I got into Columbia

A few thoughts on success and manifestation

On Saturday last week, I got admitted into Columbia University for an MFA in nonfiction writing. As some of you might remember, I was there on an Arts in the Summer program in June last year. What you might not know is that when I left, along with a cheap Amazon desk lamp and a few wire hangers, I also left my heart there. I promised myself that I would do everything within my power to return.

In my six-week time in Columbia over the summer, I fell in love with everything: with my cool, talented professors (one was a friend of Woody Allen’s, the other a part-time sailor) whose brains I wanted to pick endlessly; with the cinematic campus atmosphere, and of course, with New York. It’s hard to describe New York without sounding corny. As Haley Nahman wrote in a newsletter: “The sprawling city lit up like infinite possibility. Ugh! But to be fair, it did.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to apply for a fiction or nonfiction MFA since I write and want to write both. (I can only graduate with one.) They are completely different, independent concentrations, with separate application processes. I decided to apply for both and let fate decide. Applying for both meant that the already rigorous application process was going to be twice as long and hard. But I threw my hat in the ring. And reader, I got accepted for both! (If you’re interested, I might publish some of the essays I applied with here.)

I knew I’d hear back regarding my application in mid-March or early April, and being superstitious as I am, I had told very few people that I applied. Not even my father. From September to last Saturday, I held my breath. On Thursday last week, I started feeling restless and febrile, as though my body could sense the pigeon that had set south to bring news to me. “I feel something in the airwaves,” I texted a friend the day before I heard back. Inconveniently, as I got into bed at midnight on Friday night and—just as I was about to leave my phone on my nightstand and set my alarm—my thumb did its memorised routine and clicked on my Yahoo! email icon. I had a new message from Columbia. I knew the reply would make me emotional and produce either happy tears or sad tears, so I decided to try to get to sleep and open the email in the morning. Naturally, I didn’t sleep a wink that night. But I had so much adrenaline running in my system that as soon as the clock hit 8am, I jumped out of bed, played Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” (the soundtrack of my summer) and, with a clenched stomach and sweaty hands, logged in.

I am not telling you all of this to brag (OK, maybe just a little). We owe it to ourselves to celebrate our successes as loudly as we lament our failures. But the main reason I wanted to write this is because this story taught me, in a very experiential way, something about manifestation and something about success.

I have been trying to manifest my life in New York since the first time I ever watched an episode of Sex & the City, aged six on the sofa next to my mom on our grey, bulky Panasonic TV (that you’d get lumber strain if you tried to lift), in a flat that now seems poky but then felt nothing short of a castle and just right for the two of us. (“Mom, what does ‘cock’ mean?” I asked one evening without further ado. My mom replied she would tell me if I didn’t tell anyone she had.)

Some girls dream of becoming ballet dancers, others primary-school teachers. I wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw: getting splashed by taxis in my pink tutu, with my naturally curly hair, forever to and fro between brunch with my best friends and book launches, or else perched behind a MacBook at a brownstone window desk. (I know that if I see the series now, I will probably just get an uncontrollable urge to see Carrie to a therapist’s couch ASAP.)

The seeds of my infatuation with New York might have also been laid when, for my 14^th birthday, my father took me there as a birthday present. Something altered my body chemistry then, enmeshed the oxygen in my blood with that New York air, made me feel something like jealousy and indignation that I had no more ownership of the city, or a more distinguished status on its grounds, than the other million tourists, when I felt that it so clearly belonged to me.

I could go on about my favourite writers and heroines, such as Nora Ephron and Edith Wharton, and Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn, all of whom have discreetly played a part in weaving visions of the Upper East Side into my heartstrings.

My point is, I have been trying to manifest this more or less my entire conscious life. So why did it work now?

Manifestation gurus always instruct us to imagine the thing we want, to experience it happening as though we are confident it will. I attempted this trick every time. I heard the sounds, smelled the air. But before, hope was punctured with doubt. Excitement smothered with a cold feeling. I ignored it and tried again. This time, when I pictured my life at Columbia, I felt different. I was energised and excited. It wasn’t because I had got better at visualisation or learned to suppress unwanted emotions more effectively. In fact, there was no effort to it at all. It was simply a natural result of believing in myself. And the reason I believed in myself was because I believed in the work I had done. Manifestation works because of the effort you put in behind the scenes. Not when you’re manifesting, but at any other unglamorous hour. Consequently, I don’t know if it can be called manifestation at all, or just cause and effect.

The work I was religiously committed to for the last five years—writing manuscripts, reading and analysing books as if it were my full-time job, caused me dissonance, despair and confusion on many Monday mornings because there was no immediate reward for it. But it was necessary because it was preparation. It gave me skills and confidence in myself. It was working its magic on the doubt.

I was at the Bulgarian seaside in July last year, walking back from a birthday party with two guys. They were talking about car racing and race drivers (naturally). One of them said that the reason race drivers hit record lap times is because they keep trying until they do. I filed this observation mentally in my “noteworthy” folder as something that rang very true—that I might refer back to one day.

We rarely see people’s double-chinned accidental photos on social media or read writers’ rejected manuscript drafts. We see their success stories and read their polished final products. But the key factor to their “likes” and acclaim is that they’ve taken a thousand selfies at different angles before arriving at the perfect one, or have written five gruelling drafts.

I wanted to announce—I was rejected twice before I was admitted to Columbia. And if we count all the times I’ve ever applied for a creative writing master’s (once at Oxford)—three times. Now, I viscerally feel the meaning of the words that the difference between the people who succeed and the ones who don’t isn’t just that the former have more skills or talent. It’s that they keep trying. Again and again and again. They believe in themselves when no one else does. When they are judged for being round pegs in square holes, when no one understands why the heck they are doing what they do, they carry on anyway.

Fear not, I am not here to tie a pretty pink ribbon on something as messy and unpredictable as life. Life refuses to be reduced to neat rules and platitudes, and every time you think you’re on top of it, you’re reminded who is the master. It did not take a single email for me to start giving lectures on success. There are more than enough people on The Diary of a CEO to tune into, and I still know relatively little about success. On most days, I am riddled with self-doubt, in a perpetual existential crisis, scrambling to make it doing what I love despite a sabotaging brain and a critical inner voice constantly chastising me for being ten steps behind in embodying the lives of the people I envy on Instagram. I will also always acknowledge and appreciate external factors that contribute to any success story, such as luck, timing, Mercury Retrograde, and privilege in its many, multifarious forms.

But last week I had a moment of illumination and clarity. I wanted to channel the hope and reward I felt to you and to say: If you put in the invisible work, have faith in yourself, and try as many times as it takes, dreams really do come true.

To Reality
With Love,