what do you really want?

It's that time of the year again when we stand on the precipice of summer — more importantly, summer holidays — and try to figure out how to handle this parenting and working combo with no school to rely upon for much needed childcare.

Many years ago, I remember telling myself that I wanted to be a full-time writer so that I'd have the flexibility of spending time with D during the holidays instead of always having to cart him off to camps.

D, too, is a child who likes to relax at home just as much as he enjoys having days of activities.

But when it came to it, I started dreading the long stretches of summer without access to the quintessential form of childcare that school had become.

With no family to rely on for support, and little additional budget to hire nannies or babysitters to help out, we felt stuck.

This desire for flexibility quickly turned into resentment when KrA would disappear into his basement office to take work calls for most of the day and I'd be upstairs with D.

Spending time with D was never the problem. We have a grand time together, playing, laughing, listening to music, reading, cooking, eating, breathing, chilling, imagining ...

What became a problem were two thoughts that constantly nagged at me:

1. When will I ever get around to doing my work if I were to spend all day with D?
2. How is it that KrA gets to work but I don't whenever D's at home?

the folly of indulging in the fantasy of lives not lived

What I really wanted was a life in which I could spend all day writing and publishing without feeling guilty about time spent away from D, and also a life in which I could spend as much time hanging out with and caring for D without being unable to write.

When D was barely a year old, an old friend of ours visited us from the UK. I remember telling him I'd love to have days that were made of two sets of 24-hours each. I'd spend one 24-hour period being a full-time mom, and the other 24-hour period living the way I did before D came along.

Except, no matter how badly I wish it were, such a thing is not possible in real life. 🤷🏽‍♀️

The biggest mistake I committed in the past was in looking at all the constraints I had and cursing them for their very existence, bemoaning my past choices for having led me to this present moment with its circumstances, and wishing these limitations would go away somehow.

I also got into consistently berating other members of my family who, in my fantasy world, would have helped and supported me, but didn't/couldn't in real life. I falsely believed that if only I could have counted on them, I'd find myself free of these constraints somewhat at least.

You can imagine how bitter and angry these thoughts made me. It was as if I simply couldn't switch my brain towards problem-solving mode and continued to fester in complaining mode because it had gotten very comfortable there.

what we are really afraid of

In his course 'Overcoming Creative Anxiety' over on DailyOm, psychotherapist and teacher, Eric Maisel, says:

Anxiety is a feature of the human condition. It is a much larger feature than most people realize.

A great deal of what we do in life we do in order to reduce our experience of anxiety or in order to avoid anxiety altogether.

Our very human defensiveness is one of the primary ways that we try to avoid experiencing anxiety.

If something is about to make us anxious, we deny that it is happening, make ourselves sick so that we can concentrate on our sickness, get angry at our mate so as to have something else to focus on, and so on. We are very tricky creatures in this regard.

~ Eric Maisel

I'd like to say that the penny dropped the instant I read those lines. It did, in a way. But not enough to make me get up and do something about it.

Creative anxiety manifested in me in various ways. I'd have imaginary arguments with my mum-in-law in my head. I'd worry about meeting with an accident or falling ill. I'd often pick up fights with KrA.

I didn't know back then that it was creative anxiety. After all, I loved writing, didn't I? Then why would I feel anxious about it?

It took me a few years to realize that I had taken to estimating the worth of my writing based on the financial returns it generated. And when I was in the place where I was still writing and testing out my works in the market, not seeing immediate results made me decide that this entire endeavour wasn't worth it.

It all got twisted in a way that requires a whole other post to dissect and analyze the workings of a mind imaginative enough to come up with touching stories yet also prone to predicting doom and gloom for its own person!

But digging deeper I found that what I was really afraid of was of making 'wrong' choices.

I didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom, or even a mother, if it meant that I couldn't reliably predict a good future for my child.

I didn't want to turn to writing fiction as a career unless I could prophesy great financial success and fame.

