When I grow up I wanna be a writer, he said as he studied to become a teacher
My instincts beg me to apologise because my writing isn’t good enough. Psychology literature refers to this as negative self-evaluation, a construct associated with self-esteem (Lee and Ashton, 2006). I don’t have to tell you that I have issues in this department. And that’s okay; let me tell you why.
In the summer of 2011, I passed my driver’s exams following six months of expensive lessons in Paris without killing anybody. I was twenty-seven and should have celebrated the achievement, but I did the opposite. I made sure never to drive again. My driver phobia exacerbated feelings of shame and worthlessness I had experienced on-again-off-again since my teen years. Fast-forward eight years later, my wife and I purchased a used manual-shift Toyota. My heart rate skyrocketed, and I’d feel waves of nausea wash over me at the idea of driving a mile to the supermarket. But spouses can be very persuasive, and mine was telling me to kick the out-of-nowhere PTSD-like behaviour; it’s not like I had done tours in Nam. A year on, I now drive every day, even while singing nursery rhymes. Motorways are still a work in progress, but I’ve otherwise warmed up to our little Toyota. I call it my Ferrari.
As it turns out, one’s human value doesn’t correlate to one’s confidence as a driver. Although, in my case, the skill made parenting a lot easier. Therefore, I’m now trying hard not to worry too much about the quality of my writing. Because if driving a car for a year turned me into a confident driver, then it follows that simply continuing to write and publish articles should make me a confident writer. And if it all turns out to be smoke and mirrors in the end, my future self may rest knowing I gave it a real shot. And that I was not a lesser man for having failed to inherit the gifted writer genes that I suspect run on my mother’s side of the family.
This series of articles — of which I intend this piece to be the first — is for anyone who is considering becoming a primary school teacher because, quite frankly, they didn’t come up with a better idea.
The real introduction
The outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, made front page news for over a week. I was finishing my undergraduate degree and had applied for a Master’s degree in social science research. But I had second thoughts and asked a trusted university professor for career advice. I knew, and he confirmed, that this choice of study would mean living like a student for three to five more years. In an unalarmed voice, he cautioned against studying anything requiring more than one year to train for, which couldn’t immediately lead to employment. I knew that, but I needed him to say it. He suggested looking for a Master’s in business psychology, a growing field, or looking into the education sector as a possible good fit. All my life, I have held strong convictions about what I would become. But my self-belief was shoring up in the wake of a personal — financial — crisis.
I considered what he said over the summer months. By then, the pandemic was in full swing and the restaurant where I worked closed. I was homebound and the primary carer of my daughter. My wife, a nurse, resented the situation. She hadn’t become a nurse to battle deadly new viruses for the good of humanity while her husband hung out in their garden with their daughter and got paid by the government.
I often put my daughter down to nap in the afternoon and then retired to the shade of our living room to watch Youtube; many videos had titles like A day in the life of a primary teacher. Primary teaching lured me in because of the alleged demand for male teachers in England and because it was hailed as recession-proof. It also meant that my wife and I could move out of Manchester — we longed for a life on the coast — when we finished our degrees without struggling to find work. She is midway through a two-year Master’s degree, which means we’d complete our university commitments simultaneously in the summer of 2022.
From the cockpit to the classroom
As a child, I glued countless model planes together and worshipped my VHS copy of Top Gun. As a teenager, I wasted countless hours flying a desk around the internet with flight simulators, back when the internet made funny noises. Later, I worked at an airstrip as a janitor and joined an air cadets program, where I did lots of drill marching in camouflage fatigues.
Then, one day I had an epiphany. Maybe the idea of being a fighter pilot was a fantasy I had slowly brainwashed myself into chasing. Perhaps I was not tall enough, smart enough, or resilient enough. Could I keep my lunch down during combat manoeuvres the almighty Maverick effortlessly pulled off in his F-14? Would I be able to sleep knowing that I was an instrument of death and destruction? The weight of these doubts piled up in my brain, dragging my aspirations of becoming a pilot down through the primitive recesses of my psyche and into a chasm of despair; they gurgled and sputtered into oblivion. Therefore, I considered myself lucky to have a second, parallel obsession.
