the endurance mission

you're not going to get it right

Before I moved to California for the second time, I worked as an Artist in Residence at a Performing Arts school in West Palm Beach, Florida. Twice a week, I drove to the campus and taught Creative Writing to a small group of students. I was paid barely anything, but I loved the job. I was going through a bad breakup from my grad school relationship, and the gig gave me clarity and time to focus on myself.

My students were ten years younger than me. They were brilliant and funny and brought me back to life after the heartbreak. But then I decided to move across the country and start over, again. I kept in touch with a handful of my students. I was twenty-seven, single, and ready to get serious about my writing.

evening walk through the paseos

My first stop in California was a two-week writing retreat in the Redwoods. I was working on what would become The Brittanys, but in truth, I spent most of my days hiking in the woods and crying. The owner of the property had a dog named Sally who accompanied me on these crying walks. I felt like I was finding my footing again after being involved with someone toxic for so long. This person threw things at me when he was angry. And I let him. The straw that had broken the camel’s back was when I told him I wanted to try stand-up comedy. “What’s my role in this?” he’d asked, his face glued to the Florida Seminoles as they ran a play across the screen. “To be supportive?” I said. “No, I'm good,” he’d responded. We broke up that night.

On my cry-walks, I imagined a new self emerging from the writing retreat, pristine and pure. There was even one day when I jumped into the pool, fully clothed, in what I suppose was a bout of anxiety that I was attempting to clear. A baptism of sorts. An immersion that served as a rite of passage.

I came home from the retreat with the opening chapters and a renewed sense of hope, a hope that my ex would have called delusional. I called it ambition.

*

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries chronicles a decade of feelings—the things that are fleeting, things that remain. Difficult friendships and dangerous loves. In an online workshop with Heti back in 2020, she shared her screen with our group and showed us the diary entries in a word document, how she’d shuffle them around and try to make sense of the structure, how this was her way, her form of play.

There is a palpable push/pull throughout the pages—of wanting to be known and wanting to live a quiet life, of wanting to write and wanting to love, a desire to go inward, a wish to move away from the self.

“A lack of values, a lack of privacy, and a lack of modesty, which is making me feel kind of sick,” Heti writes from an unspecified time. “A life in a new place for a while. A life which is beside the main current of life…A little distance between this energy and myself. A little nervous. A little too long, and it’s boring now.”

“Been thinking about authenticity, and about how we have been done a great disservice by being taught that what we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values.”

“How long I wanted to be rid of myself—but couldn’t be.”

bunny on the grass

I wonder what the alphabetical diary is doing. What good does it do to document ourselves in the written word?

In essay writing, I guide my students to discover structure and shape, to illuminate what’s been hidden, and to use the page as a space for self-exploration and expression.

The alphabet offers structure; the dairy, a resting place for emotion. But the emotions don’t rest—they live. Each one pulses with urgency. Each one endures.

*

One of my former students from the Performing Arts school texts me when I'm writing at a coffee shop.

“I have this note you wrote me and S and C and N the summer before we all went to college and you were 27 when you wrote it and I'm 27 now which is crazy and I'm just dropping in to say that you were right right right and I hope you’re doing well.”

The note pops up an attachment and I hit download. Here is the note, syncopated for clarity:

“I'll be in the Redwoods for the next two weeks. I'm actually here now sitting at a wooden table in a very big house and three other writers are actually here also writing with me. I guess I'm telling you this because I won't be able to have our "workshop" time, as I'm setting my focus on this novel. I need to get a draft done before summer is over. I know some of you are already off to college, or packing, or leaving tomorrow. It's a very emotional time and I don't have the nine hours it would take to properly prepare any of you for it, but here is my two-minute advice--

You're not going to get it right. That may seem harsh, but it's the truth. You're not going to go be a perfect person. You're just not, and I know that because no one does that. Even the people who get jobs right out of college (that's a whole other essay) don't necessarily "get it right." They're just doing things. You're just going off to do another thing in the course of your life. As I was driving today, I thought about you all, packing and getting nervous and arguing with your parents, and it's funny because that shit never ends. I packed super haphazardly yesterday, argued with my mom about money, cried in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s. And I'm 27. I've been doing this shit for ten more years than you all. So trust me, you'll probably never get it right. But that's the good news. College is important, you are important, but college is not meant to be the end-all-be-all. Nothing's over until you're dead anyway.

The point is, you're going to get through it, and then have a new experience, and more, and many more, then fifteen more, then a hundred more. Don't look at your whole life though; just stay in today. Try very hard to just be a good person, tip well at restaurants, don't be on your phone in the Starbucks line, summarize the reading for someone in your class who didn't do it (they won't pass anyway), be on time, fuck, be EARLY (my mom used to send me the Wonder Word from the paper and I used to do it before class and eat Oreos), don't make college about guys (or girls) ((and I mean that romantically or in a friendship way)). First of all, college guys are DISGUSTING. I knew a guy who DID NOT shower. He literally sprayed AXE cologne instead of bathing and wore the same shirt every weekend and never washed it. This is what is out there. And girls are super clique-y too, because they're just like you (you guys are better…but still). They're new, lonely, and weird. They get jealous. So do you.

