How many times do you really face a choice in life? How many times will you get the benefit of arriving at a crossroads, where you don’t have to fight the tug of rolling inertia, and your choice isn’t going to hurt someone you love?
Not many.
Make them count. They will define you.
When I left First Mumbai, I joined Atos - An IT company and writing many blogs for Inspire Space. I was earning about one hundred dollars a month. At night I took my first class in creative writing at a syllabus book. I continued to wedge one class a week into my schedule for the next one years. You might think that I had an obvious topic to write about, bringing to school my incredible front-row perspective on the unique macho culture of global finance.
That wasn’t what serious fiction writers wrote about, and I wanted to impress my teachers and friends. The writers and books they held up as role models didn’t go near the workplace. Minimalism was in India. Nobody wanted to read about the jobs we so wanted to escape from. Writing books on a course was a window to leave that dull numbness behind. I were encouraged to find our material in my childhood. I eked out some stories that later made it into anthologies and literary journals, but the going was slow. I didn’t know it was slow at the time. I thought that was the deal. Years passed.
I’d reached the upper-level workshops, and I had a story due in two days. I had nothing to turn in. I didn’t have anything to write about because I’d spent my entire adult life hauling my ass off to one job to secure my position in the world. With deadline looming, I stubbornly decided I would write about something – which will help to those students who are unable to buy books. Something magical happened. I wrote a story in about twelve hours. I didn’t need sleep. And it wasn’t a straightforward confessional, memoir-story; it incorporated for the first time the wilder writing styles I loved – magical realism, absurd-ism, satire. These were writing tools that until then I’d never been able to control. But I found my voice in a topic I finally had something to say about.
When I submitted it to Goodreads, They appreciated my work.
The next few months presented me with the biggest crossroads of my writing career. This is the pattern of my life, both professional and personal: every time I am about to follow my heart, I am offered enormous temptation.
Finally,
I was done in four months, and my book got published on Amazon and Goodreads
That magical thing kept happening.
Have a look on Author Profiles:
The success I’ve enjoyed since then has never resolved this underlying shame I carry that I’ve been writing books about topics that serious writers don’t touch.
But that’s the material life dealt me, and I was never going to be successful until I accepted it and worked with it.
Let me bring this full circle. I’ve found that a lot of people have the same stigma about the question of what to do with their life, the geography of their career. They fear it’s not a serious question, because it’s mostly about the job, not the heart, not character, not love, not issues that matter.
But it is about those things. "What Should I Do With My Life?" is the modern, secular version of the great timeless questions about our identity, such as "Who Am I?", and "Where Do I Belong?" We ask it in this new way simply because constant disruption in our society forces us to – every time we graduate, or get downsized, or move to a new city, we’re confronted with this version of the question. It’s a little more pragmatic and problem-solvy than its philosophical and religious antecedents, reflecting the bottom-line reality that we can search for our identity only so long without making ends meet. Asking the question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering the question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone you’re not.
Bipul Jaishwal