It is only when comparing myself to others that I feel stuck.
As a child watching my dad trudge dutifully, suit-clad, to work, I dreaded joining the adult workforce but dreamed of someday writing articles for the magazines I liked to read: Tiger Beat and Sunset and Fate. I imagined myself jetting around the world to interview prospectors, presidents, pop stars and seers. As the first step on this path, I wrote for my middle-school and high-school school newspapers and edited our literary journal and senior yearbook. Somehow in all those early years, I never actually met a professional writer. I knew nothing of how their careers came about, knew nothing of internships or networking or protegés. I vaguely imagined, even through four years at university, that good writers simply got discovered, a la Lana Turner and Jesus Christ.
After earning an English degree, I sent query letters to magazines, offering to write articles on topics that interested me. Garden statuary. Dude ranches. Seances. Koi carp. The big magazines never responded but from the medium-sized and small ones I got assignments and, after my stories ran, modest checks.
At the same time, my ex-classmates from Berkeley were finding permanent positions at important publications: Time, the New Yorker, the Washington Post. One guy -- a snaggle-toothed laugh riot with whom I'd seen Quadrophenia and A Chorus Line -- had begun writing for Playboy. They were living my childhood dream, flying all over the world on expense accounts, meeting rappers and dictators. I thought it wasn't fair.
But it actually was. It was perfectly fair.
My ex-classmates had reached those career heights because they did things I wouldn't/couldn't/didn't do. They deployed skills I lacked. They took risks I wouldn't/couldn't/didn't take.
They dressed like adults and had nice haircuts. I did not. They had bravado, social skills, an air of normalcy. I did not.
My successful ex-classmates had willingly relocated to snowy metropolises. I did not. I wouldn't/couldn't/didn't even drive. So, clad in ragtag clothes and sporting strangely chopped chair, I freelanced for obscure magazines. There were payoffs: sweet sunshiny days spent interviewing yard-gnome sculptors, koi breeders, and ghost-hunters. If you had asked me then if I was stuck, I would have drawled, "No, I'm perfectly free" -- then, the instant I saw another of my ex-classmates' bylines in a major publication, I would have blared, "Boo hoo, poor me, I'm totally stuck. I'm still in my college town, still eating Rice-a-Roni, and my byline appears only in magazines of which sophisticates have never heard." Yet was I stuck? Those yard gnomes and seances and sherbet-colored fish sparked the idea for my first book, coauthored with my beloved fiancé. Ten more books were to follow: mostly obscure, offbeat books and not the blockbuster bestsellers that some of my ex-classmates have written, but books nonetheless and the only kind that I could write.
How things worked out in life has directly mirrored my strengths and weaknesses. I always knew what I was good at and capable of and willing to do. And I knew just as clearly what I was bad at and incapable of and unwilling to do. I knew which of these qualities might change and which would surely not. I knew my limits, if sometimes I lost sight of the importance of this knowledge.
But the idea of limits has itself come to be suspect. In most conversations, the very idea of limits now inflames us with fury, suspicion and resentment. Is it really so shocking to point out that some of us are suited to be senators and others to be cab-drivers by aptitude, by attitude? When my college roommate and I were both hired to work at Grand Teton National Park one summer, Melinda was posted in the top executive's office and I was assigned the park's lowest-status job: dishwasher. I seethed, yet dishwashing was all I could be trusted to do, given my inexperience. Melinda was a hyperspeed typist who had worked in offices for years.
Whether or not I've been stuck on the career path, for sure I've been stuck in envy. When I start to envy others -- my college pals are now professors and TV producers; one is a district attorney -- I must ask myself the most crucial yet most politically incorrect question of our era:
Do you have what it takes to do what they did?
Well, do you, punk?
I know the answer. I do.
Delusion and denial are quicksand.
