On Turning 45 and the Endless Search for Wonder

In the couple of weeks since I turned 45, I’ve been thinking about thresholds, the passageways between one place and another. Maybe it’s because this new age feels consequential (even more so than the act of turning 40 during the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic). Maybe it feels like I’ve reached a transition, a tipping of the scale into the second half of my life — as I am truly middle-aged now (if 90 is or close to the end).

Or maybe it’s that I’m longing for a threshold, a doorway I can walk through, an opening to the pathway to the life I want. But instead of a door, or even the hope of a door, all I can seem to find is a kind of wistfulness and longing.

Recently, I read Asa West’s essay “Becoming Molly Grue,” which perfectly reflects what I’ve feeling — so much so that when I read it, I burst into tears. Molly Grue is a character from the 1982 animated film, The Last Unicorn, which I watched over and over again as a child. I remember always being deeply moved by Molly — though I couldn’t have fully understood her at the time.

Molly is introduced in the film as part of a group of bandits led by Captain Cully, a man who imagines himself a kind of Robin Hood. Molly is dressed in rags and barefoot, serving rat soup to the group of raggedy, sad men. Her hard life has made her rough-edged, acerbic, and full of regrets — as made clear when she finally meets the unicorn. Standing before this beautiful, magical creature, Molly is at first awed and then distraught and begins to shout at the unicorn with all her pent up pain:

Molly Grue is a character of misfortune and missed chances, and seeing her pour her broken heart out to one of the last vestiges of wonder in the world dredges up a universe of pent up feelings. “God, that scene hurt,” points out West, “You don’t have to experience newsworthy trauma in order to feel the pain of regret, the countless little hurts of days wasted and hopes dashed, the feeling that you’ve missed your chance at finding your unicorn.”

Just like West — and Molly Grue — I had a lot of dreams growing up. I assumed that by 25 years old, I would be a well-known painter, no, an author. People would read my work and be moved, and I would become a best seller, comfortable enough to support my family and buy my own my dream home with a library where would sit typing new worlds into existence. And when I wasn’t writing, I would travel the world, meeting new people and experiencing new places.

My dreams never died out, but they have certainly faltered over the years. Everything seemed to take longer than I expected, and I’ve always had this persistent feeling of discovering things too late. It was a slow build toward publishing my first chapbook of poetry at the age of 38, and I only realized that I could pursue writing narratives for games around the age of 40.

Regardless of this plodding pace, I am quite fortunate in my life. Since that first chapbook, I’ve published three more poetry chaps — and have developed small games of which I am immensely proud. In my personal life, I have wonderful family and friends and (thanks to my day job) have traveled to several countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

But none of that seems to shake that longing for wonder, for that feeling of having arrived at my unicorn.

Part of my current despondency comes from feeling stuck in the same place in my career for the past several years, despite efforts to move things forward. My need for a career doesn’t even come from my true desire as a writer, but out of the soul-crushing drudgery of capitalism. Having a career, gaining recognition, and becoming “famous” are necessary to achieve some semblance of financial stability — a goal that seems to be growing ever distant. (My dream of ever buying my own home seems to have died on the vine.)

And in recent years, I’ve increasingly had to fight the question, Why bother creating at all? As the world continues to spin into increasing chaos and cruelty, this question buzzes about me like a mosquito, taking small bites out of my soul.

As West writes of Molly Grue’s regrets and feelings of despair, “It hits even harder when your country has been taken over by fascists and the planet you live on is being cooked to death. If you’re lucky enough to spot a unicorn, it’ll probably be the last one in the world.”

Finding a way to continue on with my work while trudging through the tar of my self doubts is a constant process. I search for hope and meaning the world around me — swimming through the clear waters of a reservoir, whispered laughter between sisters, the lines of poem, and in the work I pursue every day, because even when it’s hard, the act of filling the infinite white space of the page with words is vital to my existence. To quit writing would be to grind myself into dust. I wouldn’t even know how to stop.

There a thousand small hopes cast in the tiniest moments. Just the other day, as I was reading Mary Oliver’s Dream Work, I stumbled across the poem “Dogfish,” a piece that explores survival and desire and the need to stay kind. The final lines of the poem resonated deeply with me in this moment:

A hopeless future does seem to be bulging toward us, and the world doesn’t seem likely to get any easier, and maybe it never will. But that doesn’t mean our work doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean we can’t fight for a better world. I believe it does mean we can dash ourselves away from hopelessness. I believe in that final line, “they can do it.” We, you, I can do it. We can wake up and do the work.

In her essay, West points out society’s obsession with youth, the idea that only the young can have new beginnings and grand accomplishments. But it’s never too late to find wonder and joy and hope and possibility. As West points out,

Maybe I’ll find my unicorn at 45, or maybe it will come to me some years later. Maybe I’ll shape a unicorn from the mist of my dreams. Maybe I’ll just find hope and wonder in the act of living and creating and loving this world despite all its heartbreak and sorrows.

Either way, I hope that you find your own unicorn, too.

What’s Been Going On

I am infinitely grateful to Daniel A. Rabuzzi for his insightful review of my poetry book, Necessary Poisons. It’s always a wonder to see a reader perform a deep analysis of your poetry, making connections and invoking connections in the work that (in my case) may have been more instinct than intention. What’s more, Rabuzzi’s review does a wonderful thing, in that it makes me want to learn, to explore the writing of poets and styles I’m not currently aware of, and to recontextualize my own work.

Here’s a brief section from his review:

My writing over the last few month, but I did manage to publish a few media reviews at Once Upon the Weird:

• It’s a Strange, Strange World Out There: Exploring Crimes of the Paranormal

• Death of a Unicorn: Modern Monster Movie Draws on Classic Unicorn Mythology

• Murderbot Is as Charming and Darkly Funny as I Hoped It Would Be

Good Reads

Maria Popova shares Franz Kafka's experience of writer's block and his thoughts on the four psychological hinderances that prevent creatives from their work, including time anxiety, world anxiety, self comparison, and self doubt (all of which I have personally dealt with on occasion). Keeping a diary as a form of self preservation through writer’s block and doubt, Kafka eventually learns that “he writes to save himself” and not just “a matter of art but of survival”, as well as a form of transcendence.