When I was a child I believed I could do anything. I hadn't failed yet. I was lucky enough to have parents who encouraged me to be myself and who never let me think that anything was out of my reach. I wanted to be a lot of different things. I wanted to be an author most of all.
When I was twelve I went on a class trip to Toronto. Our class stayed in the residence of Erindale College, which is a sub-section of University of Toronto, Mississauga. I wanted to live there. After that my best friend, Kayla, and I made a pact that we would move to Toronto and attend Erindale college. We didn't really get that it was part of U of T, or that it wasn't technically in Toronto. I don't think she ever really had any interest in our plan, that's just what twelve year old best friends do.
In Highschool, I still hadn't lost my desire to move to Toronto, but I was more flexible about the school I went to, and I had stopped writing. I was lost. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'm not sure and high school student does. Maybe the lucky ones with the drive and focus to get good grades, while playing school sports, and keeping up relationships with a large group of friends. Fuck those people. I'm not convinced they really knew what they wanted. They were just better at faking it. I had a new best friend in high school. We made the same pact. We were going to move to Toronto and be roommates. Six months after I was already in Toronto, still waiting for her to save up enough cash to meet me there so we could get a place together, she got pregnant and decided to stay in our hometown. That kind of thing happened to most of the girls I knew in high school. Small towns, right?
I moved to Toronto to go to school for fashion design. I still don't know why I thought that was a good idea. I had no talent. Worse than that, I didn't care about fashion. I just felt like I wanted to be creative. I was scared of writing by that point. I had met the world, and the world isn't always kind to dreams. It wasn't that I had faced any rejection specifically to do with writing. I had just developed this sens that I wouldn't be able to do it, and I didn't want to try. Fashion Design seemed safer. In my very weak defense, I was seventeen.
Not surprisingly, the whole fashion school thing fell apart. I entered an essay contest and won a prize. I started a school magazine and wrote interviews with faculty and students. I became depressed, medicated, and confused. I dropped out. I felt like a failure. Because I was. I moved to London and started working for a call center and writing small environmental posts for a website. I got paid $5 for each post. I missed a lot of deadlines and eventually gave up on that. I gave up on school for a while too. This is getting depressing, I know, but there is a happy ending. Maybe even a lesson, to my twelve year old self, at least.
I worked for a fundraising company for a while. I ran the London office, mostly into the ground, but that was actually an improvement from where it was when I took over. I transferred back to Toronto. I worked for a year and then quit. I waitressed, I cleaned houses, and eventually I went into the U of T admissions office on a whim. I was walking by and thinking about my future. I found out what I needed to do and I got in. I didn't have a major on mind yet. English still seemed too impractical to me. Maybe it is, but at this point it seems inevitable. In my first year of trying a sample of everything, English was the only class that felt familiar. I got decent marks in the rest of my classes, But English was the only one where I felt like I had some idea of what I was doing. So I'm giving it a shot.
I guess my point here is that if we really ask ourselves what we want to be doing, and we aren't afraid of giving an honest answer, we will end up where we should be. I should have listened to my six year old self, my eight year old self, my twelve year old self. When insecurity took hold, I should have stopped listening and started believing. I would have been here sooner if I had felt like it was ok to try. Instead of trying at something I really wanted, and risking failure with a vocation that mattered to me, I sort of tried with something that didn't matter because at least failing wouldn't hurt as much. But it didn't feel good to pursue something I didn't care about and eventually I ended up hating it. I've always enjoyed sewing and drawing, but I stopped both for years after that experience because failing did hurt, even if I didn't really want what I was going after. It took me a long time to admit to myself where I wanted to be, but I somehow kept going back to writing when I was trying to do other things. I may never get there. I might not be good enough, I don't know. I do know that I've got to keep trying. I did eventually make it to Toronto, so who knows.
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