Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

(From The War of Art by Steven Pressfield)

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Infatuation. That’s a good word for our dizzy relationship with places we feel particular affinity for. I’ve often thought this–that our relationship to, say, a city, has the same qualities as our relationship to a lover or a partner. I feel that with Oxford–this is what I keep trying and then re-trying to represent in The Book, The Book which has become like a beast in my mind. I keep trying to over-complicate it, as if I don’t trust myself, when really it is all very simple. Really it is only a manifestation of a love affair with a particular place.

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Here’s what they don’t tell you.

You will be depressed and adrift. You will finish and not be satisfied. There will be no champagne reception, no late-night parties or quiet celebrations. There will be months to wait for the result, months during which you can carefully go over each word, wish to revise each word, hate each word, months during which you can decide that none of it matters, and then that all of it matters, more than anything else. To distract yourself, you might throw yourself into something. Say, you decide to finish your novel. You decide that you don’t need them anyway. You’ll be an author with or without the marks. Numbers are useless anyhow, in a literary world. (Wrong, as always). It’s not an easy process but at least it’s a busy period of time. At least you feel like the struggles are leading you somewhere.

Then there’s the moment when the results are delivered to your doorstep. You think, ah, at last, now I can be released. Either way, at least I can move forward without being shackled to this thing, this thing you’ve come to think of as a burden, not an accomplishment, not a gift. But what they don’t tell you is that it’s not like that. Now you revisit the words you loved, hated, wanted to change, wanted to let loose on the entire world. Now you have new eyes with which to see them. Now those months of work are erased with a single glance; no, you’re not an author, with or without them. You’re a number, a sentence, a name with a few extra letters attached. You’ve wasted your time, or you haven’t, but none of that matters.

In the moment of discovery, all that matters is this: you’re still shackled to that thing. That thing you created, that thing you started. Whatever it turns out to be, or doesn’t, it belongs to you (or is it that you belong to it, that you somehow owe it something?). You have to own it whether you want to or not. You have to decide what to do with it, because no one else can.

They don’t tell you this.

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And then there was the time we hid under my parent’s bed so that she wouldn’t have to go home.  I don’t know why I remember this now, particularly.  There are children playing hide-and-seek in the house (not our children, not our house).  I guess somehow that makes me think of this one afternoon, a long time ago.  A friend of mine had been over for the day, and now her mother was coming to pick her up and we did not want this to happen.  Somehow every time a friend was picked up by a parent, it seemed like it would be the last time we would ever have such a chance to play and be carefree.  I remember tears and tantrums; perhaps it was a manifestation of only-child loneliness, perhaps simply a particular quirk of character, a shimmer of the anxiety and self-doubt that was to come.

But this friend (another only child) seemed to understand; and then her mother arrived, and it all seemed too awful.  I can’t remember who suggested it first but suddenly we were under the bed in my parent’s room.  I don’t know where our mothers were; perhaps they were in the living room, having a coffee and a chat, oblivious to our plan, thinking we were playing quietly in my room until the very last moment when we would have to be parted.  But I know that after a time they called for us, and we didn’t come, and that was okay; most of the time, children don’t come the first time you call.  But then they called again.  And then, eventually, they scoured the house for us, and then in panic they ran out into the street and began to ask the neighbours, have you seen our daughters?

And the more we could hear their panic the more frightened we became of revealing ourselves.  We wanted to crawl out from under the bed, but we couldn’t.  We couldn’t face the shame.  We would be in so much trouble.  We had done something so very wrong, and out of such an innocent motivation.  We scarcely knew how it could all have become so complicated so quickly.

We were in trouble, of course.  We suffered both the wrath and the relief of our parents.  Then, after awhile, we weren’t in trouble any more.  After awhile we were older and after awhile longer we were living in different cities and hardly even knew each other any more.  But still, we’d done something very foolish together once.

And now here I am in a thatched English cottage, thinking of that day.  Things are funny.

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