked up older stories to see if I could expand on them. And I started reading all kinds of things--genre fiction, history, music bios, anything that looked remotely interesting when I started making my frequent weekend trips to various New England bookstores. By the end of 1996, I had the start of a new novel, and my first science fiction story. I'd never written in genre before. That novel would be rewritten a few years later and become a trilogy, which I am currently revising for submission.
If anything, I grew the hell up when I was humbled out of being a kid, and I think that was probably the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd / but when they said, "Sit down," I stood up / Ooh... growin' up -- "Growin' Up", Bruce Springsteen
I think one of the first times I realized I was a grown up was the summer of 1995, two years after I graduated from college. I pick that time, because it was the point where 'Where I Want to Be' was nowhere near 'Where I Really Am' in terms of starting said Real Life. While my college friends had gone out to southern California to start a career in film or acting or had started their writing or radio careers here and there (I went to Emerson in Boston, where these are majors), I was stuck in neutral, working at dead-end jobs, and had no real idea what I really should be doing. I was seriously in debt from credit cards and student loans. I was working at a dead-end job and never had enough money. I stayed up way too late and slept too little. I was in a relationship that was not healthy for either of us. I'd lost touch with pretty much everyone from college and elsewhere, and I was too broke to be able to call them. Keep in mind, this was before the internet was ubiquitous (it was the time of AOL, which I had briefly, but again--too broke to keep it), so it wasn't as if I could email or tweet someone. This was also during the mid-90s when trying to find a decent job was getting hard as hell to find.
That August, I'd made an extremely tough decision, after all my plans for staying in Boston fell apart: I moved back in with my parents.
On the other hand, it was probably the smartest move I'd ever made. Not that I really knew it at the time, because I was angry at my own failure and my rising debt, but it also put me in a position to seriously think about what I was doing wrong and how I could fix it. I could have easily fallen into a depression, gone jobless and listless, but I didn't. I didn't want to put my family through that. I gave myself a month to get this anger and failure out of my system and do a bit of soul searching.
I had to decide, once and for all, what I was going to do for the rest of my life as a career. I knew it wasn't going to be an office job, or a factory job, or anything like that. Not that I saw myself above such positions, of course...it was that I saw them as "the paycheck." The career was what I truly wanted to do, and would love doing until or if I retired.
And every time I thought about it, I came back to the same conclusion. I'm a writer.
I went through a succession of 'paycheck' jobs at a movie theater, a radio station, a bank, a record store, and a candle warehouse, while I lived with my parents. I of course did what was asked of me in these positions, and I never slacked off at them, but from the the spring of 1996 onwards, I did my damnedest to write something every day. I wrote poetry to get the lingering depression and anger out of my system. I wrote bits of scenes and story ideas that were never expanded upon just to get the flow going. I picked up older stories to see if I could expand on them. And I started reading all kinds of things--genre fiction, history, music bios, anything that looked remotely interesting when I started making my frequent weekend trips to various New England bookstores. By the end of 1996, I had the start of a new novel, and my first science fiction story. I'd never written in genre before. That novel would be rewritten a few years later and become a trilogy, which I am currently revising for submission.
If anything, I grew the hell up when I was humbled out of being a kid, and I think that was probably the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd / but when they said, "Sit down," I stood up / Ooh... growin' up -- "Growin' Up", Bruce Springsteen
