On growing up and fading dreams

Getting over a fear of sharing my writing

By @lgoetz.

It’s a cool night, after a hot humid New York summer day, and we’re all in the living room. By all, I mean myself, my best friend from high school, and another friend I’ve known my whole life. We all grew up together but the other two were never close, so it’s funny to hear them exchange intimate details of their lives as old friends would. It’s the kind of conversation that can only be made possible by the context of shared childhoods—a conversation now impossible among our new college friends.  

My best friend lives in this beautiful uptown apartment where the ceilings are high, the cockroaches seldom, and if you stick your head out the rickety fire escape at dusk, the wet grime of the city fades into a soft watercolor painting the color of cherry blossoms. The living room we are in is my favorite room in the apartment: there are recipe clippings for banana bread on the fridge and sunflowers peeking out of green glass bottles on the dining table and a view of the street below decorated with thumbprints of people milling about their days. The walls are a patchwork collection of exposed brick and crisp white paint and wood paneling. It’s both spacious and cozy. I lived here for a few months last summer, and though it’s been almost a year since I’ve been back, I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

When I moved to college, my childhood bedroom was converted into an office, and each of my dorm rooms since has felt painfully temporary. If grade school felt infinite with summer breaks bleeding into school years and an air of permanence hanging over friendships and family dinners, the start of my twenties has been the opposite—a cloud of dusty ephemerality sprinkled over interests and friendships and bedrooms. Everything feels transitory, and though some of it will last, it’s impossible to know which parts. Even this apartment—where friends and strangers have slept over on the couch, where Gilmore Girls themed parties have been thrown, where poems that will never be read have been written—will soon be gone. My friend got the place on a soon-expiring COVID rent discount and next month, she will be living in a new home I’ve never stepped foot in.

I’m lying face up on a grey Ikea couch with my eyes fixed on the dim glowing ceiling light above me and the black insect carcasses trapped inside of it. I find myself thinking of Icarus who flew too close to the sun and fell to the ocean below as his wings melted in the heat of the sunlight. Except instead of falling to the ocean below, these poor bugs are forever trapped in the ceiling light, stuck watching the bulb flicker on and off ad infinitum with nowhere to fall to. I’d rather be Icarus, overconfident in my ambitions, but I’m starting to worry that I’m more like the bugs, stuck in the shadows of a slowly dimming light.

I graduated from high school two years ago. It was the first summer of the pandemic and I watched my own graduation stream from a pre-recorded Youtube video. There were speeches about how previous generations had messed things up, and that it was our turn to fix the world. Even stuck watching on my basement TV, I felt an intense desire to do something good. It was the ache of a dull electric buzz that crept and crawled through my veins. I would do something worthwhile with my life, I was certain—I just wasn’t sure what yet. I fell asleep that night with that nebulous dream clenched tightly between my palms.  

The thing about my dreams is that they’ve always been amorphous and difficult to articulate, thick with energy but lacking in direction, like the noise a physicist might observe when studying charged particles. Unlike some of my friends who found their interests and stuck to them, I’ve always been a floater. My two friends in the living room beside me are working towards careers in fashion and finance, and while there’s still a ton they’re each figuring out, they seem content with these choices and they’re damn good at what they do. It gives me so much joy to watch the progress they’ve each made in the past couple of years. In this same period, I’ve danced around from public media in high school to startup investing over my gap year to neuroscience research this summer. In doing so, there is so much that I have learned. Exploration is not a bad thing, especially in youth. As Victor Hugo writes in Les Miserables: “the straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a [person].” But exploration commanded by curiosity is distinct from exploration fueled by a fear of commitment. 

I’m reading The Bell Jar right now and Sylvia Plath has this passage about a fig tree and the paralysis of decision-making which perfectly describes my trouble. She writes about this vision of a fig tree that branches out in every direction and that from “the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was …” and she goes on and on to describe the neverending fig tree and all its infinite possibilities. Eventually, it’s too much, and Esther, the main character, is paralyzed with indecision, and the figs grow rotten and fall to the ground and the tree is left naked and bare. 

I often wonder about my own fig tree. The figs are different from the ones on Esther’s tree but not by much: one fig is writing dystopian television shows in Los Angeles, another fig is incubating internet policy in D.C., another fig is a cherry farm with my best friend in someplace like Montana, another is teaching in English on a small Danish island, or studying the neurology of a really specific canary-colored fish in the Amazon, or returning home to Seattle, waking to the quiet comfort of the mountains each morning.

