2008 SECOND PLACE: No Entry fee Category

Bliss 

By Miranda Ward

 "Follow your bliss," is what my mother told me.  I was twelve, and my bliss didn't extend beyond ice cream, good books, and horses.  But ten years on, I know I wouldn't be the same without those three words; and I definitely know I wouldn't be a writer.

I can picture where I would be; and I am not so removed from my own past to think the image especially unsavory.  I would be in a suit, mincing down the marble hallways of a government building in high heels, trying to make a difference.

I was going to be a political woman, you see.  I was going to wrap the whole world around my little finger—spun like yarn, I thought, spun-like-yarn!  Seduced by spin and wowed by power, I made the mistake of thinking that I couldn't change the world with a pen (or an iBook).

As a child, it had never occurred to me to be anything but a writer.  I loved books (I remember my mother once telling someone that I was a bibliophile—"she collects bibles?" said the misguided woman, and I shrunk down, mortified).  I loved words.  I loved stories.  I wrote for hours on end, and it's a good thing I did: it was often the only thing that could make me, as a moody and tempestuous teenager, truly happy.  And so throughout my adolescence, all the way until college, I clung to the simplest of dreams: to publish a book.

But in college, something shifted.  A few weeks into my first year, living in a big city for the first time, I started to doubt my own dream.  I discovered other things that made me feel passionate; until I was laughing at my earlier self, her delusions, her idealism.  I suffered my way through unpaid internships and dreary office jobs, thinking to myself: someday, this will be worth it.  Someday, I'll have nice clothes and a nice car; someday, my work will transform the political agenda.  Someday.

But what is someday?  First it arrived in the form of my impending graduation, and though I had a job, I felt empty.  My world looked lackluster.  The things I had thought I would do as a student—develop my writing, go abroad—had never happened. 

I think I must have heard the faint echo of my mother's advice—follow your…--because suddenly I was possessed of a desolate feeling, and that summer, I went to England.  And in the city of Oxford, which I had read so much about as a child, I settled down to two blissful months.  Lazy days spent with a laptop in the garden (or in the lounge watching what seemed to me to be an unseasonable amount of rain fall) reminded me of the pleasure and purpose of my chosen craft.  Reminded me of me.

I had forgotten that what I love is working with words on a page, not with campaigns and candidates.  When I returned to the states, I called my parents and told them I wanted to be a writer, after all.  I wanted to enroll on a course; I knew, I told them, that I was going to be poor for awhile; I knew it would be a struggle, but none of this mattered: all that mattered was the thrill I felt in my breast.

"Well," my mother told me.  "I'm glad you're happy."

 Today, I cobble together a living; I hold on to my dreams.  My partner and I live simply, though not with many wants—it as Ernest Hemingway writes in A Moveable Feast, perhaps: "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." 

And what I find is that I do not feel ashamed to want to write; nor do I feel impotent.  Why, after all, do we read, and immerse ourselves in other people's worlds, if not for advice, or escape, or the provocation of thought?  Surely stories are among the most powerful forces in our lives.

So that woman who might have been, in her swish outfit, with her glossed hair: I might have been her.  I might even have been her, and happy about it.  But how glad I am, now, that I followed my bliss; that I can be content—no, ecstatic--in the knowledge that I write to sustain myself, and the hope that someday, I will also write to sustain others.

<<Contact Miranda at  http://aliteralgirl.blogspot.com >>