Looking elsewhere for success: It’s not always found in first place

I do not own a magazine. I am not an editor to whom writers submit their work, hoping I will publish it. I am the writer who submits her work hoping it will make the cut with the editor to whom I have submitted it; recently, I have done this without success. But, hang on, what is success for a writer? What is success for any of us?

Last week, my writer friend Finnian Burnett made it onto the long list for the 2023 CBC Nonfiction prize. A friend’s success is happily celebrated, so a big HOORAY for Finn! Reflecting on the meaning of this accomplishment, Finn spoke of feeling proud for having written a piece and thinking it was good enough to submit and then actually submitting it. That is an achievement of which to be justifiably proud, said Finn, because so many writers don’t ever make it to the end of the finish + polish + submit stage. They give up somewhere along the line or disappear down a tangent or never even get started.

Finn’s perspective gave me pause and has me reconsidering my own definition of success and I like the paradigm shift: Not everyone can achieve a first-place finish; by definition, only one person can. But there are other stops along the way that are equally winning in import. Regardless of what it is that we put our mind and hand to, reaching the point with our work when we consider it complete and ready for sharing with someone, somewhere, somehow must surely be considered success by any name we choose to give it. 

So it is with this writing lark. Not everyone will end up winning the grand prize, appearing in The New Yorker, or landing a high-value contract with a Big Five publisher. But that must not prevent the rest of us from feeling like winners when we achieve a personal best of our own definition. Let us move beyond the narrow 1st-place / gold medal standard of winning and redefine ‘winning’ to mean whatever level of achievement is meaningful within our own context, effort and aspirations. With this perspective switch, success can, and likely will, look different for each of us.

Of course, this is not to say that landing in first place, getting that gold medal or being published by an admired editor is not a wonderful thing. It is. But it cannot be the only wonderful thing we aim for. The odds are too great, it happens too rarely, and the glory of the winning moment is not sustainable over the long term. That glory is better applied to a stage of our work over which we have better control and agency: doing X (whatever X is in your life) to a level of accomplishment that we are proud enough of having achieved it that we are excited to share that X with someone else.

To that end, then, I share the piece below about my father.

My sister Katy, my father Colin, and me circa 1961

This essay was not selected for publication by Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, an online publication in which I aspire to see my byline. This I have not yet achieved, but I am happy and proud to share this piece with you, here on my blog. Where, it occurs to me, I am not only writer but also editor :)

I have not written a great deal about my father, so I am grateful to have been prompted by DPA’s September issue, themed ‘fathers’, to do so. My dad was one of the good ones.

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Always, but India only ever as metaphor

“I wish I were dead.”

My father and I lived far apart, so we talked on the phone, and almost every day of every week for the last few months before Dad did, mercifully, die, that is what he said to me before we hung up. I agreed with him that he had lived a good life, a long life, but now, he said, it was not good. I agreed with that, too. Confined in a body in which the heart kept beating but in which there was little heart left for living, Dad wanted out. He was done. I understood this.

He was no longer the man for whom my mother would drop everything and run off to India with. He was now the man for whom my mother could no longer do anything, so debilitated was he from the stroke that had felled him and from which he had bounced back well, but for which he had been taking medications for so many years that his body was now succumbing to the side-effects of the medicines keeping it functional to the extent they could.

He was no longer the man who had been the young father who had patiently explained fundamental economics to me when I asked him, full of innocence at age 7, ‘What does the shopkeeper do with my money when I give it to him, Daddy? Does he buy himself an ice cream?’

He was no longer the middle-aged man who had counselled me that planning a whole lifetime is impossible, but planning a life in five-year chunks can bring one’s vision into focus and one’s ambitions to fruition.

He was no longer even the older man who could drive cross-country to spend lazy summer weeks at my cottage on the lakeshore.

He was now an old man, ready to leave this world, to disappear into the universal beyond.

But what endures is that this man, one day many years ago, saw the back of my mother’s red-haired head and fell in love. So the story goes. He finagled a seat across from her in the university cafeteria, her face confirming for him what he already felt as true: She is the one. Back then, on that day in 1948 at University College London, far from wishing to be dead, he felt profoundly alive, indeed as if his life were just beginning. Sixty-seven years later it ended. India was only ever a metaphor, but that lightning-flash life-changing thunder-bolt knowledge that she was the one for him and he for her lasted through four pregnancies, three children, countless cats, and several transatlantic moves that built a career requiring those very moves that made us three kids, two girls and a boy, resilient multi-lingual wanderers who each found and settled with our own life-long mates.

My parents modelled love and respect and fun and conversation (not always civil) and adventure and self-confidence (not always leading to success but ensuring, always, that I knew how to pick myself up and carry on). I had seen Dad leave jobs, had seen him fired from jobs and, always, he landed on his feet, even if that meant multi-level marketing ventures selling soap, his heart leading the way right down the tubes to little success though friendships many, and feet beneath him, always, holding him up. Mum at his side, furious, maybe, long-suffering, often, but beside him, always.

When love meets loyalty very little can dent it. Though that one time in the late 1970s, when Dad thought it would be nice to replace Mum’s long-ago stolen wedding band with a fat shiny new one, that came close to denting it. Loudly. “I won’t wear that symbol of ownership on my finger, Colin,” she declared. And reminded him that that ring was only slightly less wanted than the yogurt maker had been a few years earlier. For Christmas. An appliance for the kitchen. Mum almost threw it across the room at him. A few years later, she did actually bang the big cast iron skillet on the table in outrage at something he said. I don’t remember what, but I do remember the banging of the skillet. Loud. Forceful. Space-claiming. Mum’s outrage. Dad’s innocence. Naïveté, really. He simply loved her, deeply. As his daughter, I was witness to — and beneficiary of — that love.

In the end, his heart gave up. Gave out. But Dad’s legacy of love, pure, simple, deep, remains. A model I live by with my own red-haired wife of 30 years and counting.

Colin Le Rougetel 1926-2015

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.