In February this year, I was heavily pregnant with my second child. So heavy, in fact, that a major connective ligament gave up, and I could barely walk. I made the choice to submit my manuscript to Te Papa Tupu nice and early, because if I was already having this sort of problem, who knew what lay ahead for me? I might miss out if I were to leave it until the actual deadline!
In March, off work, exhausted, my choices dwindled down to what book I wanted to read next. It wasn’t the worst. I didn’t have a lot of choice when it came to putting up with thirty-six hours of labour, but at least at the end of it, my beautiful baby came into the world and we were both healthy.
In April, the due date came and went for Te Papa Tupu.
In May, the day-to-day of raising two children, recovering, walking again, and getting into some sort of rhythm was all I had space to think about. Not a lot of choice to be had, but I was happy and knew what I was doing second time around. While others anxiously refreshed their inboxes, I must admit, aroha mai… I had clean forgotten about submitting to Te Papa Tupu. If someone had reminded me about it, I would have assumed I’d missed out this time.
On the very last day of May, I got the acceptance email.
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As if by some cosmic coincidence, I keep hearing or reading things about choices lately. In my mentor Lauren Keenan’s memoir The 52 Week Project, she writes about following the script of what life should look like, then changing it up, choosing to try different things to make the most of life. Next, in reading my tarot cards, the card Seven of Cups kept returning, with its picture of a seeker presented with a choice of seven different cups. Then I was invited to speak at my old high school. The deputy principal told me that the kids love to hear from different alumni every year, to see where our choices have taken us.
It has me thinking a lot about the choices I’ve made, or indeed the choices I haven’t made at all.
For me, having children was a choice. At age 29, I felt fully established with a good marriage, a steady job, and a house. Inspired by acting in a play set in a marae about generations of women gathering to celebrate Matariki, I decided, yeah, I can do this. I’m ready for this adventure now. Funnily enough, my husband watched the play and came to the same realisation independently at the exact same time. Result!
By comparison, I’d floated through my university years and my early career days making such absent-minded and misguided choices, that sometimes I look back in wonder and fear at what might have been had I not eventually made the choices which moved me along. Like leaving that bad relationship no matter that it lasted over eight years and my young self worried that I might never love again (ha!). Exiting a toxic friend group despite how much it made me fear missing out on all the fun. Quitting a job I hated even though it meant financial precarity and having to retrain.
All this dwelling on choice also had me thinking about my old approach to writing, back when I was a teenager and, I am ashamed to admit, well into my twenties. I didn’t used to think choice came into it. I had this weird belief that everything came to me as it was meant to be, like I was channelling a muse. Whenever I received the feedback that my work wasn’t good enough, or it was passed up by somewhere I submitted it to, then that was it. The work was bad. I was bad. I stopped trying for a long time because I failed to realise what I hope is quite obvious to most people: that everything about writing is a choice. Setting, themes, plot, even the individual words themselves. You don’t have to accept details of a character just because ‘they appeared to me like that in a dream’ or another arbitrary excuse. You have a choice. You can change the character a little, or a lot. In fact you should. Most dreams aren’t very narrative. Just try telling a friend about your dream last night and you’ll see pretty quickly, it’s almost never as cool as it seemed at the time.
Even coming back to prose writing was a choice, three years ago almost to the day. I’d given up in despair in my early twenties. It was too hard, I had no idea what I was doing, and I had a string of rejections which knocked me back. I’d dabbled again in my late twenties, but not seriously. It wasn’t until three years ago that I decided I needed pure, unadulterated writing. It was a balm to my soul. After getting burnt out on producing my own work in the theatre, and then burnt out again on producing entire video games as coder, writer, tester, promoter and publisher alone, I needed the slower pace of prose writing. More than that, I needed to stop running from my childhood dream of being a published author. No more ‘it’s too hard’ or ‘I’ll do it one day’. By that point, the pandemic and having had my first child had kicked me into a full-on existential crisis: there was only so much time left in my life, and by golly was I going to use it in the right way! No more of this dithering. Deny it all I may: I knew I wanted to be a writer, I’d known since I was very young. If I was going to go down that path, then I needed to put away all the other distractions I kept putting in my own way. No more theatre impresario dreams; no more game dev hustle; set aside all those other little hobbies taking up my time, and just FOCUS. I’d prided myself on being such a jack of all trades. But trying to achieve the big dream, the main dream, the one that really mattered, that was where I would find real pride. Even if I never ‘made it’, whatever that means, just trying was more fulfilling than all the mediocre busywork I’d been filling my time with.
So I made the choice, and I’ve been happy with it ever since.
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When I got the email at the end of May, amongst all the broad swirl of emotions, at the heart of them all was the certainty that I HAD to do Te Papa Tupu this year. I knew would have to move heaven and Earth (and ask of my whānau the same) to get there, to be present, to be in the best possible state to receive the mātauranga. There was both a choice, and no choice at all. I could say no, this would be too difficult. But let’s be real: no way in hell was I ever going to say no.
The story isn’t done – in both senses. More choices lie ahead of me, in the different directions I can take with my manuscript revision, even in the different aspects of this programme I can focus more or less on. The difference this time is that I’m going to take these decisions under advisement. I have my mentor Lauren, and I have layers of support networks around me both in and out of the Te Papa Tupu ecosystem. Every move I make in my revisions is a choice. The teachings I have received through the workshops and mentorship have made that more clear to me that ever.
E kore te pātiki e hoki ki tana ake puehu. In this case, to stay still and not learn from experience, or to return to my old ways, is as good as death. I won’t be going back.
