deadlines
When I was nine, I wanted to be a writer. Specifically, I wanted to write historical fiction novels. I wrote little stories in my Disney spiral notebook about the Titanic, Renaissance Europe, and ancient Egypt. For a long time, I never showed them to anyone, preferring to keep my stories all to myself. When I opened up and began to show them to friends and family, they told me I had a gift. My ability to write stories made me feel special, like I had a talent no one else had.
My sixth-grade class voted me “Most Likely to be a Best-Selling Author” in the superlatives section of the yearbook. In eighth grade, I had a short story in my middle school’s magazine showcasing student artwork. When I was 14, I started writing poems in addition to short stories. I wrote terrible poetry about my high school crush in a pocket-sized composition notebook. (Yes, I was the annoying kid who carried around a fucking notebook in her pocket). I genuinely believed I was on my way to becoming a historical fiction best-selling author and the poet laureate.
By the time I got to college, I didn’t write much anymore. I wanted to major in English or creative writing, but my parents gently suggested that I should choose a path that would lead to steady employment, so I settled on the next best thing - communications and journalism. I wrote fewer and fewer poems and stories. My goals became more practical and less imaginative.
When I turned 20 and entered what I believed was the most important decade of my life, I thought I would have my master’s degree at 22, get married at 23, and have a child at 25. I was on track to finish my bachelor’s degree early thanks to my AP classes in high school, so getting a master’s at age 22 wasn’t unrealistic.
As I approached the end of undergrad, I took one look at a GMAT prep book at Barnes & Noble and just about shit myself with anxiety. There was no way I was cut out for that. Besides, I had gotten offered a job straight out of college, and wasn’t that the point of college anyway? And did I really want an MBA or was I just told I should get an MBA? After all, I came of age during the “girlboss” wave of feminism when Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was required reading for every young woman whose sense of self-worth came solely from her academic and professional accomplishments.
Around this time, I admired my boss at my first internship. She was the CEO of a digital marketing agency at 30, wasn’t that something to aspire to? Never mind that she was always stressed out, overworked, and disorganized because she consistently bit off more than she could chew. She had an MBA and captioned her Instagram photos with #bosslady, which meant she was successful.
The more time I spent in the high pressure world of professional Lean In women, the less I wanted to go to business school. Still, I had my bachelor’s degree and was the communications manager at a nonprofit at the age of 21. So, maybe the master’s degree (in something besides business) could wait a few more years. Though I was grateful for the stable job and regular paychecks, it wasn’t exactly creatively fulfilling, so I thought I’d take another stab at writing. On a whim, I entered a local nonfiction writing contest, even though I had never written nonfiction before, and I won. But then what? What did people who wanted to be serious writers do? Get an MFA? I convinced myself that winning the contest was beginner’s luck and couldn’t bring myself to write anything else for nearly a year because what if I was actually an awful writer and that had been my peak?
Academic goals aside, I thought I could still be married by 23. I had a long-term boyfriend, and I saw on Facebook that some of my old high school classmates were starting to get engaged. My boyfriend and I talked about getting married and even looked at engagement rings. There was never a formal proposal, just an understanding that this was what people were supposed to do when they had been together for five years.
Never mind that his alcoholism was destroying our relationship one bottle of vodka at a time. Never mind that he would wake up on the living room floor after a night of heavy drinking, surrounded by broken things with no memory of what he’d done while I cried in the bedroom. Never mind that we fought constantly; I resented how easily he was influenced by his small-minded friends in his small-minded hometown, and he resented my love of travel and my larger ambitions. And if I’m being honest, I can be a pretentious bitch sometimes.
We sent out wedding invitations, picked out a caterer, a venue, and a color scheme. Then COVID hit and we started working from home, barely leaving our apartment or interacting with other people besides each other for months. He kept drinking. We kept fighting. I started seeing a therapist. It was his suggestion, and maybe he thought I was the problem and therapy would fix me because I was so angry all the time. We canceled the wedding - or COVID did for us. It was much less embarrassing to tell people we had to cancel due to a pandemic instead of our own failures as a couple. We broke up and got back together and repeated the cycle like we were stuck in a time loop, minus the groundhog.
My 24th birthday came and went. I had no master’s degree and no husband. I had dozens of rejections from various literary magazines and a boring job in a beige cubicle. The only goal that I hadn’t completely failed at yet was having a child by age 25, and not only did that seem ridiculous at this point, but I no longer wanted it, not with the way things were going. My new goal was to write a book before my 30th birthday, but I had no idea where to start. Why not impose more deadlines on life goals that I may or may not be able to achieve?
