Success nourishes hope

A family motto and a writing lesson

My maiden name is Ross. It’s a Scottish surname, which means it comes with gear: a family tartan, a crest, a motto, a haggis recipe (kidding but probably true).

A long time ago, my dad bought me a pewter pin of the Ross crest, which has the family motto emblazoned on it: spem successus alit, or “success nourishes hope.”

Image credit.

I remember being underwhelmed the first time I heard this as a teenager. It seemed obvious, kind of a no-duh statement. If you already have success, of course you’ll feel hopeful about the future. What a stupid thing to say, let alone turn into your family’s moto. (I also think I just wanted a cool family motto, like “No one provokes me with impunity” or “Hakuna Matata.”)

When I sold my first novel in a two-book deal, I felt overwhelmed by the immensity of my “success.” There were times I felt excitement for the future, but I also felt crushing imposter syndrome and straight-up dread that I would somehow lose what I had. I had immense anxiety when I turned in my first round of developmental edits, suddenly terrified at the prospect that my book was going to be published. Weirdly, my “success” was not giving me much hope.

Then, years passed as I worked to produce a satisfactory second novel. There were days I noticed the family pin sitting in my dresser and felt mocked by the words, because again, I saw them as I had when I first learned them, and they did not apply to me. These were times when I measured success by what I did not have: a second novel on its clear way to being published. These were the times that I felt I had lost my hope, and when I saw the pin, I thought, “well, you have no hope because you have no success.”

But of course, I was missing it.

I think the closest I have been to understanding my family’s motto was when I wore the pin to my first oral argument as a lawyer. Behold, baby Caitlin, eight years ago:

a long, long eight years

My memory of why I wore the pin that day is this: I felt it acknowledged the success inherent in the occasion. I did not expect to win the appeal (and I did not), but I hoped to hold my own and get through the oral argument without crying in front of all the judges I used to work for (and I did!). I think I understood that this was an internal success as much as an external one.

Sometime after achieving the super extrinsic successes of publication and reviews and newspaper articles and podcast interviews and all that outward-facing noise, I lost the true meaning of success, the kind that nourishes hope.

And I’m sharing this because I know how easy it is to get caught up in those public measures of success in our increasingly public world. I, for one, was seeing book deals and cover releases and lit awards every time I opened my Instagram app, which was often, and I wonder if my now eleven-month break from social media is part of why I’ve been able to reflect on all of this–the way that I started to think I’d had success but lost it.

That’s not how I’ve been feeling lately. Lately, I have felt success in the act of writing. In sitting down to write, even when I’d have liked to sleep in. In having a breakthrough in a character’s voice. In writing a sentence and thinking “hot damn that is good, where did that come from?” I’m noticing that success is even “in the frame,”¹ in examining what might look like a loss for a potential gain.

And the more I’ve paid attention to this, the more hopeful I have felt, because I don’t know if I’ll have another book published next year, but I know I’ll be writing tomorrow morning when the sun comes up, working on something that feels meaningful and important and fun.

I’m not saying extrinsic successes are inherently evil, nor am I saying I wish I’d never been published. Of course not—I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I plan to! But I’m working on seeing success as a prism, like one of those glass balls you can hang in the window to make rainbows on the wall. Success is multifaceted, capable of refracting energy, dependent on viewpoint and context.

This shift in my perspective is even making me a better writer friend and literary citizen. I have noticed in these past months a feeling of genuine excitement for other authors whose books are coming out, when in the past I have, at times, felt distracted by my own failure to produce a new book when I should have been enjoying someone else’s. Julia Cameron says that success occurs in clusters. “Water seeks its own level and water rises collectively,” she writes in The Artist’s Way. My friend’s success bodes well for me, she is saying. Your success can nourish my hope, but that depends on me.

These are the beliefs I am cultivating, and so I wrote them down today, to cement them for myself and share them with anyone who could use a little hope.

And so shines a goon’s deed in a weary world. (Image credit.)

1. This is also from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: “As my waggish friend the novelist Eve Babitz remarks, ‘It’s all in the frame.’”