Writing Sample 1
Kintsugi: My Struggle with Perfection
Congratulations! My fingers trembled as I read the word.
Your submission has been selected as the
winner in the historical romance category of our Novella-Writing Contest.
As a winner, you will be awarded $100 and
royalties after publication. In the publication of your novella, we will be
working in conjunction with a student editor, who will reach out to you shortly
to get everything started.
If you have any questions in the
meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
I stared, unbelieving, at my phone screen. A third and fourth
read finally sank the words into my mind. Then, a staccatoed squeal escaped
from me before a hand flew up and covered my mouth. “They’re publishing my
book,” I dared to whisper.
Then, in a
moment, the feeling overcame me. “They’re publishing my book!” I yelled to my
empty apartment, as if I expected the sofas and piano to celebrate along with
me. I jumped up and down and ordered Alexa to play my favorite song. I danced
alone in the kitchen until the microwave beeped angrily at the display.
They
think I’m good enough, I thought. And the words were like medicine to my
soul.
~
I read my first chapter book when I was six years old. I
still remember the faded brown of the pages and the lingering smell of the
musky school library that diffused into my backpack and the tips of my fingers as
I read. The stories carried me away. Snuggled up and almost disappearing into
the corner couch cushions, I could imagine myself anywhere in the world, doing
any sort of adventurous thing. For the first time, I felt free—free from homework,
from chores, from the nagging of an army of older siblings. Free from floral
jumpered bullies who taught other girls to laugh at me.
I grew up
quiet, shy; I pretended not to notice the sound of laughter. Instead, I hid in
my books. The best ones were fairytales. I could become someone different in fairytales.
Often, I spent my days as a poor but ravishingly beautiful village girl who was
secretly a princess just waiting for the right moment to take her kingdom back
from an evil sorcerer.
It was late
into my first-grade year when my teacher approached me with a proposition. She’d
noticed the improvement I’d been making where reading and writing were concerned,
and she offered me a spot in the advanced learning circle. I said yes quicker
than I could finish forming the thought.
A tingle
of pleasure ran down my child-sized frame the first time I joined the group. I
was nervous, achingly nervous. I cautioned a small smile in my classmates’
direction. An olive-toned girl with perfect golden-brown ringlets smiled back at
me and nudged the freckle-faced boy next to her to do the same. Eventually we
three were inseparable, and I secretly wondered (many times) if Mrs. Eliason ever
regretted having me join.
But that didn’t matter. I had my books and
now I had friends, too. And they think I’m enough, I thought. The words
were like medicine, and I repeated them to myself like a prescription: three
times a day on a full stomach.
~
The problem with fairytales is that there is always a prince to come to the rescue. They called him charming. I called him imaginary. I had never been in love and wouldn’t know it if it hit me. And yet, I fell for it. I fell for the idea of love, the idea of perfection, of needing to be rescued. I wondered every moment what it would be like, how it would feel to be in love.
When the wondering stopped for the
slightest of moments, there was laughter ringing in my ears, leftover form
elementary and middle school years. Slowly, I stopped pretending not to hear
it. It was loudest when I looked in a mirror and categorized what I saw:
eyebrows askew and bushy beyond tolerance, a short and freckled nose, teeth too
small to fill a smile, and cheeks too round to ignore. The rest of me reflected
like a balloon—it bulged and grew and expanded every time I took a breath, all
the while the sound of laughter echoed in my mind. How could anyone love this?
I needed to take back control. The next
thing I knew, I drove my nose—that ugly freckled nose—deep into the binding of
a book. For a moment there was respite. Prince Charming was on his way to
rescue the fair and beautiful princess, whose hair flowed like ribbon in the
wind, whose cheeks were delicate and sunken, whose frame was thin and slender.
This time, as I read, the scene changed
around me. I became a bystander, no longer the princess waiting for the prince.
She was beautiful. She had silky hair and a soft outline, and I was nothing
compared to it. I was not worthy of perfection, not worthy of rescue. That was
the beginning of my obsession with change.
I started hoarding make-up. The more I put
on the better—my nose wasn’t so freckly anymore. No one would have to see the
real me. Tweezers and scissors and razorblade sculpting tools were my daily
eyebrow solace. But there was nothing to do about those cheeks, and the ballooning
drove me insane.
Eventually, I began eating less. I told
myself that was all it was. It started as smaller portions sizes, but soon I
was skipping meals altogether. There were days I could hardly bring myself to
eat half a bagel. The thought of cream cheese on top was unbearable. It was
painful at first, but an obsessiveness forced me to. The unnerving part was how
much I liked it. I liked the way I saved money when I went to the grocery store,
and I liked the game I played with the calendar to see how many weeks I could
make it between shopping trips. I liked what people said when I started
thinning out, and I liked the feeling of my clothes becoming gradually looser. I
liked the hungry feeling that gnawed at my stomach and felt like power and
control.