From the outside, my life looked like a success. I had a (tedious) job that offered good benefits, a (drunk, on-again, off-again) partner I loved, and an (extremely overpriced) apartment in the Boston area. I had a few essays (that I hated upon rereading) published in small literary magazines. My non-writer friends and family asked me if I was getting paid for these - I was not. This seemed to confuse some of them. Why work that hard for something you’re not getting paid to do? And maybe that’s why I was still unsatisfied - not because I wasn’t getting paid for my essays, but because my life looked like a success through the lens of capitalism. I had set these goals for myself because finding academic and professional success as a young woman means you are winning in a system that is rigged against you. And it’s not enough to just be successful in your career - we are still told that our value primarily comes from being a wife and mother. So maybe I thought I could do it all while still pursuing my silly writing dreams on the side. Hobbies make for well-rounded employees and interesting wives.
My eighteen-year-old, girlboss-wannabe self would have been impressed by these so-called accomplishments. I should have been happy. Maybe that’s why people are so shocked to learn I tried to kill myself. Some thought it was all a desperate ploy for attention.
What reason could she possibly have to be depressed? I imagine they thought. Why should I want to be alive? I would respond. To work another 40 years at a desk job while the planet quite literally burns to death? To stay in a relationship that makes me miserable? To someday bring a child into an unjust world? To pursue a dream that thousands of other people are also pursuing and only a handful will ever achieve?
Maybe a morbid and narcissistic part of me thought I might achieve posthumous success as a writer. We love consuming dead people’s art, especially if the artist committed suicide. These dead lines of prose might have more value if their author was dead too.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I threw up all the pills I swallowed almost immediately after I took them. As much as I would love to tell you that my suicide attempt was a wake-up call that I was unhappy and following this attempt, I quit my job and left my boyfriend and moved to New Zealand to get away from it all, nothing really changed. I went to work the next day, came home, and binge watched some Netflix series with my boyfriend. I don’t know if a drastic lifestyle change would bring happiness, but I’m not rich enough to afford a drastic lifestyle change.
Though by many standards, I’ve lived a privileged life - growing up in a middle-class family, being able to afford college because my parents saved money, and never going hungry a day in my life - I’m far from wealthy. I can’t afford to just quit my job and take a trip around the world to “find myself.” Not only do I have bills to pay, but I depend on my job for health insurance, which I need in order to continue seeing my therapist.
I could have called it quits with my boyfriend, but I still love him. Living with an alcoholic isn’t easy, but it’s easier than trying to live without him. Some days I hate myself for being so weak and not wanting to be alone. That’s not what a #bosslady would do.
The thing is, I don’t really want to die. I just don’t want to be this depressed shadow of myself. I don’t want to be the cookie-cutter capitalist woman I set goals and deadlines for either. I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder in a soulless city, nor do I want to live in the lifeless suburbs with a husband and 2.5 kids.
I’ll be 25 in a few months, and maybe this is the dreaded quarter-life crisis my older friends warned me about. It’s the realization that you probably won’t have accomplished everything you set out to accomplish in life by your mid-twenties or early thirties. It’s the doubt in yourself and the choices you’ve made so far. It’s wondering if following your childhood dreams is still in the cards or if you should resign yourself to your cubicle.
I plan to keep working - at my job, at my relationship, and at my writing. I am working on redefining what success means to me. What if I had achieved all those goals by the deadlines I set for myself anyway? What if I had finished grad school at 22, got married at 23, had a baby at 25, and was on track to have a book written at 30? Knowing the kind of person I was when I set those goals, achieving them wouldn’t have made me happy in the long run. I would have set increasingly difficult goals and continued putting pressure on myself until I burnt out. I would have never given myself time to relax or reflect on why I was doing any of it. Is that what I want success to look like for me? Do I want to be the exhausted girlboss who doesn’t know who she is outside of her external achievements?
When I was nine, I wanted to be a writer because writing made me happy, not because anyone told me I should. I didn’t care that my stories lived in my notebook and no one read them but me. Is that not a form of success in and of itself?
Madison Block has a BA in Communications & Journalism from the University of New Mexico. In 2018, she won the Albuquerque Authors Festival nonfiction writing contest. Her work has appeared in Korean American Story, Burnt Pine Magazine, Mom Egg Review, and The Nasiona. Madison currently lives in the Boston area and works in marketing.