Meredith Scribbles

My greatest enemy is myself.

I’ve known it for a long time, but the thing about myself is that my self is smart. It likes to let me forget about the parts of me I have to battle until I’m already attacking myself, thinking I’m fighting off an external enemy. It’s not until I’ve lost half a leg that I realize I’m the one causing and encouraging the damage.

Case in point: I’m terrified of failing.

And the easiest way to avoid failing is to simply not start.

It’s not a good strategy by any means, but it is an explanation for why I haven’t created a single blog post since September. Sure, I could say I started a new job, cite the fact that I was rewriting my novel, or blame it on the time-consuming energy of personal development, all of which are true.

Another true fact though is that I felt I didn’t have anything profound to say, and so I didn’t say anything at all. Besides, since I can’t afford a website domain and the monthly WIX subscription is more than a gym membership, search results aren’t even connected to the website. You could google Confessions of a Misplaced Bookworm and never find it.

And if no one can find it, no one will read it, so best just forget the whole thing and start a Substack.

Here’s the problem though—I start a Substack, and then what? If I haven’t established the habit of consistent writing, I wouldn’t write anything there either, resulting only in another empty platform with my name on it. I’d merely be jumping from distraction to distraction in pursuit of some flighty concept I call progress. As an alternative, I’ve decided to do the noble thing of posting when I don’t have all the answers, when I’m not perfect, when I’m messy and mundane and horribly afraid, because that’s the courage of showing up and doing the work, even when I’m scared to death.

Over the past month, I’ve started setting and meeting a daily word count. I used to not set word count goals because I thought it would have to be at least a thousand words to mean anything. After all, Meredith, you have a creative writing degree. Only 500 words? Amateur. Somehow my critic convinced me that for my words to count, I had to write significant chunks and instead ended up writing nothing at all for weeks on end. Then, racked with guilt on a random Saturday, I’d spend four hours holed up in my room, put 3,000 words on the page, and berate myself for not having done it earlier. Clearly I was capable of it, so clearly I should be doing just as much every. Single. Day.

Hatred is a powerful thing, and it is even more destructive when it’s aimed at yourself. It’s tempting though to try to use it as a gas pedal, to turn it inwards in hopes that it will change into an accelerator and push you faster, harder, farther.

I’m finding it doesn’t work like that.

I hate the waiting though, and I want nothing more than to skip to the good part. I want to be finished, complete, perfect, now. I want the goal, but not the messiness in between. I want the success, not the months and months of questions, disenchantment, and well-intentioned lifestyle critique.

In short, I want the flower, not the seed.

But the time in between, the waiting, culminates into the circumstances that allow the flower to exist in the first place.

One of my favorite books, Always Remember by Charles Mackesy, features an unlikely group of friends battling their way through life’s greatest storms. The mole, the smallest of the friends, tells the boy to “be patient with yourself. Shouting at a flower won’t make it bloom.”

The simple words hit me like a punch.

I’ve since set them as my lock screen—I needed the reminder.

Because I’ve shouted. I’ve shouted and shouted until my throat is dry. But you can’t make yourself go any faster than you can and screaming adds nothing to the process. That’s something I’ve learned from plants this year. They don’t bloom when you tell them to. They bloom when it’s their time.

*cue flashback to a day in late August.

I walked into the break room after my shift and found several green stalks floating in a red SOLO cup. Perhaps break room isn’t an accurate description—think fridge-meets- storage-room with racks of espresso beans, boxes of nondairy milks, and two dark-stained, legless tables fastened to the wall, and you pretty much have the picture.

I stepped closer, examining the cup on the table. A yellow post-it note stuck to the side announced the trimmings were FREE TO TAKE.

The reason?

Not cute enough to sell.

“What are they?” I asked my coworker. She usually watered the plants in the cafe, and I figured if anyone knew, she would.

She did. She told me their name. I don’t remember it. But one day, she said they’d be a cascading vine of leaves, and they could grow in soil or water—hence the floating stalks with the twisting roots. Plants around me always seemed to die, but I said I’d try my luck with a few if she had another SOLO cup.

“No, but you can take this one.” She passed me a glass with rigid edges used for iced lattes and matchas.

I turned it over in my hands. “Won’t somebody miss it?”

“No, this one’s cracked. It’ll just get thrown out anyway.”

I filled the glass with water, transplanting the empty stems. “If you’re sure . . .”

I lost my job a week later.

As my world spiraled, I left the glass on my windowsill. The cup held water. The plants were alive. But just like me, they lacked aesthetic and found themselves discarded. Me, who months ago was living in an Oxford manor, who studied in the footsteps of Tolkien and Lewis, who graduated a year early and was going to write a best-selling novel . . .

Me, unemployed.

I screamed. I shouted. It didn’t make life go any faster, and it didn’t make the hurt go away. It only crippled me. Battling insecurity, anger, and denial, I realized I had to do the only thing I could—keep moving.

Sometimes it was only baby steps. I kept the plant in the sunshine. Drove away the cat when she’d try to drink its water. Submitted my resume to the job posting.

I kept writing.

I showed up, even when it was hard. I dragged myself out of bed when I wanted to disappear. I did the next little thing and the next, on and on and on.

And somewhere in the haze of exhaustion and disillusionment, a stem branched off of one of the bare, ugly stalks. I remember when I first noticed it and realized I couldn’t pinpoint the day that it appeared. Maybe it had been growing all along. Maybe I just hadn’t been able to see it.

It took another month before the stem turned to a leaf, and then the leaf itself decided to take weeks to unravel. I couldn’t peel it open though. The leaf would only die. All I could do was wait and let it grow in its own time. With that realization, I recognized that the same kindness I extended to a plant I withheld from myself. I couldn’t force myself to bloom any faster. All I could do was grow and allow myself to grow.

Six months later.

The nameless plant has two leaves, I’ve learned the trade of a mediocre barista, and I’m two-thirds finished with an entirely new draft of my novel. I’m writing every day, aiming for small, consistent steps instead of leaps and bounds. At first I felt like I was dragging my feet, but the past few weeks I think I’ve hit a steady jog. I’m moving forward, slowly and surely. Some days I feel like a fake. Some days I feel like I’m barely plodding along. But a friend of mine helped me see that it’s okay to start out plodding:

“First you plod. Soon you run. Then you fly.”

Success comes from constant effort. All the stories inside me are seeds in the ground, waiting to rise to the surface and meet the sun. It’s not a flower yet, but it’s going to be.

Maybe it’s true that the only thing between us and our dreams is time. Maybe someday a student will read an existential essay on plants by Meredith Mead the way I dissected Lewis’s speech on “Learning in War Time.” The piece originated as a start-of-term address for the university students. Just something he wrote. Something he said. And yet I poured over it as scripture, searching each line for truth and life profound. Maybe a similar day will come when readers will examine a work of mine. Just something she wrote. Something she said. And yet, listed in a high school text book, standard common core.

Only time will tell. But success isn’t always linear, and if my heart and soul are all at your feet . . . well . . .

Let’s just say growth is unavoidable.