Fri, October 9th, 2015 3:47 PM
I hope you’ve had a good season and I hope that you’re looking forward to fall. You might have noticed I disappeared this summer and wondered if it was for good reasons: It really wasn’t. It was a tough time.
My skill has always been in figuring out where the weak points are and where the hustle would work best: Working smart is better than working hard, but working smart and hard is even better than that. I’ve just never had the opportunity to consider what happens if you don’t have the hustle. If it just disappears.
I have been describing this year as an opportunity to learn about a lot of things that I thought were for regular mortal people—regret, self-doubt, shame; jealousy!?—and let me tell you, my findings have been conclusive and I can tell you that those things suck.
I don’t know—clearly I don’t know—how you all have been dealing with this stuff all this time. You can’t be Atreyu if you’re busy being Artax and I think I needed to figure that out. I mean, I made it nearly to midlife thinking that I was not subject to those things.
I mean, I grew up in a very psychologically aware environment. I have witnessed firsthand the way the stigma of mental illness inhibits not just quality of life but treatment itself: If you are stuck in a thought like “I’m crazy,” you will certainly have to deal with that—but when you secretly also think “I’m crazy” means “I’m bad,” you are running a game on yourself that other people have no way of involving themselves in.
Everybody’s got different stuff and I am not a person with enough interest in others to really fall into judgment about it, but I knew that for specifically me, the way I am built, those kinds of feelings were a sign of weakness. Or if not weakness, lack of hustle. Or if not lack of hustle, lack of forethought. All of which may be true, but connote a sort of judgment that I’m not really comfortable with.
Mostly I just kept saying I felt like the Last Unicorn. All that time she spends bitching about how much it stinks to be human and have to remember things, see the bummer parts of people so clearly; have to be sad—and she’s saying this to the saddest, strongest people she knows, because she hasn’t learned how to not be an asshole yet.
So, both parts of that. Which means it’s probably for the best.
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I started to get the yips last year, during that horrible time—there were weeks where I sat at the computer for nine hours a day, unable to speak or write for the first time in my entire life, toward the end—but the first half of this year was just so productive and exuberant and fun. Creating what I wanted and seeing it succeed.
Wasted getting recommended in the AV Club (http://www.avclub.com/article/three-books-each-totally-different-and-distinctly–221565) at Midsummer was a big one—and the first time in a long time that any attention toward my work, or my person, felt like the Eye of Sauron. You want to know why I haven’t sent you a newsletter in months? Because I didn’t want to get you dirty, that’s a big part of it, but the other part was that I couldn’t stand to be looked at.
Because it wasn’t just that I was afraid to work, that whatever was happening to me would taint the writing, which would be a scam on readers. A lot of this summer has been about not perpetrating scams! When your #1 fear in life is anybody thinking you’re Janice from The Sopranos, the selfish sister that is constantly on the make, you can make almost anything into a scam.
I do think ultimately I was right about that, based on the fact that when it was time to get back to work again there was no ramp up or stern self-discipline involved: I knew it was time to work, I got back to work. That tells me that—no matter how much of this second-guessing I have somehow become so good at—I was right about the fact that I actually had been, may still was, going through something real.
Unfortunately we had reached the point of Wasted Beauty where things were coming to a head: Estelle was headed down a very dark path, isolating herself from her friends, exploring her darkness. Ending the world. So it was a little paralyzing to find myself on a very dark path, isolated from almost everyone in my life, and wanting to feel just safe enough that I could write her story and know that I wasn’t talking about myself, or using it for therapy, or any of that. I mean I guess depression could be useful in lending some kind of verisimilitude to something like that—but what a tricky, slippery thing that would be.
The solution, for both Estelle and myself, came as it always does, down through the ages. I save Ursula K. LeGuin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching like a vampire slayer keeps the extra big crosses: Behind the glass in a cabinet that says “This better be a goddamn emergency.”
There are people who can read a book over and over and find new insights and turn it over in their minds and that’s a lovely relationship but I don’t have that relationship with very many things, books or movies or shows. I don’t like having the same conversation over and over and I don’t really like revisiting old stories, any more than I can handle “oldies” on the radio.
