T-Minus One Week

Or rather one week and one day. I leave April 1, 2008 for one month in Paris. It is a dream I've had – to write in Paris – for well over a decade. A dream that I've talked about (and talked about and talked about) until one day last year. When a friend of mine said two things.

The first thing I'd heard before: "God, you talk about this a lot. When are you going to stop talking and just do it already so we can talk about something else?" It was the second thing she said that really got me. "Um, Mel," she said. "It could suck, you know." [Cue earthquake and epic Wagnerian score.]

It's true. It could suck. And that had never occurred to me before. I had built up The Paris Experience to be the pinnacle of my entire life. The high point of existence. The thing against which everything else would be measured. And yeah, it could suck.

That was the tipping point. If I was indeed basing my entire life's worth on an experience that was going to suck, I had better get it over with and see what was on the other side. I booked my ticket in October, saved a bunch of money and here we are, a week out from me living the dream. My dream.

I will say this, achieving dreams comes with its fair share of gutwrenching fear. This isn't a Parisian holiday, my friends. This is an epic creative journey. And for anyone who has two-stepped with their own creativity, it's no walk in the park. (Hmm, mixing dancing and walking metaphors. Oh well, at least they are both some kind of movement.)

Aha! The Editor has reared her judgmental head. Note the smarty-pants tone. Won't be the last we hear of her methinks.

The Editor has chosen an appropriate time to make an entrance. The Editor, a.k.a. The Censor, has figured prominently in my life as a creative person. This is the voice that tells you you're too old, it's too late, you're not talented enough, you should have taken Creative Writing in University or (if you really wanted to make it) you should have dropped everything and high-tailed it to New York when you were eighteen. Censor, meet everybody. Everybody, meet Censor.

This sweetheart of an inner demon also echoes with well-meaning but misguided parental messages about Security and Sensible Choices. The SS. The Creativity Gestapo. They come in the night, put a bag over your head and make you swear allegiance to things like Full-Time Jobs, Health Benefits and Mortgages. The pluses of a regular paycheque aside, the threat of getting the crap beaten out of you in the middle of the night makes it hard to write a poem with any sense of innocence or joy.

And so, welcome to my journey back home. The journey takes me to Paris, yes, but it is a homecoming to my creative self. A self that, for the past ten years, has been biding its time. Waiting and watching as I make "safe" choices, trading paycheques for mortgage payments, trading dreams for stability. A self that has patiently tolerated watered-down iterations of my dream from working as a magazine editor to writing ad copy. A self that stroked my hair as I quit job after job wondering if it's me – if I'm simply not cut out for the 9-to-5 world. A self that finally looked me in the eye and said, "Darling, it's time."

Like most things, this story begins long before I actually board the plane. Perhaps I'll tell you about it sometime.