My Future, Myself

I received the 2013 Annual Report from the International Institute in the mail this week. Seeing it sandwiched between ads for gutter guards and lower car insurance rates evoked an odd mix of emotions. Sadness and regret bumped up against equal measures of relief and…something else, something I couldn't name right away. It was something like the feeling a traveler might have who changes her plans at the last minute, then realizes the plane she would have been on went down over the Atlantic with no survivors. Or maybe it was like the feeling of seeing the guy you almost married in college at a reunion, now married to someone else and fat and balding, and realizing he is nothing at all as you remember him.

Disaster narrowly averted or escaped.

This is the project that made me change my mind about volunteering with the Institute. This is the project that made me change my mind about writing for other people, about writing for a living, about how much of my time and energy I am willing to invest in projects that benefit a bureaucracy more than individuals. It's also the project that helped me see I was still stuck in "thesis mode" three months after graduation.

The Report was short, more an extended postcard than a full report, with a brief overview of financial statistics for the year and a short note from the Institute's director containing platitudes about community involvement and diversity. I took special note of two mini-profiles of recent immigrants that were included, as a way of putting a face on the plea for contributions—a plea that encompassed fully two pages of the six-page document. Photos of the two men profiled were each accompanied by a short paragraph outlining the ways in which the Institute had helped each man assimilate to life in Akron and seek citizenship.

It was my much more in-depth profile of one of these men that was the catalyst for the end of my tenure as a volunteer with the Institute. And in hindsight, I'm so glad I left when I did.

I had interviewed that man and his wife in much the same way I did all the interviews of immigrants for my thesis. I also wrote the final piece about him in exactly the same way I had written all the chapters for my thesis: crafting a compelling narrative with rich sensory details and dramatic tension that said something about the universal human condition.

The short paragraphs in the Report served an entirely different purpose. They illustrated how monetary contributions to the Institute would help continue its services.

One of the main reasons I never pursued the copy-writing jobs many of my MFA colleagues did was because I cannot abide the type of insidious rhetoric advertisement copy requires. Also, I detest the entire idea of writing to please someone else. I write to please myself, and to say something about the world. And as high-minded as that sounds, I prefer my own agenda to that of a bureaucracy or corporation.

So, for a few moments anyway, I also felt a kind of satisfaction and reassurance in my choices I haven't felt in a long while.

As someone wise once said, regret is a useless emotion. I regret nothing and look only to the future, a future I am writing on my own, for no one but myself.