Dear Carmen Maria Machado: Do What
You Can’t
by Nabeel Rasheed
Talking was a pain for me when I
was little. Whenever I opened my mouth, I would lead an army of broken
syllables to the listener’s ears. My speech therapist had a list of activities
to dismantle such an army, and at the top of that list was reading. Every night
before I would go to bed, I would step into the irony of reading a bedtime
story to my mom. Instead of reading children stories though, my mom made me
read adult classics like Moby-dick and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Neither
did these stories succeed as a panacea to my speech impediment nor as a
motivator for me to read more. I felt humiliated instead. I gave up then on
reading stories aloud, and I rebelled against my speech therapist by secretly
telling myself stories before falling asleep every night.
I started telling myself stories
in fourth grade–one of the darkest periods of my life. In fourth grade, I was
told by a doctor that I would never walk again, by a teacher that I would never
be intelligent, and by a role model (my dad) that I would never be anything in life. I never cried about
my handicaps, but I did run away to my thoughts before going to bed every
night. Here, I found a utopia, a place where anything I wanted to be and do was possible. I dreamt of a Nabeel who was skinny and good
looking, who lived in big mansion with all his friends, and who was dating his
fourth-grade crush–Anne Woods. To keep the utopia realistic, I created
adventures for my friends and me. These included traveling through murky depths
of the Mariana Trench in a submarine, walking torch-handed into a
zombie-infested bunker, and building a LEGO paradise.
When I stepped out of the shoes
of a day-dreamer and started working toward actual success, I began to stop
telling myself stories. Ironically, a ton of negativity thrown at a child can
sometimes evolve into positivity. This was the case for me. I wanted to make
everyone who doubted me eat their words. In middle school, I attended spin classes
for three years to lose 50 pounds, and I self-taught myself years of curriculum
to jump from below-average classes to gifted-classes. In high school, I practiced
tennis everyday with my older brother to secure a starting position on the
varsity team, and I gave countless speeches to be named a national debate
champion as a freshmen. Essentially, I went from dreaming of success to being in success, but as a result, I lost
the motivation to continue telling myself stories every night.
I still missed these stories, and
fortunately, I had books to fill the void. The stories I told myself were
limited to my life but reading fictional books gave me the opportunity to hear
the journeys of others. The first book I read was The City of Ember, and god, could I not love anything more than it.
Learning about the underground city brought me into a deep, contemplative state
of mind that I never wanted to leave. Their mission to save their own unique
world soon became mine, and no one thing in my life was going to stop me from
finishing that book. The love I had for world-building books led me to read Powerless, The Hobbit, and my all time
favorite, The Stormlight Archive by
Brandon Sanderson. Eventually, I ended up in Ms. Townsend’s speculative fiction
course, and the books I got to read here only led me to end my Netflix
membership and finally settle down to make a Goodreads account.
I want to keep reading, but
seeing who I am today also compels me to never stop telling myself bedtime
stories every night. Nowadays, I tell myself stories of me cooking Indian
cuisine as a Michelin rated chef, performing electronic music at Lollapalooza,
and doing kick flips as a professional skateboarder. These stories are not on
my bucket list or even on my wish list. These are the things people told me I
could never dream of doing in my life. I put them on my “do what you can’t list”–something my speech therapist
would be proud of.
“Do
what you can’t” – Casey Neistat
Dear Nabeel,
ReplyDeleteWow, you really opened up a vein for Carmen Maria here. Thank you for your generous answer to her question.
Your personal experience with telling yourself stories, and letting these stories act as a bridge to imagining (and creating) a different life for yourself puts the lie to the tired logic that dwelling in fiction damages a person's ability to achieve in the real world. Sometimes, we need fiction -- need it quite desperately -- to help us do what we can't, just as you say. We need to see characters constantly being pushed, being forced past their limits, to believe that this is something people CAN DO, or should do. Most importantly, to paraphrase Dickens, it can teach us to be the heroes of our own lives.
Best,
TT