Essentially, I didn't wish to play the game if I couldn't guarantee a winning outcome.

I was in my early 20s when I was applying for a sales role within my company. The senior executive who interviewed me almost turned me down, saying, "You haven't encountered any failures in your life. I'm not sure you'll last long in this role."

Until he had pointed out that fact, I had been ignorant of it. I always thought I'd do well no matter what I chose to do.

And that had been the undeniable truth of my life until I stepped into working life and realized that he was right. I wasn't terribly good at taking rejection and disappointment in my stride.

If I hadn't met with much rejection in the first 20 years of my life, the next 20 years went in learning how to encounter rejection without getting derailed.

Yes! It has indeed taken me that long to learn this lesson. And I'm still a work-in-progress in this regard.

Also, in case you were wondering, that executive was right. I didn't last in that role for more than a year.

In fact, for most of my working life, I tended to take roles in which I naturally shone. I'd scale steep learning curves very easily, then I'd get bored of the routine just as quickly.

But I rarely knew how to push myself to the next level, because I didn't know how to try and fail at something and then go on to trying some more without feeling crushed by that failure.

This is the same energy I brought to writing and indie publishing too. Inadvertently, of course.

I didn't know how to get comfortable with failure, rejection, being ignored, all of which are a given in today's publishing world and saturated market.

success POV: reframing our definition of 'success' can be the antidote to our fear of failure

Recently, D has been talking about how he has started to feel nervous about performing in front of an audience. When we talked about it, he said he didn't like making mistakes in front of other people.

In the course of our conversation, we came up with the idea of Success POV. What does success look like in such a situation?

Perhaps, just showing up to his performance makes it a success. How he performs — how many mistakes he makes, how well or badly he does — then become irrelevant.

Because right now it feels so hard for him to show up and perform, taking that step alone can be the relevant metric of success.

Perhaps he could take deep breaths to soothe his worries. Perhaps he could remind himself that today, success is simply showing up.

This conversation made me reframe how I viewed my own endeavour and writing and publishing fiction. How I've deemed it a big failure and a pointless exercise because I'm not raking in the moolah or I haven't been propelled to global stardom yet.

All those worries kept me from showing up to the writing desk for days and weeks on end.

Until one day, I wrote down this question:

What would I do if I remembered that this life is short and I don't want to waste it chasing approval or fearing lack?

The penny certainly dropped this time. That too with a loud, resounding thud.

What would I create if I wasn't afraid of being unseen or unpaid?

Wasn't it Annie Dillard who said, 'How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives'?

Even if I had all the money in this world, what I'd really be doing is writing or spending time with KrA and D.

So my success POV is: Show up and do the work.

Whether or not it brings in financial rewards is immaterial. We have enough money to live a modest life. I absolutely love the time I get to spend with D. We've been able to create a life that doesn't rely on screen time, and for that alone I think the effort has been worth it.

so, what do you really want?

When I was struggling to write, I used to get pissed off at the mere suggestion that perhaps I didn't want it badly enough and that's why I was letting my passion slide.

My intention in asking you that question 'what do you really want?' is not to put you in a spot and suggest that whatever it is you claim you want, you just don't want it badly enough to do something about it.

Maybe you want it badly, but there's some kind of fear blocking you from reaching out for it.

So what you really need are tools and mechanisms to cope with that fear, not for someone to shame you into believing that your passion is a fad or that you lack ambition or that you don't want to realize your dreams badly enough.

Once you unpack the fears and distractions that come between you and what you want, you can name them for what they are. Thereafter, aligning your thoughts and actions with your desires begins to feel rather straightforward.

So, dear Reader, what is it you really want?

And what fears are keeping you from going after your dreams?

But more importantly, how are these fears showing up in your life? The answers might just surprise you!

If this post stirred you to pause, reflect and think, I invite you to join my newsletter, Monthly Missives from The Dream Pedlar, for musings on embracing the creative life, writing and book-related updates, and more reflections and thought-provoking fiction.