I’m sure there’s some kind of Myers Briggs thing there—along the same lines and probably for the same reasons ENTPs don’t really form memories, which was a huge load off my mind when I learned that—but what it means in practice is that if I’m going to reread something magical—The Invisibles, the Tao Te Ching, Harriet the Spy—it needs to count a lot more than just “I like this.”
Especially in a situation like this year, where—for the first time in maybe my whole life—I was alone most of the time. I still haven’t really put that into practice, like I don’t exactly yearn for solitude and I can see how it would be productive, but I definitely got to know the more negative and darker sort of repetitive thoughts and self-conversations that were going on. Maybe always had been, maybe not, but either way it was nice to bait them out of the forest and have a good look at them under the sun. I think it was strong work; certainly it was hard work, and maybe it is not done.
As the weather returns to normal and the planet Mercury chills the fuck out I think it may be easier to see some good stuff in the future. There are things I can’t really tell you about yet, that could be pretty exciting if and when they come to pass.
One of my favorite parts of a very good movie, Bridesmaids, is how effortlessly it makes this point: That to the lead character, all of her problems are really one very big problem. She is a giant porcupine but nobody can tell, because the quills all point inwards.
She eats her shame about her failed baking business by making herself a beautiful cupcake that nobody else will ever see, and then devouring it. It’s self-comforting but it’s also very hateful. It reminds me of the stories about Brian Wilson, in his worst days: How Dennis would drop by with a bag of hamburgers, begging him to come downstairs and create art that other people could hear.
But the whole time this is going on, and she’s imploding and substituting her problems in one arena for excuses in others, the Irish cop keeps telling her to fix her taillight. The taillight is not some kind of Proustian symbol of everything, which is how the particular darkness we’re talking about works: Because you cannot find words for the thing that is holding you down—because it is always standing behind you, where words don’t work—it has to find itself in other shapes.
And there’s not really a way out of the trap, even if you are very clever and have been through this before: There’s not a way to make it walk beside you, instead of behind you. Except by the method most horror-movie heroines eventually figure out: The taillight is just a taillight. All of the taillights are just very boring tasks that you have no energy to deal with, which is paradoxically what’s sapping your energy. Your shame deserves a name, and once you give it that, it will stop presenting as everything else in the world. You can make a little space to fix the lights, one at a time.
Part of feeling weird about myself along with everything else this summer was the fact that self-promotion—something that I never had a problem with in the past, obviously—became pretty crippling.
I thought for a long time it was some kind of genre shame, like, how am I supposed to say “I wrote this story about several fairy princesses, about what if Marilyn Monroe was black, about a queer witch with a superhero fetish, about CIA mind control programs and the neuroatypicality of angels; I wrote a story about a war to end the world,” without immediately apologizing that it’s actually about the rigors and specific demands of celebrity, it’s actually about what it’s been like growing up sexualized way too early.
That it’s actually about reaching down into the garbage disposal up to your fucking elbow to find compassion and love for shitty and dangerous men—and for the shittiness and danger of them, and of yourself.
But I don’t think it’s genre shame entirely. Certainly that was why Outriding fell by the wayside: I couldn’t find a way to tell this story—the story honestly I have always wanted to tell, the story that is most important to me, more important than Wasted or even While You Are Over There—in a way that would necessarily get across why it was so important to me, or what possible appeal it could have to anybody that is not me.
And a lot of that is the futurist and sci-fi elements, for sure. I got very used to saying, “You can write a hard SF military story, or a queer social-futurist soft SF story, or a story that is entirely about religion and service and the importance of tradition… But you cannot do all three of these things at the same time. The religious stuff chases off the rational SF people, the gay stuff chases away the Sad Puppies and space marines people, and the weirdly conservative pro-religion, pro-military stuff you never ever tell anybody about, well, you are right to keep that quiet because literally nobody wants to hear about that.”
