The Graveyard of Ambition

Nine minutes into the movie One Day (2011), the following conversation between Emma (played by Anne Hathaway) and Ian (played by Rafe Spall) takes place.

Emma: So, what’s your stroke?

Ian: Sorry, my what?

Emma: Waiter/actor, waiter/model, waiter/writer?

Ian: Well, I am comedian.

I watched the film in 2015 when I still believed that job is meant to pay bills, there was no wanting involved. I was beginning my M.A then, I hadn’t given a thought to who I will be by the end of next two years. In a way, I had taken it for granted that I’ll be somebody after college. Job was just what follows college, just like college followed school. It was a completely normal rite of passage in embracing adulthood. Yet, this scene had made me wonder, what would my stroke be?

As and when I completed my post graduation, I was struck by a crisis that comes with freedom of choice. I was prepared for a step by step guide to death, I wasn’t prepared for making a decision. I struggled for a long time because an M.A in English leads to opportunities in many fields. I had always looked forward to being in academia, be the teacher who inspires young minds to be the change as my professors had been to me. However, the awareness of my verbal diarrhoea kept me from pursuing it.

Within the first week of my internship at a semi-corporate company I had declared to my parents that I am not meant for a desk job, I’d rather be a writer. A couple of months later, I was in a 9-6 job. As great as it felt to be able to pay my own rent in the first month, I was dying inside because I hadn’t written anything beyond my daily work report in a month – a work report that needed language to be used in a certain way. I had no time for anything after working hours, I had no mental space to even think or physical energy to stay up till ten at night. The only day off that I got was spent in doing the chores that were not taken care of during weekdays. Every time a friend asked me out, I returned to Emma from One Day to say, “I’d love to come but after work, I like to head home, comfort eat, and weep.”

As much as I wrote rants about a job related to writing instead of writing, I was not ready to commit. I kept telling people I write but only for my blog. When they called it a hobby, I was uncomfortable. I didn’t write because I had free time. I wrote simply because I had to, it was my only way to feel alive. Yet, calling myself a writer seemed far-fetched.

Now, two years after college I look around me and I have run out of people with strokes in my life. I see business associates, I see divorce lawyers, I see marketing managers. I no longer see ‘the job we are doing now stroke writer in future’. It is disheartening because I looked up to these people who called themselves writers and poets and storytellers. Unlike me, they were always confident about what they produced. I was merely venting. So, it is disheartening to see that their art was just a hobby that they had let go of in order to move forward in life.

Ian: So, what about you Emma? What’s your stroke? What do you really do?

Emma: Uh, this, this is what I do. Still, it’s not forever, is it?

When I hear Emma say, it’s not forever, I wonder if my friends feel the same way, if someday they’d pick up a pen to write again. I hope with all my heart that they do. I find a voice inside me now that assures me that there was a reason that I looked up to them but never felt at home with them. Writing wasn’t a hobby, and I have taken time to understand that simply because I vent, it doesn’t mean it cannot be art.  I have lived in denial for too long, procrastinated more than Hamlet. Maybe it is okay even if my friends don’t return to their art, they had choices, they took a decision. I shouldn’t have to compare myself to them, questioning my worth, constantly snapping myself out of my dreams by saying that there’s a hole dug for me too in the graveyard of ambition. I was there. I went in to bury self doubts and fear, I am planning to visit it with flowers every once in a while.

Here's a Shashi Deshpande quote from That Long Silence (1988) to end the post with:

"To achieve anything, to become anything, you've got to be hard and ruthless. Yes, even if you want to be a saint, if you want to love the whole world, you've got to stop loving individual human beings first. And if they love you, and they bleed when you show them you don't love them, not specially, well, so much worse for them! There's just no other way of being a saint. Or a painter. A writer."