Like Esther, I’m always going after different figs, plucking, examining, and eventually discarding them. It’s a terrible case of choice paralysis: because everything is potentially interesting, I end up reluctant to commit myself to anything. It’s also the great optionality problem that economist Mihir A. Desai identifies, “the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.” It’s taking the safe path to keep choices open, without ever making use of those choices, and a topic that my friend Sarah writes so wonderfully about. It’s choosing the road with the most potential forks—but only ever walking along the main road anyways. Sometimes, maybe, I’ll turn down an offshoot or two, but I always, always keep the trailhead in sight.

A few pages after the fig tree is introduced, Esther visits a restaurant and has a great big meal, stating afterward, "I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach." 

My friends and I had just finished cooking a failed dinner. Failed in that we had planned on making Spanish tortilla but we didn’t flip the pan quite how we were supposed to and instead of a beautiful golden omelet, we ended up with overcooked eggs and undercooked potatoes scrambled together in a formless mix. The ingredients were all there but the dish didn’t come together quite as we’d hoped.

Now, lying on the couch with the badly cooked dinner in my stomach, staring at the bugs trapped in the ceiling light, I overhear my friends talking about how old we all are now. We’re only twenty but I know what they mean. Twenty feels a lot further from eighteen than eighteen did from sixteen. I’m certain I’ll soon look back on myself and laugh at this thought, but it’s there and it’s real. It’s been two years since high school graduation and already I feel the ambitious naivety my friends and I once shared becoming subdued by the realities of life, our innocent idealism now embarrassing and impractical. This weird transition that is early adulthood has laid bare the formlessness of life and elusive proximity of achievement. I worry that my fists, once clasped so tightly, are loosening, slowly letting the dreams they once guarded slip away in a steady stream of sand.

Or, maybe, like Esther, I’m just hungry. Maybe, I know exactly what I want, and that’s to be a writer and to let all the stories I’ve collected fall out of me and fly about like butterflies into the wind. Maybe, writing is the forbidden fruit of my fig tree, and when I reach for it, it feels too indulgent—and that’s what makes it right. I’ve always loved writing. Exactly ten years ago, I wrote my first real poem. The years between were littered with half-finished screenplays, short stories, and more poetry, but I never took myself too seriously. A year ago, when I moved into this apartment for the summer, I started imagining my life as a writer. Over the past year, I started exploring new modes of writing, moving beyond occasional poems, and dipping more heavily into fiction for the first time. It felt so much more right than anything else I’d previously spent my time on or anything I’ve done since. But it was also much, much harder than I expected. 

When I wrote that first poem ten years ago, I had yet to settle into that self-conscious nature that adolescence so rudely engages. Back then, there was no fear of judgment—or if there was, it was slight. I submitted my pieces to contests and anthologies, and shared them with family friends and babysitters without a second thought. As an adult, I found things to be different. I’d be at a party, sharing my writing aspirations with strangers, and when they would graciously ask to read my work, I would draw a blank. Sure, I had a large collection of half-finished Google docs, but nothing felt ready to share. “Soon,” I would assure them, “I’ll send you something as soon as it’s finished.” But things remained unfinished and I never followed up with anyone. With each day, it became increasingly clear that there was no such thing as finished. I was becoming frustrated and my dreams were slipping and I hated that.

Earlier this summer, I shared this problem with a friend and she responded with a quote from This American Life host Ira Glass on the trouble with getting started with creative work: “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

Glass continues to explain that a lot of people with creative ambitions get stuck in this phase: they know their work isn’t as good as those of the artists they admire so rather than forcing themselves through an inevitable phase of mediocrity until something of satisfaction emerges, they give up.  I won’t claim to have killer taste, but this sentiment really resonated. For the past year, I’ve been sitting here unsatisfied with everything I create, unwilling to give myself a shot if starting out means mediocrity. But I can’t bear the idea of being stuck here any longer. As the Robert Frost poem goes, “the best way out is always through.”

This Substack is an attempt to hold onto my dreams. I make no promises that the writing will be good but mediocre writing is far better than nothing at all. I want this newsletter to feel like a secret garden, a hidden oasis for my creative work, a soft place online removed from the harshness of the internet, saturated and full of growth and color, sunlight and shade, warmth and respite. 

This will not be a tidily-kept garden. I promise no consistency in what I publish or when. Only that from this day on, it will be alive and tended to. 

That’s all for now.

Love,

Lila

Thank you to all the people who gave their feedback on this post and have encouraged me to share my work. I love and appreciate you all so very much!