During my sophomore year of college, I began to write a novel entitled Most Likely to Succeed. In it, I planned to follow the lives of a fictional close-knit group of high school friends as they went their separate ways after graduation. The story begins when the main character, a girl named Sonny Churchill (I had a deep admiration for Winston) learns that she, like her older sister before her, had been voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by her classmates. It’s an accolade she views with both pride and unease; she wonders whether receiving this recognition somehow cursed her chances for success as it had done to her sister.
Why did I attempt such a daunting project at age nineteen? I’d had a few reasons, actually. First of all, like Sonny, I belonged to a wonderful circle of friends in high school, so I had that experience to draw from. One of them happened to be the guy whom I considered to be the Love of My Life. By sophomore year of college he and I had broken up, which would also be the fate of Sonny and Scott in the novel; I wanted to see whether or not during the course of writing the book the two would or could ultimately reunite, if Sonny would end up finding the true Love of Her Life in someone else, or if such a romantic notion as true love existed at all.
I also wanted to write that novel because of what I, from my idealistic, 19 year-old viewpoint, thought I saw happening to my two older brothers. Eight and six years older than me, they had been two of the biggest influences in my life up to that time. Both were smart, funny and talented in their unique ways, and I adored and emulated qualities in each of them. My oldest brother taught me to explore new ideas and consider new paradigms well before I knew what a paradigm was; he was the brother I turned to when I needed an interesting topic for a term paper. He introduced me to edgy rock and mournful folk music, Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and other authors I may have never otherwise encountered, and science (he was the brother with the chemistry set, telescope, etc.). From my other older brother I learned how to appreciate an even wider range of music, to such an extent that music became and remains an integral part of my life, how to cultivate friendships and new experiences by being a “joiner” (because of his example I joined everything from kickball teams to Camp Fire Girls to the yearbook staff), the importance of being politically active, how to be loyal (to this day, God bless him, he’s a Cleveland Browns fan) and how to be generous.
But by the time I started my sophomore year of college, it appeared to me that both of my older brothers’ lives had been derailed. They held jobs that barely scratched the surface of what I knew they were capable of, and from what I could see they seemed to be settling for less than the very best for themselves. What was it about life after college, I began to wonder, that steered bright, gifted people like my brothers off course and caused them to fall into what I referred to in my novel as The Abyss? (Yes, I realize now that my brothers were only 27 and 25 at the time and still had their own growing up to do, but they had seemed oh-so adult to me back then.) I wanted to explore that concept in my book, in the hope that Sonny and I could together discover the success I felt certain awaited us all on the other side of The Abyss.
Last but not least, I’d hoped that through the process of writing this novel, I would reach some sort of understanding as to what success really meant. I’d already read and heard stories of wealthy and famous people who struggled with addictions, depression and hopelessness—heck, I was attending an Ivy League school with a history of financially well-off, extremely intelligent students who ended their lives by jumping off bridges. That showed me that success surely meant more than possessing a lot of money, achieving fame, or even having what would appear by all accounts to be a promising future. So I embarked on writing Most Likely to Succeed as a means of coming to terms with a whole lot of questions I had at the time about what truly constituted success, and what it took to attain it.
Of course, I never finished writing the book. I needed to learn those lessons—regarding who, if anyone, would ultimately be the Love of My Life, how dreams became derailed, whether of not The Abyss truly existed and what success really meant—by living my life, having my own setbacks and victories, and through every choice I made at each crossroad I came to. I would not be able to learn them otherwise, and certainly not by putting my young protagonist through situations and decision points I had not yet experienced myself. I know now that I had wanted Sonny to take the hard knocks for me, like some sort of stunt double for the real Mary Anne Hahn. I understand why she refused to live my life for me.
So I’ve launched this blog, in which I am still trying to come to grips with the meaning of success after all these years. The difference is, now I believe that success has everything to do with unearthing one’s passions and expressing them in our daily lives, our vocations and avocations, and our relationships. Or maybe the 19 year-old me already knew that, too. Even then, I had some sense of how I wanted Sonny’s life to evolve; I just didn’t know exactly how to get her there.
Apparently, I’m learning still.
