Several months ago, a box arrived at my house. It came from the storage loft in the house my ex and I used to share; they’ve been renovating over there, and he came across this box and asked me if I wanted it. I said sure, and then, when it arrived, immediately froze at the prospect of going through it, so I put it on the floor of my office and that’s where it stayed, patiently waiting all this time. This is notable, if you know how much I dislike clutter in my workspace. A couple of weeks ago, I started thinking about a piece I wrote long, long ago about the house my dad lived in throughout my childhood—the house my mother and I left when their marriage broke up. The climactic scene of that piece depicted a night some time after my dad married my stepmother, when she informed me in no uncertain terms that the house no longer belonged to me, that it was hers now and I should never forget that. That night—that speech—was emblematic of the way I felt my stepmother replaced me in my father’s life, and I wanted to rework the piece from my perspective now, so I went looking for it. When I couldn’t find it in any of the digital files of my writing, it occurred to me: it’s probably in that box. So at long last, I sat down and started digging through it. What I found…surprised me.

The piece I was looking for was right there, as I’d expected. The box is packed with manuscripts I wrote while I was in graduate school, and before that, while I was taking classes at Cleveland State in preparation for applying to grad school. There are academic papers, creative nonfiction, excerpts from what would ultimately become Dark Matter, and short stories: so many stories. The first thing that stunned me was the volume of my work: did I actually write all this? How had I forgotten any of these stories existed? The second thing was the critiques penned on final pages and throughout the margins by my classmates, teachers, and writer’s group partners. This is the most accomplished manuscript I received this year, wrote my beloved CSU professor, Sheila Schwartz (a brilliant writer whose work few people know due to her untimely death from ovarian cancer). My graduate adviser scrawled uncharacteristically effusive praise on a revision of a Dark Matter excerpt, which reminded me that he’d held it up as an example to the class of what good revision looked like. Not everyone loved everything I wrote, obviously, but the gist was clear: this work is strong, original, interesting, funny. It’s really good. Keep doing it. 

 Amidst all the short essays about my crazy family and aspirationally Kafkaesque stories about homeless squatters taking over people’s houses and yoga students uncovering long-lost memories, was a story inspired by the little girl who lived nextdoor to my ex and me while we were in grad school. It’s about an ugly little redneck girl who falls in love with the host of her favorite Jerry-Springer-style TV talk show and then realizes, after she hears her dead mother speak to her through the family answering machine one night, that the story could get her on his show. It is a quintessentially 1990s story that beautifully sends up a particular cultural craze and lets an unlovable heroine triumph. I reread the entire thing on the spot, sitting on the floor of my office, and I loved it as much in that moment as I had while I was writing it. 

Why am I dragging you on this long trudge down memory lane? Because it brought me to a surprising and painful realization: all of these manuscripts were written between 25 and 30 years ago. That’s half my lifetime. And they’ve been sitting in this box ever since.

Maybe that’s not a hundred percent true. I never let go of Dark Matter; it went through multiple iterations, but it ultimately became the novel it is today, something unique and beautiful that I would be proud to let stand as the sole literary accomplishment of my lifetime, if anyone would let me (though it won’t be! Because I’ve published multiple short stories already and have another coming out this spring! I’m saying this to me, not to you!). But the rest of it? The thousands of pages of writing about motherhood, friendship, politics, womanhood, family dysfunction, history, memory, hope? What has become of any of it? What ever will become of it? There are a lot of reasons I haven’t achieved the kind of career success that, in my mind, would show I have “done something” with my talents: introversion; the total absence of any understanding of the “business side” of creative work; the lack of a literary network and the connections that would provide; a belief that my work was not as important as my husband’s, and was therefore reasonably pushed aside in support of his; a desire to stay home with my kids and be their primary caregiver. But the biggest obstacle, if I’m honest with myself, was my own fear, and my biggest fear was of how the people I loved the most would feel about my work.

My Muralist friend recently made a discovery about himself that has triggered a wave of reflection and regret. What would be different about my life, my family, my career now, he wondered aloud, if I had figured this out twenty years ago? He has the kind of career I imagine would feel like success to me: he supports himself and his family with his work, he is out there every day making his art and getting recognized for it—and yet, he feels so much frustration because it is still such a daily struggle to stay afloat, he hardly has space in his life for anything else. No sooner had we talked about his grief over what might have been than I sat down beside the box, and was suddenly confronted with the same overarching question. What would be different about my career trajectory, if all my decisions hadn’t been grounded in fear? What would be different about my life, and my family? Are these simply the sorts of questions everyone asks when they reach a certain point in life? I thought I’d already been down this road in my forties—and I believed I’d be farther along by now. The grief that wells from some deep unacknowledged place when I ask myself those questions about my work is suffocating, but I know that the consequences of not acknowledging it are, perhaps, even worse. 

The choices I made were mine alone; I don’t blame anyone else for them. Others absolutely benefited from them, even relied upon them, but it was I who opted to keep myself small, and silent, out of a multiplicity of fears: that people I loved would be angry about (or hurt by) what I wrote; that eventually I’d be outed as a hack and a fraud; that I would fail; that I would succeed. And always, underneath all of those, the eternal fear that it’s already too late for me to be the writer I’ve dreamed of becoming. This is the binary system I’ve existed within my whole life: the supersonic engine of need to be doing the work I was put here to do, and sending it out into the world, and the paralyzing, existential terror of being seen, and found inadequate. Or wrong. Or selfish. Maybe it’s not such an unusual dilemma; maybe other people just navigate it earlier in their lives. Or, possibly, never at all, though that last one feels like not an option. Maybe it’s the discomfort of having an additional binary added into the gravitational system: the…what? Acceptance? Grief? Integration? of what is no longer possible, balanced against the possibilities that still exist. And the recognition that time continues to pass, regardless of what any of us do, or don’t.