The night before my first day at Oxford I couldn’t sleep.
Most of my classmates couldn’t either, but I didn’t know that at the time.
After orientation I wandered in a cloud of anxiety through University Parks. The grounds were already cool with the arrival of autumn, I could see my breath, and the sweater I’d brought with me – per usual in the English weather – wasn’t cutting it. I stood along the wooden bridge over the canal and examined the meadow grass swaying under light rain.
There along the bank a lone swan dove into a slick of pond scum. It shook and floundered under the surface, a flailing tuft of feathers and madness.
There was no grace in its movements. No regal manner. Despite that it belonged to the Queen, as all swans in the UK do.
I felt an immediate and intense affinity for that swan in University Parks.
If you’ve never visited Oxford, know this: you feel academic just being there. The buildings demand a certain reverence. They are drenched in the gold-filtered gravity of possibility. Everything looks terribly ancient, like it possesses so many secrets and a whole lot of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that you want to have, too.
That first night I imagined a host of embarrassing, horrifying scenarios. Everyone there would speak and read Latin and of course I didn’t have any Latin. I would be asked to recite Cicero and I would instead start quoting The Babysitters Club Super Special 2 in the only Latin I knew: Pig Latin.
Or maybe my tutor would ask me to make her a cup of tea and I would freak because is it milk first or not damn it which one?
I had no idea how I was going to make it through the first writer’s workshop, during which a great cloud of geniuses would surely tear my poem to shreds.
The thought made me feel sick. It made me desperately need the toilet. And University Parks toilets aren’t open in the evenings.
I did what I always do when I’m feeling overwhelmed and intimidated and inferior. I raced to the comfort of a private bathroom. And then I watched Rudy. The whole thing.
And I cried real-ass tears at the last scene, when Rudy gets his one and only tackle for Notre Dame and no one even cares because we’ve all fallen so much in love with him that we don’t give a shit that he has really no credibility to be there at all.
I convinced myself that that was the secret: I didn’t have to be amazing, or even good, if I just tried really hard and earned my place at Oxford for my effort, if nothing else.
It was a cute idea.
But a year into my Masters I hit a brick wall. We’ve all heard of writer’s block, but this was next level. I’d sit at my desk and I’d start to write, like, two words, and I’d just delete them and feel horrible. And then I’d Google image “French lavender fields” with the hope that a photo would help to calm me down. When it didn’t, I would just type out the word ‘French’ and then start to feel sick again.
My writing process was plagued with the weight of living up to being “good enough for Oxford.” Which meant that I was mortified every time I sat down to write, because nothing, nothing, was good enough. And by extension, neither was I.
I mean, you try writing about Gerard Manley Hopkins across the street from the pub where he scribbled down the very poem you are analyzing. You try doing research on Victorian writers with the ghost of drunken Oscar Wilde breathing down your neck.
When I did manage to eek something out, I’d submit it and my tutors would offer their thoughts in an exchange that I absolutely dreaded.
In part because their comments included lovely, opaque British-isms like “I quite like this image” (translation: what the fuck are you saying?) or “This bit is strong” (translation: there are WAY too many adjectives.)
The only way I was able to understand the feedback was to imagine it was Woody Allen giving it to me. If I did that, everything made a lot more sense. And I would cry slightly less.
Only slightly.
It was a minefield, the whole thing. And almost convinced me that maybe I should stop writing altogether.
Thankfully the universe or God intervened because one day, in the middle of a feedback session with a very patient tutor, she suggested a book called The Artist’s Way.
I bought it immediately. And felt my whole world shift after the first two chapters.
The book is structured as a sort of “12 steps” for the creative process, helping people break free of blocks and damaging beliefs about creativity.
The author says that you should just write. Write: good, bad, it doesn’t matter. Put your judgments in the back seat. Give yourself permission to be embarrassing. It doesn’t matter. It’s all part of it. Don’t write to prove something. Don’t write to earn something. Don’t write to be particularly good. Just write.
Reading those words was like having sixteen gin and tonics poured down the throat of my soul. I buzzed, I sighed. I stumbled from room to room like someone in love with lilacs and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
It was thrilling: I was allowed to be totally shit at writing!
In our Western culture, the good life/success/happiness is something you must actively pursue. The road is a mix of persistence-goals-achievement. Achievement is important, right? What good is a life without goals? Goals say we matter. Goals say we are living for a reason. Goals are a way to measure whether we’ve made it.
Right?
Hidden under all of this stuff is the idea that our life’s value is derivative and not innate.
If you focus on a goal (being a really “great” author), your exhaustive pursuit, self-monitoring, and evaluating will sabotage the whole thing. And it will destroy the possibility of any pleasure.
Boom.
In short, I wasn’t supposed to be Rudy. I wasn’t supposed to push push push myself, striving and struggling, even if just to earn fifteen seconds of fame at the end of my Masters to justify it all.
I didn’t have to worry about whether my writing was good enough for Oxford. I didn’t even have to worry about whether my writing was good. Like, at all.
And you know what? What happens after that is not like the unicorns and rainbows at the end of a romantic comedy.
What happens after that is much deeper, more mysterious.
In fact, it’s so solemn and moving that it’s almost annoying.
What happens when you let go of striving is that suddenly the present moment is tremendously valuable.
You aren’t missing out, you aren’t keeping score. It’s not that you are good enough or totally crap: those values don’t matter.
Instead, what matters is that you are here, now, with your faculties intact. And, well, what does that miracle feel like and what do you notice and how do you respond?
When you abandon the currents of “keeping score” you find there is a deeper current, a different way altogether.
Letting go of striving is like knocking on the door of a subdued state of quiet wonder. And comfort.
It’s a bit like what I believe Jesus means when he says to consider the lilies. Though I am not entirely sure. But I think so.
Robert Frost said that he was in a ‘lover’s quarrel with the world.’ Which is sexy and all, and makes for some outstanding 20th century verse. But fighting with the world, with my life, just leaves me mostly kind of homeless in it.
And I don’t want to feel that anymore.
I don’t want to vacate today because one day I might have a slam-dunk, six months from now, that lasts for a brief shining moment and then withers.
I mean, what good is a highlight reel when you could be grinning the whole damn time, happy to be playing at all?
And what is the point of being a swan if you’re at odds with the pond water and don’t know that you belong to the Queen?