I Don’t Dream Big Enough
On inherited smallness, Joan Didion, Holly Golightly, and learning to look again…
Photographed and edited by Carla Monroy
I don’t dream big enough.
Is it out of fear.
Is it out of the unconscious bias of coming
from a long line of immigrants?
Am I not conditioned to think big
because my version of thinking big is
actually thinking small?
I was taught to be small.
Don’t take up too much space.
Be meek.
Proper.
Quiet.
Don’t be that big loud Mexican girl. Don’t you
do it!
We carry the load, the suffering of our
ancestors, but we don’t have to.
Big subjects to ponder on an ordinary
September day.
The weekend before a really BIG American
holiday. These are the juxtapositions that
occupy my mind.
Writing Before I Know What I Think
I’ve become more interested in writing that is less polished. A little bit less certain. Writing that doesn’t quite have its thesis all figured out. There is some wonder in the process.
And let’s face it, in an increasingly AI world, the public opinion seems to be begging to see ugly writing. There is something seductive about it.
Which bring me, somehow to Joan Didion.
The Dead Writers Kept Calling
More recently, I felt the spirits of authors past trying to break into my realm. One in particular kept showing up. It was Joan Didion.
A friend had sent me an Instagram clip of Kaia Gerber talking about how The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion was one of the books she would consider life changing. I thought, what does SHE know about the great Joan Didion!?
As if Joan and I were friends.
I had been smitten with her in college when Play It As It Lays was an assigned text in a class. I identified with her womanhood. Her poetry. Her waves of emotion.
Sometimes I even wanted to be her.
The I started to watch The Shards, the television adaption of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel. There she was again. Here influences hanging all over Ellis’s Los Angeles.
So, what is she trying to tell me? What questions will reading her texts answer for me in my own life?
Memorize the Architecture
In the Shards, Ellis talks about retyping the sentences of Didion’s books so he could memorize their architecture.
It was an idea I had encountered before and I couldn’t stop thinking about it again now: copywork.
Writers have long copied the work of the writers they admire, word for word, not to plagiarize but to experience their decisions from the inside.
I started to think, what if I stopped admiring the writers I loved and tried instead to inhabit them?
Didion. Hemingway.
And more recently for me, Capote.
The Demented American Dream
Two years ago, I reread Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The experience was completely different from when I watched the movie as a high school girl.
For years, the iconic black and white photograph of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly represented the picture of the perfect American dream. Something to aspire to, which was to make enough money to drown your depression out by shopping at Tiffany’s. A little retail therapy never hurt anyone.
Audrey Hepburn, the actress, lending the character in the movie a delicate beauty and sophistication that was simply not written into the version of Holly that Capote intended.
Capote's version of Holly Golightly is psychologically unsettled, anxious, and compulsive.
She gets what she calls the “mean reds” which is not sadness exactly, but fear. The feeling that something terrible is going to happen but not knowing what that terrible thing is.
When the fear comes, she goes to Tiffany’s.
But in Capote's text, going to Tiffany's is Holly Golightly’s anxiety–management ritual.
When depression strikes, she hops in a cab and goes to Tiffany’s because she believes nothing terrible can happen there, a place that is so orderly. Quiet. Expensive. Safe.
In the movie, Audrey Hepburn lend the character such an elegance that here mental unwellness becomes light-hearted and almost whimsical.
Being able to afford to go to Tiffany’s becomes an aspiration. And an anxious woman becomes an icon.
And millions of girls, including myself saw her in all of the posters that music and book stores tried to sell to us in college and thought: I want that.
What Have I Mistaken for Aspiration?
Is the question I’m left with pondering. What other beautiful things have I looked at and failed to notice the fear underneath? And what does that have to do with the thought that started this whole thing: I don’t dream big enough.
Maybe more than I initially realized.
I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the space between identities —Mexican and American, ambition and gratitude, belonging and otherness, the person we inherit and the person we choose to become.
Those tensions became the poems in my book, American Mexican.
But writing the book only led me to more questions. Maybe that’s why these writers keep coming back.
Maybe Joan Didion is trying to remind me to look again. At the American Dream.
The stories I inherited and at the smallness I was taught.
Maybe I can give myself permission to think bigger.
A Poet at Heart
A Poet at Heart is where I write about identity, books, culture, memory and the strange territory between the person we inherit and the one we become.
If something here make you stop and think, join me. I send new writing directly to readers rather than trusting the algorithm to bring us back together.
If questions of inheritance, belonging, and living between cultures resonate with you, they are also at the center of my poetry collection, American Mexican.
