Where am I?
Sixty-three years ago, just before 10:00 a.m. Rudolf Nureyev defected at Le Bourget airport. Two years ago, I went to Paris to start work on my novel Margot, and one year ago, I returned a redrafted version of my novel to an agent.
If the past two years have taught me anything, it's that progress is not linear, because that agent never got back to me, and it wouldn't be for another six months and a literary exile to Gdańsk until another did.
But now I am here, and by strange coincidence, it is also six months to my birthday, so at 27.5 years of age, I have to ask - am I where I thought I would be?
First of all, a confession: I did not like Margot when I wrote its first few drafts. I thought it was obvious and inelegant, and remember so very clearly being in a cafe on Rue Royale, staring at the manuscript with keen disgust and thinking, "But, it's not literature." (it wasn't)
Do I think it is now? It's certainly closer, and surely it's better to be here, having spent the last two years honing my book into something I'm proud of, than be further down a shorter, easier path I'm not so keen on?
I recently spoke to a friend about what I thought my adulthood would look like as a teenager, and the only real vision I had was being a young woman zipping around London in a convertible, like Mrs Kensington (admittedly bearing little resemblance to Elizabeth Hurley) in a 1961 Jaguar E-Type (admittedly without the Union Jack decal) at the beginning of Austin Powers (admittedly without Austin Powers). Alas, I am too cheap to pay the congestion charge, and I don't know how to tease my hair into a beehive, nor do I care enough about my hair to put it in a beehive.
The visions changed as I got older, but it is only very recently that I have realised that my unsuccessful chasing of visions of an adulthood in which I have a flat of my own, where I can listen to my Camelot vinyl and pretend that I'm Natalie Portman in Jackie to the subdued bemusement of my cats Guinevere and Emeric, does not invalidate the experiences I have had.
I have lived alone, admittedly in some 800 miles further east than I thought, without the cats but with the Jackie fashion show, but this path of whimsy and detours to Paris, Kraków, and even Wrocław, sustained by a keen confidence of my ability to forge myself into the person and writer I wish to become, has been enough.
But again, progress is not linear, and putting in the work does not necessarily equate to an award. I recently got rejected from the London Library’s Emerging Writers Programme, and maybe because I felt I had worked hard enough for it, I was devastated when I failed.
I was so stung by the keen awareness of the unconventionality of my choices and my lack of exceptionality, that one felt responsible for the other. For all the wonderful things that make up the sum of Lily Hyde, I am not brilliant, nor am I foolish enough to ask others to pretend that I am.
Sometimes, I think if I could commit myself to greatness, that if I gave myself to someone brilliant, I could be moulded into brilliance, and things would be more straightforward.
"But, you don't want to be moulded," one friend said.
"You sound fucking deranged," said another.
I have been ironically listening to the Jeremy Irons recording of My Fair Lady too much, ok? And watching the Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller version of Pygmalion too, ok?
I have to tell myself that life is not a competition, but if it is, the history of my heroes shows that passion conquers natural talent almost every time.
Rudolf Nureyev should not have been the ballet dancer that he was. He started dancing at six and was neither natural nor technically strong, but he worked hard and forged himself into greatness. Even then, he was still threatened with being sent back to Ufa, he was injured, and when, at last, he got to Paris, he wasn't even in the opening night performance, but when the time to defect came, at roughly 10:00 in the morning on June 16th 1961, he acted with greatness.
It would be months and one very questionable ballet company later before he came to London and found a partner in Margot Fonteyn, but progress is not linear (and very few ballet companies wanted to sour their country’s relationship to the Soviets in the middle of the Cold War).
Yes, Mikhail Baryshnikov was technically a much better dancer than Nureyev, but whether he would have ascended the heights he did without Nureyev doing it first is questionable. Also, as good as Mikhail was in Sex and the City, would Rudi have been better? возможно.
Where am I? I’m not really sure, but I’m on my way. The path of whimsy is not for the faint of heart and requires blinkered self-determination and a great capacity for self-forgiveness, because successes do not always guarantee rewards, and you will find yourself in a lot of Polish cities and doing a lot of stupid shit in the name of, 'forging yourself into a better writer.'
Even if I didn't always succeed, does it really matter? To love oneself is to forgive oneself, and progress is rarely linear.
That being said, if I can please sell my book and be published soon that would be great!