But with the things I was still producing I guess I just felt, well, I have never produced anything of worth or lasting value, but I can’t say that because then all these people who have supported and encouraged and loved me so fiercely for all of this time, they will feel personally discounted or attacked, and that’s not really a worthwhile thought.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, or shoring up evidence to support it. Like, here’s one I hesitate to bring up at all, but it’s the kind of backdoor thinking that I’m talking about: If you tell a person who is self-publishing a serial novel that you look forward to reading it sometime in the future, what the person is going to hear is, “I’m so excited about what you’re doing that I plan to do literally everything in my power to make sure it stops.”
Now, nobody would so blithely say that, if they understood the subtext. Much less many, many people. But instead of adjusting the strategy, or responding with a gentle explanation of those implications, what you are left with is: The outcome that was so terrible I couldn’t even consider it, which is that expressions of love and support are the limit of what you can expect out of the world—and that expecting more is itself actually a very selfish and lazy thing. We are not fuckin’ Amanda Palmer over here.
Which had the cool benefit of also meeting it coming the other way: People who reached out specifically asking to just send me cash were saying, “You are not worth much more than begging, and your work has worth equal to and not exceeding the click of a link, for free,” which is of course a warped way to hear that, too. And although it’s something I’d been wondering about for literally one-third of my life on this planet, certainly not worth speaking to, or about. So if you can’t talk about any of it without hurting people, and you can’t stop thinking about it for even a single second, then suddenly you have a very large porcupine to deal with.
What sucks is that I had the hustle. I had proven the system. I made as much in June through self-publishing as I had in a month at Gawker, which was by far my most lucrative job to date. Therefore, it was a matter of continuing that, growing that, and paying attention to that.
Which is exactly when the bottom fell out: I stopped producing, stopped answering emails, chased everyone away that I could, completely shut down. Now, I have been around long enough to know that this particular snarl is a perfect feedback system: The only thing that throws me off my emotional kilter is money, for reasons that are both inborn (what is money?) and historical/familial (a whole other fuckin’ deal).
The point is that money is the only thing that depresses me, and you can’t be depressed if you want to make money: Like that old commercial for cocaine, but the man is going backwards and very slowly. And he doesn’t want anything. And even huge career opportunities are impossible to get excited about. And so on.
So June was the peak and it was also the end—and if there’s some kind of subconscious sabotage going on there, it’s most likely the good kind… In the grand scheme. I hate the grand scheme.
Avoiding self-promotion, beyond the occasional obnoxious tweet or whatever, became its own sort of self-gratifying, ugly little Gollum of a thing. I bake myself a cupcake, knowing full well that if you don’t know about the cupcake you won’t know to eat it—but it’s out there, and if you’re not buying it, that confirms that we are both terrible. But I have plausible deniability, because I baked the secret cupcake, it exists.
You see couples like this all the time, keeping score and so focused on their score that they don’t realize the person on the other side of the table is also keeping score: When you are in survival mode, considering other people’s subjectivity can feel like a luxury, or a fantasy. It is very lonely either way but the end result is the same: You can stop worry about why you are unhappy, or what it would be like to stop being unhappy, and focus on the essential rightness and fairness of your unhappy state.
If any or all of this sounds extremely out of character, trust me that nobody is as surprised as I am, to hear literally any of this coming out of my mouth. In addition to the constant misery, there has been a corollary, jaw-dropped shock at every turn: I never wanted to feel special, I don’t enjoy that feeling, but being so far down that you’re beyond whatever “ordinary” is, into cliché, that was some very WTF stuff to be dealing with.
Any one of these negative emotions or processes would have been a heavy-duty, long-delayed lesson: But all of them? I’m not only selfish and lazy and plagued with self-doubt, but also in a newfound and severe anxiety over my employability, my utility to the world, and the likelihood I have, pretty deliberately and permanently, missed my shot at being a husband and father, the one thing I have never had even a moment of ambiguity about…
And on top of it, this? Not just one unoriginal thought but several of them, over and over and over? Nightmare stuff.