I guess I couldn’t decide who I envied more, Tom Cruise or the filmmakers who shot the Top Gun movie. Long spells daydreaming about hunting rogue Soviet fighter planes were regularly interspersed with visions of becoming a Hollywood director, a stuntman, or a visual effects person. I played with my stepfather’s camcorder making stunt tapes and stop motion action scenes with toys. Looking back, I spent most of my time avoiding real responsibilities in favour of chasing lofty fictional ones. Did I have my head in the clouds, or had I buried it in the sand?
I never did go on to direct movies, jump through windows, or conjure up special effects. However, I did pursue a decade-long career as a colour grader in film post-production, which entails the final adjustments to the visual coherency of motion pictures. The colour grading process happens at the same time that the soundtrack is mixed, ahead of the film’s theatrical distribution. After a decade of doing that, as a thirty-year-old, I had a second epiphany. Colour grading didn’t give me the sense of self-actualisation I had hoped it would. Here I was doing a job nobody even knows exists that has nothing to do with telling stories.
So, I left my job with a severance package and set my sights on becoming a writer. I purchased a typewriter and reams and reams of paper. Then I tried very hard to write.
For four years, I hammered out half-finished short stories and lived off my savings and small jobs. During this time, I became engaged to a beautiful young woman who saw me as the writer I would become. Behind every successful man, there is a woman, she’d say, with a twinkle in her eye. A year later, we married. We bought a house and that Toyota I mentioned earlier. I also became a father. My personal life was taking off with magnificent leaps and bounds! But my fledgling career as a writer was doing anything but leaping or bounding. The penny dropped when in the summer of 2020 — nearly eight years after I had quit my real job — I found myself staring at a depleted savings account. Ridiculous?
I had believed, with all my heart, that if I worked long and hard enough, there would be a payoff. A sort of happily ever after in which I minted my own money with a 1950’s portable typewriter.
This series of Medium.com articles is my attempt to come to terms with preconceptions of happiness and success. And, of course, it gives me a renewed opportunity to pretend that I’ll eventually become a writer when I finally grow up.
Last year, I gave drafts of my four best-written short stories to an MFA Creative Writing program professor. A polite man with a white goatee and small, round glasses. He read them and wrote me a thoughtful email in return. He said, in the kindest way possible, that my writing samples wouldn’t get me onto their course. Despite my efforts, he said I didn’t convincingly command the English language, confusing spellings of such words as “where” and “were,” and plenty of other oddities like that. He did say that he liked one of my stories because it was simple and short. Right.
It was finally time to shelve the typewriter. Accept that, for now, it wouldn’t be the thing that would be paying the mortgage.
Never give up
I recently completed an undergraduate degree in psychology and philosophy. I am not a fighter pilot, a film director, a stuntman, a visual effects person, or a writer. The world is still grappling with the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. Six months ago, I was serving people coffee and pancakes. I have a car, a house, a wonderful wife and a beautiful two-year-old daughter. I don’t always have lots of practical sense or overflowing self-confidence. I have decided to become a primary school teacher and reboot a part of my life — the job part — in a way that will challenge me to grow. The idea gives me a renewed sense of purpose, to take on responsibilities that I evaded in the past.
My teacher training starts in six months. So I close my eyes to pray. Let me learn to let unhelpful things and old emotions go. Let me remain vigilant to opportunities which surround me. Let me face the unknown with an open mind and a belief in my ability to wisely navigate adversity.
Once I send my prayer out into the world, where it belongs, my heart feels free.
References
Lee, K., and Ashton, M. C. (2006). Further assessment of the HEXACO Personality Inventory: Two new facet scales and an observer report form. Psychological Assessment, 18(2), 182–191.
