Once Upon A Time
Year-end edition
In keeping with the end of a truly horrible year, I’ve committed to spending the next few weeks reveling in small discoveries of joy.
Something people back home often ask is why I decided, when most people my age were entering the best years of their career, to kiss a job and decent money goodbye, and pursue, of all things, a staggeringly expensive MFA in the one area least likely to provide me with good returns of investment. In fact, when I got the acceptance call from Columbia, in between all the cheering and celebratory drinks, more than one friend pulled me aside and asked if I were certain. Why couldn’t I continue writing on the side? Why couldn’t I just decide to work less — I was a freelancer after all, my own boss — and dedicate more time to fiction? And on that note, did it have to be fiction? Did I know that I could probably make much more writing for TV? What about skits? Someone always needed a skit written in Singapore. We’re a high-pressure society and everyone’s dying for a laugh.
At the time, I shook my head; I could see where they were coming from, but I was certain: no. I had to go, this was what I’d been working towards all this time. And it wasn’t just an MFA. It was also buying myself the time and capacity to work on my writing, to seek out peers and mentors. I knew that an MFA wasn’t a prerequisite for being a writer, I knew that plenty of people held jobs and wrote, and made it work. I just wasn’t one of those people. Being born and raised with no money guides the way you approach life — all my decisions were made out of terror that I’d fall back into lack. I read somewhere that the best thing about having money is that you’re afforded the luxury of not having to think about it, and I couldn’t agree more. If I continued working, every hour I spent writing would be pegged to the dollar, and from experience, the pressure would cripple my writing, inflicting the double whiplash of guilt and pragmatism through my work. No. I had toiled long enough to literally buy myself this opportunity, and I wasn’t letting it go.
So I moved to New York in the summer of 2019. I was hungry, desperate to be amongst people who were serious about writing, desperate to exchange stories and ideas, to not do that awkward little cough whenever uttering the words: I’m a writer. What words! What delight! I said it upon touchdown to the officer on duty at passport controls. I’m a writer. He didn’t blink, just stamped my papers, and waved me forth. No additional questions, no “like, a journalist?” I’m a writer, full stop. I was thrilled.
My career as a lifelong reader and writer began the minute I learned to read: we hardly watched TV in my house, there was little access to a computer, and for entertainment, I had whatever books the older kids in church had outgrown. My early tastes were shaped by the footsteps of others; I made my way through Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, the Animorphs series, Artemis Fowl’s exploits, the Shopaholic adventures, the likes of Twilight, and whatever else was on the list of recommended (popular) reads at the library. They were mainly plotty, pacey books, adventure-driven, and I ate them up.
In my undergraduate years, I started reading literary fiction, but I was late to the game. Still, the turn of a sentence could make me gasp aloud, I drew pure, unvarnished pleasure from a block of tightly wound prose. I wrote, too. My early stories were clumsy, but fun; I remember my fingers flying across the keyboard, banging merrily as I rewrote cliched tropes thinking them all original and fresh and new. I never doubted that reading and writing in some capacity would be my life’s work, and after years of typing away in private, the brightly lit halls of an MFA program seemed the next obvious step into the brave new world.
The initial moments of doubt flickered upon entering my first classroom. I was early, overeager, and proud of it. But there was already someone sitting there. It was a fellow student. He asked who my favorite writers were, I stammered and named a few off the top of my head, conscious that they were considered obvious, popular choices: Ferrante, Chimamanda, Baldwin. I returned the favor, and he said, Dostoyevsky.
I hadn’t read any Dostoyevsky. In fact, I didn’t even know how to pronounce his name. After class, I panicked and called my partner. Help me, I said, everyone here is way smarter than me. Unfazed, he replied: well, you’ll just have to catch up then.
Emboldened by the reminder that I had historically worn down most tribulations through stubborn hard work, I read over a hundred books that year, at a rate of about 3 books a week. For school, for pleasure, I tore through them all the same. My worlds were widened by writers I hadn’t heard of before, I wept for characters, I engaged in lengthy debates on craft and structure. In January 2020, when I visited home, my friends were curious: was it worth it? And I said, yes.
All of that before the pandemic hit. Readers of this column are familiar with how it devastated my life and landscape, but also, my mental capacities. For months, I moved slowly, my mind sluggish. I was unable to write, but worse, unable to read: my eyes would stray after a line or two, my brain couldn’t process literary fiction, my thought processes were amputated. My secret fears: that I was stupid, incoherent, and lazy, bubbled to the surface, taunting me. I tried to force my way through yet another book as a response, but this was one roadblock I couldn’t wear down.
It was the fairytales of my youth that saved me. In lieu of comprehending literature, I turned, desperate, to children’s stories. Aesop’s Fables, In A Dark Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, A Monster Calls, the X-Men comics. I revisited Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl; I even breezed through a few romance novels, which had inaccurately informed my notion of relationships early on. My mind caught on to the familiar, feeling itself along the ridges of repetition. Slowly, carefully, the stories pulled me towards myself again, stitching the path towards normality with ribbons of prose.
Today, I am nearly myself again. The words Once Upon a Time promised escape when I was a child, nudging open pathways to other dimensions and realities, fueling a sense of adventure. Who could have predicted that so many years on, these worlds would still be waiting for me, safe havens to which I could return for rest and refuge? Come, they seem to say, however you are. Come, sit, and read.