Just try, like I said, VERY HARD, to wake up every day and talk to yourself nicely, tell yourself you're worth a damn, that you are going to do something good for yourself, and then take a nap and eat a cookie. Try to go for walks like to class or go running or stay active somehow.

If you're sad, and you will get sad, call each other. Text. Send a dumb photo. Stay in touch. Call or text me. I literally have NO life. Reach out and don't just internalize everything. Call your parents and tell them you love them. Call a friend and tell them that. Call me and tell me my snaps are artistic.

Explore. Don't just sit in your dorm and get high. My roommate did that and she ended up getting that rare disease you get a shot for before college and dropped out of school. She literally never went to class.

GO TO CLASS. It's fun. College classes are actually enjoyable because the teachers want to hear your opinions.

Be careful. I somehow made it through college without getting pregnant, arrested, or getting an STD. SOMEHOW. If you can do the same, I’d say college was a success. Oh and get a diploma or something. The most important thing I learned in college was that I'm a hard worker and self-motivated. I respect that about myself. I also learned that I cannot pull off a belted dress of any kind, and that I shouldn't drink vodka.

I love you all and I hope this is helpful. You're going to worry and be upset and scared no matter what I say, but just know that you're going to be fine. I'm proud of all of you and even if you get pregnant, arrested, or an STD, I'll be there for you and I'll still love you and respect you and think you're awesome.

DO NOT stop writing. If you stop, in any capacity (even if you only do it for fun in a journal or on the back of your class notes), I will not love or respect you and I will unfollow you on social media.

Be well.
Britt

*

I procure a spring sinus infection and stay in bed to watch Interstellar. In the movie, Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, leaves Earth to join the Endurance mission. He is 35 years old. His daughter, Murph, is 10 when he leaves. She sends him a video message after the crew has experienced time dilation, a traumatic scene to say the least, and she states that now she is the same age as her dad when he first departed.

When Cooper finally reunites with Murph at the end of the movie, his daughter is now elderly and on her deathbed, surrounded by family. The reunion is a poignant moment, with Murph acknowledging Cooper’s return and assuring him that she knew he would come back because he had promised her such. It’s a moment of immense emotion, especially for Cooper, as he has missed out on witnessing his daughter’s entire life and the events that have transpired on Earth. And Murph, despite her feelings of abandonment and betrayal, eventually accepts her father’s decisions and understands his motivations. He literally wanted to save the planet. His return is a testament to their love and his commitment to his daughter.

Murph has aged passed her father. The tables have turned. Time has become crooked.

This is sort of how it feels when my former student sends me that message. This student has gone on to be a teacher in their own way, traveling for drama work and acting and helping others.

After I read the note I’d written when I was twenty-seven, the note that this student has saved on their phone all these years, we continue chatting and it warms my heart.

“Omg are we having an Interstellar moment??? This is wild!!!” I say. “I still love all of you!”

“We still love you too,” they say.

I share pictures of my daughter and what I’ve been up to and we chat about how academia is crumbling and I congratulate them on following their passions and their heart.

It was all I wanted for myself when I was twenty-seven, to follow my heart.

I feel it in Sheila Heit’s writing. I can tell which entries were made in her twenties, which in her thirties. I can feel what sentiments were of youth and which were more grown up. There are moments of pure anger, of self-doubt, of excitement, of happiness, so many internal expeditions into the self. The thread that tied all those fragments, confessions, and reflections together was this: she endured. And through each experience, she emerged stronger, transformed by the very act of having lived through it.

Life is not a hill to conquer, but a season that keeps turning.

*

lizard friend on the trail

I’ve started walking alone in the evenings. I listen to whatever audiobook I have borrowed from Libby. I put on my hat and my sneakers and I set out on the trail that takes exactly thirty minutes to complete. Sometimes my mind drifts away from the book and I think of other things, some problem in my life, some mental or physical ailment, or I try to find my way in to a problem in my work. I see a lizard or a bunny and I take a picture on my phone.

I used to go on walks like this because I thought it would help me find myself. Whatever that means. But now I believe the walks help me remember myself. Oh, here I am. The walks remind me that I have survived many things and that I will survive a great deal more. I used to want answers from life, but now I just arrive at more and more questions.

For me, getting older is learning how to endure. I am growing in my ability to withstand hardship, stress, and pain, to persist through grief, trauma, anxiety, without giving up. I think my advice at twenty-seven still holds up: You’re not going to get it right, but you will endure. You will get better at it. You will become more at home in yourself, and you will soften to the rhythm of your own life.

But God help you if you stop writing.

trail selfie

—

I wrote about the complexities of how we all navigate the human experience and how yoga helped me cope with grief in “Human Again” for the latest issue of Clarity for Waiting Room Publishing.

My interview for Elizabeth Hall’s novel Season of the Rat is now live on Write or Die: On the Romance of Rat Life, Making it as a Twenty-Something, and the Excavation of Fantasy.

Registration is now open for my next 8-Week Advanced Nonfiction Workshop with Lighthouse Writers!