René Roberts

I had a setback yesterday. Not the kind where you find that some asshole parked in your favourite spot or your tip starts lifting while your nail technician is on maternity leave. You straight girls better appreciate these little titbits I sneak in for you. My setback wasn’t monumental either. It wasn’t like discovering your mother’s expecting your fiancé’s child or that your father likes wearing your underwear.

It’s that irritating in-between kind. The kind that breaks your heart completely but you don’t start looking for the highest cliff or a strong enough rope. You want to cry for weeks on end, but you don’t get your will and testament in order. Yet.

My manuscript was turned down. Again. Now, people start running down their lists of clichés to pepper me with. My top three :

1) Did you know that Gone with the wind was rejected 38 times before being published?

2) If you keep sending it in, the right person will eventually read it

3) The timing must be wrong

Now, I just might admit that you’re all probably right. In two weeks. When I’ve managed to get over myself. The strangest thing that I’m finding, is that fellow writers are the last people to offer a word of sympathy or advice. They’re the last people who would take five minutes and read a blog, not to mention a book, of a struggling writer. I’m not wasting another second trying to figure out why. It’s irrelevant, because I’m in good hands. My girlfriend says she’s proud of me for handling it this well. She’s only saying that because she expected me to recreate my favourite Grey’s Anatomy scene. You know, the one where Izzie collapses on the floor in her salmon pink dress and refuses to get up for days because Denny died and she completely destroys Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars for you forever. I mean forever. I’m pretty sure my girlfriend does NOT picture me in pretty pink dresses, but she knows I can fall apart like the best of them. So now she gives me those quiet hugs and she might even let me hold the remote control for a few days.

My best friend tells me to stop being that girl. Maybe she was picturing me in Izzie’s dress on my kitchen floor? She just had a C-section and there’s no way she’s lying down in our kitchen without tearing something, which is why she wants me to snap out of it. Imagining that scene actually makes me feel better already. I can just see our cat staring at me and poking the dress, like it’s a foreign object, which it totally is in our household. I can see my family rushing from all over the country to see me in a dress, not interested in why I’m drooling on my kitchen floor, but wondering why I’m in a dress? This is how I self medicate. I’m all good now.

I also turn to Jeanette Winterson when I’m all emotional, which is how I ended up reading Written on the body this morning. She refers to the French Impressionist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

He was fascinated by the nude female. We have that in common already. He also started submitting his art at the Paris Salon from 1864. Paris Salon was the greatest annual art exhibition of The Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He kept submitting his work, but recognition was slow in coming. He had his first success with the Salon in 1878, that’s 14 years later. To top it off, years later, he was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis and developed severe deformities in his hands and shoulder. He was a painter at heart though and no illness was going to stop him. He knew he had to adjust his painting technique. He needed an assistant to position the brush in his cramped hand and he started working on moving canvas and picture roll as his movement was restricted. Paint he would paint.

One thing I like to do is to take stock of my life. I do this often, because it gives me a sense of accomplishment and it inspires me to do better. I’ve never had it easy, but I know how to work hard. I’ve also been blessed in small ways. Sometimes, it really is the tiniest of things that we remember forever.

I remember an incident where I needed a certain pair of shoes in the twelfth grade. I was consumed with worry, because my dad had no means of getting it for me and I had to brace myself for being ridiculed at school for being the odd one out. Someone I held so dear at the time came to my rescue. She took it upon herself to buy me that pair of shoes and she doesn’t even know how it changed my life. Random acts of kindness. Thank you kindly Hanlie Rheeder, it was pivotal in my life.

Liberty has this ad on TV about a pair of school shoes. One perfect pair of school shoes are shown, being stashed in its box, ready for consumption. The narrator points out that it’s a pair of school shoes in size four and a half, one pair like so many others. He says that Liberty didn’t pay for it because a little girl needed a pair of shoes. They paid for it to answer a question that the parents of that little girl needed answered. The question of who takes care of her needs when her parents are no longer around.

“We didn’t pay for it because a little girl needed school shoes, we did it because we know that’s what her dad would have done.”

That’s exactly what you did Hanlie, and every time I see that add I get a lump in my throat. So thank you.

I didn’t have the privilege of studying full-time – I had to find a way to get my degree while earning some cash. I was only able to do this because my family took me under their wing. My youngest brother even gave me my first car, which I had to sell for varsity fees and text books before I ever got to drive. I made it work. I got my degree and I worked my way up in the world. I don’t have a mansion, but I share a modest little house with the love of my life. I don’t have a Mercedes-Benz, but I paid for my Hyundai Getz with hard-earned cash. I look around me and I feel like patting my own back for a job well done. I have no riches, but I’m living the life I truly want to live.

That’s why I’ll keep writing.

That’s why I’ll publish my books.

Watch this space.