Ambition is critical (On dreams pt 2)

As Dylan Thomas would have it. I mentioned in my last post that I have recently rediscovered it, the ambition that was lost for a long period of time. During my childhood and up until my early teens I had it in spades. A little too much. I knew that I was going to be either a writer or an actress. I filled exercise books with stories and poems, put on plays at Christmas in which I naturally gave myself the starring role, with more than a little ta-da! of the Shirley Temples.

I took it upon myself to scratch out letter after letter with ideas for new 'magazine style'(?) TV shows to the BBC and as a result got offered an audition for one of the only such programmes available to kids back then. I was overjoyed but then subsequently so horrified at seeing myself in the first episode, that vanity prevented me from watching any more. I hastily shelved any further thoughts of an acting career and concentrated on writing. Many obscure poems ensued. The lower school at my comprehensive got to enjoy a whole 2 issues of my school magazine, complete with badly drawn Athena-esque front cover and suitabably pretentious title.

And then boys happened and hormones happened and I won't be able to iterate to my daughter enough just how much there is to rue in succumbing to the wrong desires and kicking your own best interests in the shin.

I didn't much enjoy school. (When recently asked to recall a memorable experience about a teacher, the one that immediately sprang to mind was that of the chap who prowled about jangling a huge set of keys, looking like the caretaker he wasn't whilst smoking fags and allegedly sleeping with 5th years.)

It was the late 80s so it wasn't entirely the teachers' fault that we were less than enthusiastic. The lack of resources meant we were fighting over 1 tatty Tricolore textbook between 3. The idea of trying to ignite an amoeba sized spark of educational passion in kids who'd rather be puffing on chippers outside the Happy Shopper must have seemed less likely than a Labour government.

To be fair to myself I didn't completely abandon all brain cells. When GCSE coursework deadlines sprung out from behind the bike sheds and presented themselves to my astonished classmates I became a factory line of English Language folder content. I like to hope I did so with a little more variation than Moonpig.com, but after a particularly long week at the desk, one of my essays for friend A came back with a red 'see me!' scribbled across the top. He didn't though, so I never knew for sure.

I drifted through the subsequent years under a cloud of brassy Sun-In'ed hair and dewberry, hyper aware of wearing the right clothes and saying, or rather, not saying the right things. Image became everything, ambition seemed terribly bourgeois. Aggressively moody I could go for days without uttering a word to my family, slipping off into the night with a scrawled note and a vague promise of return. I lost all sense of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to become, exacerbated by the damage I was unleashing on my personal life. It is bleakly unsettling to think of all we can undo in the pursuit of love. I stopped writing and went to University to do a subject I knew I could pass.

Writer friend B once quoted her own (slightly drunken pub philosopher's) version of Voltaire's 'don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good' when I was giving, with the self-pitying luxury of the pub bore, my 'it's all been done before' reasons for abandoning writing.

I wince at the memory. By a cruel trick of genetics, B found out in her late teens that she would steadily lose her sight. She was born partially deaf. By the time she was 21 she had a sought after job in the media and then, during her mid twenties she became a writer. A brilliant one, despite once being told she couldn't. She didn't sit on her arse wondering if she had it in her, she got on with it and made it happen. It seems a trifle fucking misplaced of me to have had the nerve to whinge over not having the nerve to write.

We've all a tale to tell about misspent youth, opportunities wasted, regrets we profess not to have. I may never be good and I most certainly won't be perfect but crumbs, to quote another B-ism 'it's not a bloody dress rehearsal' and I'll do my best to remember that. Especially when languishing in some crap existential crisis over things we have the power to fix with those who should happily slap you out of it. I sound cross I realise. Well, hell, it's a great deal better than false apathy.