Bubble Gum Wrapper

I was in college when I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was right around the time I quit the basketball team and I felt as if my life was spiraling. For more than a decade, basketball had been the core of my existence. Everything I did revolved around my need to play the sport. I loved it—the adrenaline rush during the game, the excitement of scoring, the clamour of the crowd when we won. It gave my life meaning. Wanting to excel, to win, to break records, gave me a reason to exist. Then one day, it was gone. Unable to mesh with the team, feeling like an outcast in the sport I’d given so much of myself to play, and realizing that skill alone wasn’t enough to earn me playing time, I quit, and it felt as if all the oxygen in the world had suddenly disappeared. Where do I go from here? I thought, as I cried face down on one of the couches in the lobby of the gym. 

Out of the death of that dream, a new one slowly started to emerge. If I couldn't make a living out of being an athlete, perhaps I could make one as a writer. I was, after all, majoring in English Literature with a concentration in creative writing. The problem was, I wasn’t very good. At least, I didn’t think I was. Not like some of my classmates who already had an engaging voice and interesting stories to share. I had neither, and the harder I tried, the more phony I felt. But I enjoyed writing, the process of hiding behind words, expressing myself without actually having to interact in real-time. If only I could somehow find a way to ignite my imagination or live big so that I could create stories out of my experiences, maybe I could figure out a way to write well enough that people would actually want to read what I had written. All I had to do was channel all the energy and desire I had poured into basketball into writing. It was a simple mental shift, or so I thought at the naive age of twenty. It would be years until I realized that perhaps I looked at it all wrong. Instead of focusing exclusively on my writing, I should have been networking— building connections, expanding my social circle. If I had known back then that the success of a writer is built not on hardwork, isolation, and creativity but on one’s ability to be seen and to socialize with others, I probably would have chosen a different path—one that might have been more suited to my personality, my deficiencies, and my isolationist tendencies.

But reality and realization were still years in the future. As a young twenty-year old I wanted to be a writer, and I genuinely wanted to believe—despite my failed dreams regarding basketball—that if I wanted something badly enough, if I was willing to dedicate myself to it, and work hard to achieve it, then success would be mine—eventually. It was only a matter of time. And so, I committed myself to being a writer, to someday seeing my work in print and having the pleasure of knowing that others were reading—and liking—what I had written. 

One evening, while hanging out in my college dorm room with Karl—(How to explain Karl, I’m not really sure. He wasn’t a boyfriend, but he was more than a friend.)—he reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of Bazooka gum. Rather casually, he pulled off the wrapper, popped the gum into his mouth, and then glanced down at the comic. His lips tugged up into a smile and he handed me the wrapper. “The fortune,” he explained. “Because you know what you want.”

Taking the wrapper, I read the fortune and felt it would be bad luck to throw it away. In fact, it felt important enough—vital, even, to my dream of being a writer coming true—that I folded it half and slipped it into my wallet, a reminder for future me to never give up, to stay the course, regardless of whatever obstacle or difficulty I encountered along the way.

It’s been three decades since I last saw Karl. More than thirty years since I decided I wanted to be a writer. In that time, I’ve gone through I can’t even guess how many wallets, but each time I get a new one, I remove the wrapper from the old and slip into the new. And whenever I feel discouraged or on the verge of quitting, I reach into my wallet, carefully unfold the now brittle paper, and remind myself of the journey I embarked on more than thirty years ago. Do I really want to disappoint that much younger me? The one who still believed in fairytale endings and the power of persistence. Do I really want to tell her that I couldn’t do it? That I gave up because believing just got to be too hard. That all those rejections finally defeated me.

Last night, despite having had a memoir published last year and another due to be published in a couple of years, I was feeling down. I’d gotten another rejection for one of my middle grade books, one of the novels that I truly believe could be commercially successful if only I could find an interested agent. After reading the tersely polite email, I sat back in my chair, waiting for the harsh wave of depression to swallow me, but before it could, I reached into my pocket, and extracted my wallet. The wrapper is still there. Still a reminder after all these years, and so I read it, reminding myself once again as to why I couldn’t give up, not yet, not while I still have a pulse.

FORTUNE: NEVER COMPROMISE YOUR DREAMS.