Hurry Down Sunshine

There’s a scene in Little Miss Sunshine, where the little girl presents her brother with a color blindness test. His dream is to be a pilot. However, he fails the test - and that means he can’t be a pilot. It was his biggest dream, getting out of hellish, mindless suburbia. He runs off, and after a long period of self-imposed silence, finally screams into the arid air of the desert. It is a powerful scene and a testament to the true power of a dream - and being very deeply alone in it.

Similarly, I applied for an MFA in Writing recently. A comment on my last post reflected that I could have added to it, elaborated more on it.

So here’s the movie of my rejection:

No, I didn't scream into the arid air of a desert. Instead, I took it in stride, waxed philosophical, as only a writer can.

There’s a scene later on in Little Miss Sunshine, towards the end, where the uncle, who had slit his wrists over unrequited love, yells off a pier, into the ocean, in front of the brother who can‘t be a pilot. He says, after a long rant about someone: “All those years of his suffering were worth it, because it made him who he was.”

When I got my rejection for the MFA in Writing, I didn’t slit my wrists, or break weeks of silence. I squinted at my little phone screen, where my rejection sat in front of me. And I thought: fuck ’em. I’m good without an MFA.

Queue the moody movie music.

I live in a coastal city in Northern California. The day I got rejected, I walked down to my city’s pier, near the boardwalk. I watched the sea lions and felt the salt breeze. I thought: I’ll be OK.

I think the hardest part about being a writer is existing alone, in silence. It’s just like a self-imposed silence, and when I hit “publish”, I scream into the arid air of a desert.

I become one with potential failure.

I’m not sure if my years of suffering “make me who I am.” But right now? I’m trying to figure out how a rejection letter will be a part of my story. And how I can best write about it. How it will fit into the screenplay of my life.

My final thoughts? That I think I’m an adequate writer, able to pass the test to make me an official one. But maybe there is no test, maybe it’s more important than that. Maybe I’m blind, not color blind, but I have existed in that moment - in the movie, the brother‘s eyes flash quickly when he realizes he’s failed, and can’t be a pilot. I too have now had a moment where I was totally alone to process, in a single “frame” of my life (if it were cinematic, which it’s not), that I am not able to achieve my dream.

So, alone on the pier of my coastal California city, I was left alone to process my failure. But it’s not that, at all. It‘s going to be a scene, perhaps part of a future masterwork I will be able to call mine, and mine alone.

I took a picture of the ocean and saved it to my little phone, the little screen capturing a vastness I cannot fully comprehend - just like when the movie-goer watches the uncle speak philosophically about failure, we can relate to it, without fully understanding why, its vastness.

Like in the movie, I realized life is messy, and I am ready to move on - perhaps alone, as I always am in my writing, but stronger for having failed. Stronger for having tried, for being blind but now able to see beyond it.