One day they’ll think I’m enough. The
poisoned thought filled my mind, and I repeated it to myself like a
prescription: three times a day on a less-than-full stomach.
~
A few days ago, my editor emailed me a
series of revisions she said would improve my book. I opened it cautiously,
keenly aware that edits are painful. The idea of changing something I’ve poured
my heart into in order to appease an audience tore at me. Still, I looked over
her notes.
I’d written a fairytale, and I was the
princess. She was flawed and damaged, with hidden monsters crawling under her
skin. She was a damsel in distress waiting for a perfect prince to rescue her.
Certainly, perfection was what would redeem her. Certainly, perfection was the
solution.
What surprised me was that my editor didn’t
ask for me to change the princess. She asked me to change perfection. “Give him
a flaw,” she wrote. She went on to talk about character development and creating
greater conflict which gives greater fulfillment at the resolution. The thought
struck me powerfully—that flaws could be interesting, engaging, that they could
bring fulfillment.
All this time I’d thought I wasn’t good
enough because I wasn’t perfect; I didn’t look a certain way, I wasn’t thin,
wasn’t exciting, wasn’t anything you could take a snapshot of and set on
display to look back on years from now in a nostalgic lens of fondness. I was
riddled with flaws, and they crept up into my head and poisoned my every
thought.
Now as I sit here, looking over my editor’s
notes, I think how over time I developed two primary problems with
perfectionism. The first was a mild case of anorexia; the second was a complete
inability to tell anyone about it. I was overcome with an anxiety of what would
happen if somebody knew that I was flawed, that I was weak. So instead, my
solution was silence. It became a breeding ground for the philosophical
bacteria that fueled my illness.
The issue climaxed in a small country in
Southeastern Asia where I lived for a year and a half almost completely cut off
from my family and friends. Standing just shy of six feet tall, all hips and
thighs, claves and ankles, I was an anomaly there. Everyday I was painfully
aware of how I looked standing among a sea of five-foot-nothing slender bodies.
Believe it or not, I made it nine whole
months of almost-surviving. After that, I began calculating. I knew it wasn’t
healthy; it wasn’t normal. Normal people didn’t obsess over their meal
schedule. They didn’t have a list of rules waiting for them at home, taped to
their study room mirror so that every time they saw themselves, they’d be
reminded why they weren’t enough. Normal people didn’t turn habits into points
and keep them tallied in their journal.
I knew it wasn’t normal. But what I didn’t
know was how to stop.
I moved home in the summer of 2019, and my
parents planned a family getaway now that we were all going to be united again.
We flew out to a beach house in the East and spent dawn till dusk playing in
the ocean, drinking in the scent of salty breezes, and relishing the texture of
sand beneath our toes. It was a week of relaxation, and we all needed it.
I remember one particular afternoon when
we’d all decided to hold an informal lunch of ham sandwiches served at your
laziest convenience. I made an open-faced ham and cheese—one piece of bread, a
light slathering of mayonnaise, grocery honeyed ham, and an ambitions slice of
cheddar cheese. I tried so hard to eat it. Truly, I did. But just as I’d been
discovering ever since moving back home, there were some things harder to
adjust to than others. My body started rejecting food. Not all food, of course,
but what little I gave it had to be well chosen. After my time in Asia, I could
no longer stomach breads, heavy pastas, and almost all dairy products, milk and
cheese being the worst offenders.
As I put the half-finished half sandwich
regretfully back down on my plate, my brother-in-law gave me a pitying look.
“It must be hard to adjust back to eating like this again,” he said, sympathy
dripping from his voice.
He had no idea how true his words were. That
was one moment that really shook me. I couldn’t keep going like this. For the
first time, a genuine fear crept over me, and I knew, painful as it may be, I
had to start eating again.
Seven months later, and it’s still hard.
There are times where I still force myself to eat three square meals a day that
a normal person wouldn’t give a second thought to. It hasn’t been a pretty
recovery, either. It’s been full of sagging jeans that used to fit perfectly on
the third hole of my belt instead of the seventh (a hole I had to punch myself,
causing the leather strap to wrap one and a half times around my body). It’s
been full of days like yesterday when my solution to significant weight loss
was not eating more in order to fill my clothes again, but rather to buy
smaller ones I wouldn’t have to sag in.
Yet through it all, I come back to the note
my editor sent me that just because I’m flawed doesn’t mean I’m broken. It
means I’m workable, I’m developing, and in the end, I’ll bring a better
fulfillment to my story because of the struggle.
As it hardens, I hear an edit echo through
my mind; it’s a revision that was painful to change, but undeniably better than
the first draft. I think I am enough, it says. Not “they think I’m
enough,” or “hopefully I’ll be enough someday.” It is me.
“I think I am enough.” Though it is a
variation of a sentence I used to take like a prescription, it doesn’t taste
like medicine now. This time, it tastes like the cure.
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