This week started with my heart being torn out

As a teenager, my tennis coach was very deliberate in drilling into me a strong foundation of perfect technique. The idea was that once I had mastered it, we could build upon it – setting me up for a lifetime of playing tennis. The girls that I was competing against on the weekends and over school holidays, however, were not taught so much how to play tennis but how to win a game of tennis. It meant that their stroke pattern was shoddy, but it didn’t matter so long as they played tactically and were ruthless about winning. When faced against these girls, I was at a loss of what to do other than repeat my perfect racquet stroke. They always managed to beat me. Over time it started to affect my self-confidence and I experienced a lot of stress, anxiety, and pressure each time I stepped onto the court to play a game. Those perfect strokes became harder and harder to perform as I was crippled by fear of the inevitable: that my parents had paid all this money and my coach had invested all this time for me to only lose to these girls that I was better than, technically speaking.

Defeated by my anxieties, I quit playing tournaments and then tennis itself, even though the plan had been for me to go to America and study in a University with a tennis program and eventually to take on the international tennis circuit. The fact is that I couldn’t hack it and I wasn’t willing to put in the hard yards it would take to conquer my anxieties and to learn how to win. So even though being a professional tennis player had been a dream I’d held for many years, I was okay with letting go of it. It wasn’t worth the effort.

Because of this, all these years I have thought of myself as a quitter, that I cannot stick it out when things get tough. But this week I realised that this is a lie. The problem was not that I lacked resolution to live out my dream; the problem was in the dream itself. All along – even when imagining my life in the future as a tennis player, living in hotel rooms and picking at luncheon buffets surrounded by the media and sun-kissed sportsmen and women – I always saw myself with a notepad in hand and laptop in my bag. Why? Because my lifestyle as a tennis player was going to be the financial comfort that I needed so that I could pursue my real dream: to become an author.

In these years that have passed since high school and quitting tennis, I have pursued writing on the side whilst studying, working full-time, and now, being unemployed, with the full blessing and support of my husband, it has become my temporary full-time occupation.

This week, as my editor got back to me with her critiques about the apparent sorry state of my book, a sense of hopelessness washed over me, as though my dream had been ripped out of my heart and trampled upon. I felt like I was not good enough to make it as an author and that I might as well quit now. But I remembered how I had quit tennis when the going got tough and I realised that this was different. I cannot imagine my life without pursuing writing, no matter the cost, no matter how long it takes to get the first book to publishing, no matter if I publish fifty books and no one reads them. I’m going to keep on going, keep on growing, keep on trying again. I will not quit this dream because I want it with all my heart. It is not a side dream. It is not a passing faze or trend. It is not somebody else’s dream for me. It is mine. And I get the impression that it is God’s dream for me too.

As for my editor’s comments? She recommended that I return to the basics – to read up on books about scene structure and character goals. Foundational stuff. Like perfecting racquet stroke patterns. I need to work on the techniques of writing that will set me up for a lifetime of strong story writing and beat the opponent that all along turned out to be myself. Sound advice if I ever heard any.

Do you have a dream that is worth fighting for?