First drafts
Grab an eraser
My ego is in a snit.
It’s like I have a four-year-old child trapped inside having both a meltdown and a temper tantrum. She’s crying and screaming and spinning, doing her best to figure out how she got here and how to escape.
Why?
Because I’m focused on accepting that my life, up until now, has been a first draft.
Over two months ago, this popped up on my TikTok feed.
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I know a lot of you don’t swim in the TikTok pool and I respect that. For me, I’ve curated content creators who educate and inspire me. This young woman is one of them, so I respectfully request you take two minutes to listen. It may be relevant to your own life and the rest of this piece won’t make nearly as much sense if you don’t.
When I first heard her talk about everything up until now being a first draft, the chatterbox of my mind chimed in immediately.
That is utterly ridiculous.
You’ve worked too hard for it all to be a first draft.
First drafts never get published.
How could all this effort not result in a complete story?
What you’ve accomplished is better than a first draft.
It was too noisy for me to really absorb what she said, but I sensed it was important, so I e-mailed the link to myself and came across it this week. After the last two months filled with incredible professional highs and emotional lows, it makes so much more sense. Although I would argue that perhaps the last thirty years have been a second draft.
My 60th birthday rapidly approaches and I’m preparing to enter my third and final draft of this experience we call life – if I’m fortunate enough to live until I’m 90. This isn’t an attempt to be maudlin or a sympathy grab or an invitation to counter my perception. It’s just reality.
However, I enter this stage consciously, which I was unable to do with previous drafts.
I don’t know if I could have understood when I was younger that what I was working so hard for was never going to be the finished product. I wonder if I’d been able to grasp that, even at a shallow level, if some of the suffering over outcomes desired but not obtained could have been mitigated.
I’ll never know the answer.
What I can do now is go into this draft with my eyes open, knowing that the final chapters are being written in ink. I can let this knowledge serve as an open Chrome window in my mind, that gently reminds me when I get upset over something that didn’t go my way or feel impatient because the Universe’s timing is not mine or am afraid of doing something I really want to do, that there will not be another complete draft.
It’s time to push through the fear for real, forgive more quickly, appreciate the impediments, honor exactly where I stand without trying to fix it, and most of all have more fun. I may not get to decide the details of how this draft ends, but I can pave the road that takes me there.
So while my ego finishes feeling its feelings, I’ll be over here integrating those first two versions of the story with the one I’m writing now.