on admitting you want something
even when it scares you
One of my first big realizations from adulthood is that it’s much scarier to want things now. Part of that is the higher stakes that come with fully being the captain of your own ship. Another is that you’ve had enough time to want things, believe in those things, and utterly fail to achieve them. Wanting, in that big grand-scale of life kind of fashion, feels more fragile. As adults, we become less rubbery. Kids are so unfazed; they bounce right back, find the next thing. Sometimes those childhood wounds sting and then form grooves that inform us as adults, but largely, the possibilities feel infinite enough that resilience comes easier. The trouble I’ve found, in my short time of being adult, is that it’s not harder to get up after being knocked down. It’s admitting with the same wholehearted honesty that you want to try again and possibly fail again.
Even being honest inside my own brain, getting past that hermit crab shell of self-protection, to know what I want has been tough in the last year. I do it in fits and starts. I regress and then I have a breakthrough and then I have to confront how inherently uncomfortable it feels. This summer, I tried a lot of things, experimented with a lot of lives. Ran both towards and away from myself. Tried to apply logic to feelings or maybe logic my way out of a feeling.
But then there are moments where I can’t help but be honest with myself. Sitting on the field inside campus gates in the middle of Dublin after stumbling off an overnight flight where my feet swelled so badly I couldn’t zip my boots, I had one of those moments. One of those terrible, uncomfortable moments where you undeniably want something horribly inconvenient.
I’d thrown out the idea of living in Ireland or England one day, sometime in middle age or something. The notion came from one of those deeply honest feelings I had when I was 12 and went to London for the first and only time. But random notions built on four days as a kid are easy to ignore. This feeling, when I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything else my body was telling me, was undeniable. I googled masters programs while I was still sprawled on the grass. I first voiced the idea as a joke, “wouldn’t it be absurd,” because things are easier to say if there’s the chance to add, “just kidding,” afterwards when it doesn’t land.
As the trip went on, as impractical as it was, a little fantasy formed in my head. I let myself imagine again. Let myself hope. I started constructing a little dollhouse world where this campus was mine, my time was spent studying writing, and I wore cardigans with polished dark jeans with a trench coat overtop. I started to retreat to this place often.
I quietly started working on short stories in cafes, rereading old stories from earlier in the year and chiseling them into better form. Every day on that second half of the trip in London, I’d end up back in a seat at a cafe with my laptop without much planning or thought. By the end of the trip, I had both a portfolio and the distinct sense that I knew something about what I most genuinely wanted that I couldn’t un-know. It was the quiet persistence of working towards an unstated goal that confirmed what my brain wouldn’t fully articulate.
My previous conception of future life before this spontaneous trip was that I wanted to stay in my hometown forever and ever. It is, by no means, an easy place to live. Housing, and everything else, is expensive and fragile. But staying also felt like the natural thing to do. It’s the only place I have any attachment to. I have my parents. I have jobs I’ve already won and an assurance I could have another if I needed it. I can go anywhere without a GPS. There’s an innate comfort in the places you know, the problems you know. A part of me will always yearn for that kind of simple—the quiet, the space. Especially after LA.
Two weeks before the trip came to be, I went to the bar with some friends because I wanted to try Guinness. I mentioned that I wanted to move abroad one day in an offhanded manner, and my co-worker asked me why one day. Why not now? I’m young, and she could envision me there easily. I had a million cheap excuses that boiled down to inconvenience and the unknown. On the other side of standing on the ground there, I had to admit she was right. “One day” felt unacceptably far.
Which leads me to the present moment. Where I don’t want to submit an application that I wholeheartedly believe in, put together in record time by sheer force of will. Every bit of my being wants to be living in Europe this time next year, studying writing in the same place that so many of my favorite writers have done so before. And the application is the first step. But it’s incredibly hard to submit because then I’m a concrete step closer to my liminal world being crushed. For now, I’m free to dream, to live in that future world where it miraculously works out. It’s a beautiful place. And a part of me is happiest when I have the dollhouse to retreat to in my imagination. Current life is blissfully less consequential when I can project into a much disrupted future.
Sending the application is both the key to realizing this fantasy and crushing it.
And, there’s the weight of having lived this before that makes my brain trip on the whole exercise. I have felt a sense of belonging in a place, developed a strong conviction about what my future would look like, let my writer brain run away with the narrative that if you feel so passionately, want so much, try so hard that the universe will untangle with storybook excellence.
I already know that’s not how the world works, especially in admissions, because I’ve lost that dream before and with it, many of my more optimistic visions of how life’s narratives play out. This is the most cry me a river story ever, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot in light of this new application cycle. When I applied to college, I got in everywhere except the school I really wanted, probably down to random chance. And that rejection came in first. So, for a moment, I thought I wouldn’t get in anywhere simply because I didn’t get into an extremely competitive school with a truly low acceptance rate that I had my heart set on. Since, I’ve gotten into an equally unlikely school as a transfer, but that never felt as scary. When I applied to that school, I’d never visited, it was in a city where I’d never been, and I had built no such dollhouse in my head. I wouldn’t have known where to start.
It’s scary to want things wholeheartedly that are out of your control. Maybe that’s a funny thing to say as someone who wants to be a writer, a profession that is bestowed on you nearly at random on a timeline you cannot control. It’s not a job you apply for. It just happens one day or it doesn’t. You wake up and you try. You write to improve your craft. You send off stories to literary journals. You send pitches to magazines. You send queries to agents. You scream into the abyss and the abyss answers “no” until it occasionally answers “yes.”
But you can become a writer any day, any year. Things like school programs or jobs, the timescale for getting a yes is tighter, and honestly, your odds are worse sheerly from statistical constraints. School dictates where you live, what you do with the majority of your time, the entire contour of your life. And you get one try every year while life moves on around you, moves past it being a viable option. It’s a finite moment.
It’s scary to want out loud too. I told everyone about my NYU dreams, so I had to then tell people, one by one, when they asked that it did not come true. I didn’t tell a soul outside my immediate household that I applying to transfer because I hated that part, the admitting the cards didn’t fall my way. So maybe it’s strange that I’ve written a whole newsletter that announcing that I’ve spontaneously decided to apply to a handful of masters programs abroad.
I guess, this time I’m owning it. I want. I want a life that will be hard to obtain, that is statistically unlikely, and that leaves room for a lot of heartache. Because not trying would be worse. I guess when you want something enough, losing that little bubble, the hope, the fantasy, the dollhouse is a fair trade for the chance at the real thing. And I’m doing it publicly again because the only way I can make sense of things is to write about them, and because I’m a child of the internet, I feel compelled to share, just in case you, too, are afraid to want.