But the real nightmare isn’t even that, it’s this other thing I have with being abject, with poverty and sadness and sloppiness and inappropriate behavior. The only thing I hate more than vaguebooking is when a person treats their feelings like reasons. Feelings are facts but they are not persuasive arguments. You can’t say, “Give me this job because my ex-husband was an asshole and I have lupus and my parents were mean to me thirty years ago,” you have to say “I am perfect for this job because of my skills.”
I see people confuse those things on the regular and it makes me uncomfortable but it also activates the secret bully part of me, because I only know how to shame and abuse that way of thinking—and in the long run, any negative or messy feeling is basically a problem you haven’t solved yet, and you’d be better off keeping us in the dark about it until you have it figured out.
Not hugely healthy, but I do feel like it’s worth drawing a line between the outer and inner world in that way. Not that you repress your negativity or things you’re working on, but to understand that your romance and conversation with yourself is a lifelong mystery novel as—or really vastly more—important than what any of us think about you, or about it.
The reason your dreams are boring for other people is that everybody in your dream is you. You are talking to yourself with other faces. A story, a novel or a song, is the same thing: An engine with many parts all moving in the same pursuit. It’s just easy to see a story from the outside and think it’s identical to the way we experience life in the real world: Not that Dumbledore is one of the best parts of Harry, and of all of us, but making the very dangerous and stupid jump to thinking that in real life there will be a Dumbledore, and you need to find him.
At which point it becomes a “God sent a helicopter, I said no thanks” situation, which is unattractive for everybody.
I think if I had not been born or raised with a notably intense and ongoing relationship with that, that I would not be the man I am today. Likewise, I think if I were not committed to transparency and connecting with other people the way that I am, I would probably drown in it. Which means things like this—a story about how I fell down and am trying to stand up without dragging anybody down with me—assumes a shape not unlike a very depressing confessional blogger narrative that we’re all familiar with, and that I find incredibly toxic.
“How can I write a newsletter explaining what has been going on with me this summer,” I asked a real-life person yesterday, “Without telling any part of what has been going on with me this summer?”
It’s a question I have been asking all summer, and until today the answer has been, “You can’t.”
But that is shame talking, and shame has been running this fucking house since June.
So if you are put off by this very long, very bathetic story of suicidal ideation and teenage-level nervous breakdowns, let me assure you that I am with you on that. It’s humiliating.
But it’s what is happening, and until it happens there isn’t anywhere else to go. Delete this email, no harm no foul—and sorry to any new subscribers who didn’t know what they were getting into—but I promise you that next time it won’t be quite so hard to look at. Other people’s suffering is a complicated thing.
I think the self is a very good regulation system for certain kinds of growth. There are a billion things that can go wrong inside your head, chemically or mechanically or just by blundering into places without an exit strategy. I think once you stop leaving your house or communicating with people or putting work into the world, maybe the only other option is this sort of very dark exorcism, Goetic kind of thing we’re talking about. Not really up to me. But pretty worthwhile.
The details of that, I mean, whatever. I didn’t invent the Dark Night and I certainly have not perfected it. But what my friend Sarah said, back at the beginning of the summer when she gave me permission to talk about depression as though it were not a fictional concept, “You have to do some pretty boring stuff to get out again.” I love that girl.
And past all that, and I guess it’s still going—this very long letter being absolute proof—I needed to be reminded about gratitude: Not just for its own sake, as the all-purpose stem cell of emotional wellbeing, but in making that gratitude clear. You’re only as good as your word, so I’d better be honest if I’m going to try doing that.
We can get caught up in the internal world, whether that’s dreams or fantasies or regrets or just serious pain or sorrow, and make the assumption that the people around us must know how strongly we feel about them, because to us—in those times—there’s no difference. We confuse our story with the world.
It’s like you are seeing this amazing city on the other side of a river, and instead of building a bridge to get there, you just plant your ass on this side and pretend to… be a city. What a waste.
In this analogy you are the city. And I am incredibly grateful for you. But in order to explain exactly why, I would have to write you a whole humiliating letter about just how bad it got this summer, and that would only embarrass us both. And I’m not brave enough for that yet.
So I just have to say thank you, instead.
Jacob