the train is coming
I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. In elementary school, I wrote romance stories on loose printer paper and passed them around the classroom so the girls could read them like magazine issues. By fourth grade, when I got my first pink Dell laptop, I told my mom I wasn’t going to school because I needed time to write and become a writer. Running alongside this obsession was my love for movies. I watched The Little Mermaid, Monsters Inc., and *Toy Story so many times I lost count, and I even missed the school bus one morning because I was so saddened—for the nth time—by Boo being afraid of Sully when he roared.
So when I learned that “screenwriter” was an actual job, that was it. History was written. I was going to be a screenwriter, and nothing else mattered.
What I didn’t understand then—though I never believed it would be easy—was how emotionally punishing this path could be. In college, everything seemed to confirm that I was doing things right. Freed from the constraints of high school and finally studying what I cared about, I thrived. I got great grades, graduated with honors, and landed the highly sought-after internships everyone in my major wanted. I was promised, explicitly and implicitly, that if I went to a good school and did well, getting hired wouldn’t be a problem. The three years since graduating, however, have looked nothing like what I imagined.
I won’t get into all the details of what I’ve been up to. You can get a sense of where my head has been by reading Leaving, Returning, and…?
So where am I now? I am a soon-to-be 27-year-old living in New York City as a dog walker, restaurant host, and wannabe writer. I am always writing and somehow never writing enough. I am an “internationally recognized screenwriter,” an imposter waiting to be found out; someone who knows they need to take more initiative while also needing to celebrate where they are.
That last part is what’s really killing me these days: celebrating wins. When people ask, “So, how’s your writing?” I want to give up so badly I could burst into tears on the spot. And yet, when I list out the facts of my reality, I chose to move to New York to pursue a creative life. I financially support myself while making time for my writing. I am receiving good feedback on the work I’ve put out so far, with varying degrees of success. Still, none of it feels worthy of recognition. I feel like a starving person getting hungrier and hungrier and hungrier. My stomach hurts from the pain. These milestones don’t feel like celebratory occasions but like basic necessities for survival, like learning how to walk or read. I don’t know how I would survive if the one thing I’ve wanted my entire life didn’t happen, and that pressure grows heavier as the years go by—especially as the excuse of “you’re still young” inches closer to its expiration date.
And yet, I can never rush myself to write. Every story and every character emerges only after months of self-reflection and close attention to my surroundings. Inspiration now comes from how I am experiencing life, not from the sheer joy of inventing fictional situations and characters the way I did as a child. This slow, dragged-out process makes me anxious, like watching someone take their time untying themselves from a train track when I can already hear it coming.
