Just Believe

I've spent my entire life not knowing what I want. When I applied for jobs following graduation I was worried I would be offered more than one and I wouldn't know which to choose. Now, that the only job I was offered is coming to an end, and I've submitted my resignation notice, and job after job I've applied for results in rejection, and on occasion the traditional "You're fabulous, and we probably should have hired you, but we didn't" and I'm beginning to realize that right here right now it looks like I have no future job, no future companionship, no future apartment, no aspirations, no guidelines, no goals, no idea what I should be doing to someday be something, somewhere to someone--even to me...Its difficult to not feel just a little discontent-- So much so I was unfriendly to some poor stranger at the customer service desk at Target; I've been a beast to my seventh graders who are, surprise, only 12 years old; I haven't smiled in like a week, and even then, I'm not sure it was authentic.

I started writing a novel last summer about my life. I took the script straight from real live events; Roommates found it on my computer and told me it was great. My classmates couldn't help but ask what was going to happen in the end, and then tell me what they hoped would happen; My instructor offered her advice on constructing a believable character she already perceived as "stuck in the past" and "unable to see herself in the future"; and I quickly began to feel like our "interviews" were a little more like "counseling sessions".

I toyed with including the girls' deceased grandmother in the story as a recurring theme; she being represented by a small travel alarm clock in the main character's possession which had been Camilla's as she was a doctor in nursing. Highlighting, the conflict "Merrick" saw between being a woman and being a woman who fought for recognition of men...the male type...via professional and educational aspirations. And how, somehow, that conflict was going to be important to the 18 year old who wrote scholarship application essays about motherhood just to spite the professional world that she refused to allow to govern her future.

I could tell my classmates, her heart gets broken and NOW I could write a chapter about how she just gets over it. And now, maybe, I could write something about how I know nothing about what will happen in the end. For, here I am now--forced to make amends with the the professional world-- to be the opposite of what I had always intended I was preparing to be. Forced to support myself. Forced to be on my own. Forced to reconcile what I considered my own mother considered to be negligence, with my life, here, today and for the rest of my young adult life. And forced, last of all, to be content with it, and I don't know how to do that. It'll be a cliffhanger ending with some tacky way of letting the reader know she's alright. Hey, that's exactly what my instructor suggested. "She doesn't have to find a man--in fact, I'd prefer it if she didn't. Somehow, you just have to let the reader know that, emotionally, Merrick is going to be OK."

I guess, that's the moral of the story. Merrick is going to be OK, all she has to do is believe it herself. Just Believe.