Your Destination is on the Right

Pulling out the ball machine is kind of a pain in the ass. Sign it out, get the key, tow it out of the sweltering closet and across the uneven ground to your court, swearing it’s not heavy, it’s just awkward. Uncoil fifty feet of tangled cord, loop it across the fence, the sidewalk, and the lawn until you reach the outlet. Test all the settings, run five to ten test balls, and twenty minutes later you can start hitting.

Unless, of course, there’s a dead ball jammed under the rotor.

In which case, you unload every ball from the hopper and spend another quarter hour trying to pry the soft ball out from the wheel, then trying to shove it through the launch shoot.

But perhaps it’s impossible, and the whole thing needs to serviced by someone with more tools and expertise than you.

Then what? Go home? Say, What a waste of time, then put it all away and give up?

No! This is the chasm! Here is the difference between winners and losers! Say screw the machine! and serve the entire bucket of balls on the deuce side, pick them up, serve them all on the ad side, pick them up.

Repeat. Bucket of forehands. Repeat. Bucket of backhands. Repeat. Toss yourself overheads and chase them down. Repeat.

You can't decide to go home. It’s tedious, it’s embarrassing, and it’s the grit that separates success and unsuccess.

How bad do you want this thing? Tennis, writing, motherhood — how badly do you want to succeed?

For five years I’ve effectively hit balls by myself: short stories, poems, novels, applications. I have not met success since Ugly Good won A Studio in the Woods residency and I glimpsed the mountaintop, upon which writing is a career, and writers have readers.

Five years since then: five rejected applications to fully funded residencies. Fruitless magazine contests and idle poetry. Four novels, fifty pitches, a marathon of unsuccess.

Still my eyes are fixed on the peak. And I keep climbing; needing, wanting, starving, prying and shoving until—

I get in to Bennington! Nicholas and I stare at the letter posted in my application portal.

Dear Emily,

On behalf of the faculty and staff, it is my pleasure to offer you deferred admission to the Bennington Writing Seminars for the Winter 2027 term…

Then we stare at each other. “This is good, right?” Nicholas says.

I send the screenshot to my family. Kayleigh texts me on the side, “Are we happy?”

I have learned that if you really want it, you have to give up on being perfect and even on being good; you have to embarrass yourself; you have to be ready to grovel; you have to want every tool at your disposal — you have to lose your honor.

So then why am I more focused on the bolded words deferred admission than the following paragraph, which begins, We are pleased to award you a $5,000 scholarship?

For a moment, perhaps, I forgot that I am starving—that the ball is stuck beneath the rotor. But the starved do not turn away from steak because they want lobster.

Who sniffs at $5k because it’s not $23k? Only the stupid. So pop the champagne (we did—two bottles!) and write like a maniac until you cash your deferred admittance.

Someone with more tools and more expertise fixed the ball machine while I hit by myself. And if I’m okay with that, I ought also to be okay with all the MFAs I didn’t get.

De Vries said write drunk and edit sober. Because you can't let inhibitions get in the way of success. If you can't embarrass yourself, if you're not willing to look stupid and ignorant, to ask for directions, to put on the jacket the wrong way and let someone correct you, you're going nowhere. You only have the road map for the world you already traveled. If you want to go somewhere uncharted, you better be willing to stumble and fail and ask for help, covered in dust and near starving, bones sticking out from your flesh and ego left in the sunbaked dust of your footprints.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try your hardest to get it right. That you should half ass the road to perfection. No, like C.S. Lewis said, we should never be satisfied with less than perfection. But we must understand that perfection is impossible, and with that knowledge we can let go of the destination and simply hop on the cycle of desire, where we're stuck in a closed loop — grinding in silence, as Nicholas would put it — while the object of desire sits in the center, just out of reach. Because upon that wheel, what seem to be speed bumps in the road to perfection reveal themselves to be the opportunities we were searching for all along.

Remember: men plan and God laughs. So get on with your plan and your dreams and your desires. But don't be surprised when the things you accomplish were off the docket from the jump. That's the beauty. Five years ago, you didn't see this future. But here you are. And the things you worked on in this half-decade are the things that got you here.

Miley Cyrus has been telling us that it's the climb. But did we listen? Do we get it? It's not just that the journey is beautiful, or that it gives value to the destination.

If you are an artist, it's this: THE CLIMB IS THE EVERYTHING.

You cannot make a good book, painting, photo, poem on the first try. You cannot. So the thing that you make, the thing that makes you happy or gets you into grad school or wins the Booker Prize, it is made of the climb. It is every experience you had before success. It is made by the person who failed and suffered and climbed and kept going when there seemed to be no path left. That person made the art. Not the successful one, who appears once the Magnum Opus is complete. No. The art is made by the unsuccessful. The person who kept climbing.

Success is not found at the mountaintop. Success is found on every step, every tree root and pound of scree. And when you get to the top, that's when you turn and say, look what I made on this climb.

That opus was not built on the summit. It was built in the cycle, the silent grind, in the desert, the chasm. That success was built when you wanted to quit. When the machine was broken. When you had to get creative and you had to embarrass yourself. When you were drafting and they were laughing — that was the climb. So don't fucking give up before the top.