I want to want

Desire may be the root of all suffering, including mine, but I need it

I have always wanted things a little too much. At university I wanted a First more than anything on earth. For three years I made colour-coded mind maps for each module and stuck them to my wall so I could look at them before bed. I would record myself reading out my notes and listen to it throughout the day. I got an early start on my dissertation and figured out what grades I needed to get across all my classes to achieve my goal. When the results were due to come in, I refreshed my university’s intranet page obsessively and then ran downstairs, shaking my dad by the shoulders and screaming when the results came in – of course I’d gotten it. I’d set myself up so that it would be impossible not to.

At my BuzzFeed internship which then became my workplace for eight years I tried hard, visibly so. One of my managers called me the keenest of beans and they were right. I would come prepared with more ideas than I needed to, meticulously thought through. Once hired full-time, I tracked the performance of posts and observed what did well so I could make sure my ideas lined up. I ended up being the second most ‘viral’ writer in the company for a time and got sent to New York for a ‘quiz summit’ (bring back 2010s media budgets). All’s to say, I’ve been driven. I’ve felt, since I was a child, that something was propelling me forward. That if I just kept pushing and working and wanted something badly enough, I would be rewarded.

And then.

I have kept journals in some form for years now. Not so much of my thoughts about my inner world, but more just a list of things I was going to do. In every journal for the last five or so years one thing has remained consistent – ‘get a book deal’ has been number one. I got close. I was accepted onto a good writing course run by Faber, I got multiple full-read quests quickly after finishing my manuscript, and multiple offers. I was going to get what I wanted.

And then.

The book was rejected on submission. I had been so busy planning the cover design and which house it might go to that the fact nothing would happen was unthinkable. I cried hysterically at the gym and my dad picked me up and made me a sweet tea. I cried for a good long while, took a few months out, and then decided I’d give it another try.

And then.

I was about four or five years out from when I’d first started typing that initial manuscript. I worked on the second book tirelessly after work, on the tube in the mornings, at the weekend at my dad’s house. I would retire upstairs with my laptop for hours, or work from the sofa while he watched TV. Occasionally I would run a plot point by him. My dad loved to critique the writing in TV shows so I trusted his judgement. He would say, ‘when I think about how hard you work on your writing, it makes me annoyed that these bad writers get away with these plot lines!’

I told myself that to make me obsess less about the book I’d also apply for MFA programs, maybe try out short stories. Maybe if I was around other writers I would get inspired. Maybe getting on the course at all would confirm something about me, that I wasn’t an idiot for wanting these things. I made a vision board with pictures related to the Helen Zell Writers’ Programme and Big Five publishers. My MFA rejections, all five of them, came swiftly in the space of a month. The book just wouldn’t work no matter how much I edited it and was left to languish after two years. At one point I had two concurrent ambitions and then swiftly they were reduced to zero. I began rethinking the book as something else, with the same characters but a different plot, and wrote 10,000 words and a vague outline.

And then.

On a Saturday in November I got a phone call that my dad had collapsed. What I didn’t know in that moment is that the ambulance would not be able to revive him. He had died pretty much instantly. Weeks after the funeral, unexpectedly, a voice emerged in my head. You wasted a big chunk of your precious time with your dad doing something that will never go anywhere. The realisation of this cleaved me in two. Suddenly every evening I’d spent upstairs in my childhood bedroom, or tapping my toe impatiently to get home so I could work on my cover letter for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was cast in a harsh and ugly light. I had wasted my time but worse, I had wasted the time I could have had with my dad. And what did I have to show for it? Nothing at all. I had made no progress while my contemporaries had Bookseller announcements and stories in esteemed lit mags and appearances on various competition shortlists. I had nothing but 10,000 words of a book idea that I no longer felt compelled by and a threadbare will to live. Even if I did by some chance achieve success in writing, it would be pointless, because my dad would not be there to attend my launch party or hold my book in his hands and cry. I felt stupid and disgusted by my wanting. I never wanted to want again. When I’d visit my dad’s neighbours or speak to my dad’s best friend they would ask about my writing. ‘I’ve sort of parked it,’ I would say. I spoke to a grief counsellor about it and found myself in tears.

‘I thought that wanting things and not getting them hurt, but not wanting things at all feels even worse.’

And then.

‘I’ve been getting the urge to write again,’ I tell my author friend while we queue up for an event in Islington one evening.

‘I have started to entertain the idea of writing a short story,’ I text a now-friend and former sort-of-ex who I met three years ago and bonded with over writing.

I sit down to write a short story and 1500 words vomit out of me as a fully-formed, imperfect thing. I draft chapter titles for a project, do a prologue and then shut the laptop. I email article pitches that go ignored. I want and I want and it’s absolutely terrifying, but it’s better than the alternative.