I'll Be You

"A dream too tired to come true
Left a rebel without a clue
Won't you tell me what I should do?"

from I'll Be You by The Replacements with lyrics by Paul Westerberg

The punk band The Replacements have a song called "I'll Be You" that came on Pandora this morning.  It is about the wanting and the yearning to be someone else.  To do something else.  The song is about the inherent boredom and monotony of every day life which is like poison to us dreamers and restless hearts.

I have always had a restlessness, I have written about it before on this blog, but I have noticed that I have settled down in my shoes a bit.  Is it age or just fatigue?  And, I cannot tell you whether this is a good or bad thing.  I no longer see the possibilities like I used to, but I also no longer have the extreme anxiety that comes with wanting to accomplish so much.  

About eight or nine years ago, I started writing stories again, stories from my childhood and teenage years growing up in Ontario, California in the 1980s, and I thought I would have the book done and published within a couple of years.  I daydreamed that I would be the next Frank McCourt, whose Pulitzer Prize winning memoir took the literary world by storm.  

All these years later, I have seen how hard it is for some dreams to come to fruition.  That said, I have never stopped working on my craft and I have had some successes.  A number of those early stories have been published and that was something I could never have foreseen while I was writing them.  Perhaps, the little successes mean more to me now as I get older.  For me, writing really has never been about fame or money.  I'll never get rich as a deputy public defender, but I have enough.  

For me, writing is about the need to write.  It acts as a salve to all of the grief in my heart.  I don't know if I would have survived my dad's death or my infertility struggles without the written word.  

Maybe the key is to buckle down, somehow cure the restless tapping of my feet and just write and edit my way into my dreams.  The possibility is there. I know it.  Just like how I know that in another universe, I am parenting a little girl.     

So here is to being who we are.  And to this rebel who needs to get a clue.