The Success Cycle
Sometimes all I want to do is blow it all up and leave it all behind.
When I was younger, less damaged, more sure of myself but also somehow less sure of myself, I never had thoughts like this. I never felt embarrassed to tell people I was a writer, even when I wasn’t doing much writing (as for the first three years after college, when mostly what I did was take drugs), even as I struggled to publish anything. I never wavered, never thought about doing anything else, and though I balked at journalism — something I’m fairly sure I’m going to have to get over, if I’m going to feed myself for the rest of my life — I had no inferiority complex or guilt or ambient weirdness about it. I had always wanted to be a writer, I was good at it, and if it wasn’t working out right at this second, that was fine. If I’d gone the route of the boy wonder — something I think I was probably capable of, had things bounced differently — I would have put a lot of work into the world that I wouldn’t be proud of anymore, and the work I would be doing now wouldn’t be as good.
But for some reason, in my mid-30s, after attending a high-end graduate school and winning a couple of prizes and getting an agent and stuff — now, now I’m embarrassed to say it. Maybe some of that is just part of getting older and realizing how small and picayune your own enterprise is, how completely impossible it is to be the very greatest of all time at something. You witness the way other people go about something and it seems better than how you do it. There are all these people in the world whose whole lives revolve around art and literature and expression and film and everything; I vacillate between judging these people very harshly and feeling as though I should be more like that. But I’m just not. And I never will be. I never really wanted to be, you know? I find the instinct to read culture as though it were a novel to be pointless, possibly psychologically destructive. I think the “express yourself” model of art is dumb. Whenever I surround myself with other writers I find myself deeply annoyed after a while, by our tendency toward preciousness, by the way we can lose track of the real world when talking only to one another, by the degree to which people feel the need to get invested in the fucking politics of this shit. So many of the people I knew in graduate school were so pissed off all the time — about shit the professors said or did, about shit the other students said or did, about shit going on in the world at large. And oh my GOD, who gives a flying, farting fuck?
But then sometimes I look at the way that makes me feel and I think — maybe that means I’m doing the wrong thing. Maybe I should find another line of work, something I can throw myself into and and exist in completely, something that will take me over and define me, let me know who I am. How is it that I struggled with identity hardly at all when I was young, but now at 36 have come to get so bungled up about the whole subject? Who the hell am I? Is this a midlife crisis? Is this what quitting drinking does to all drunks? Would anything be different if I hadn’t developed this sudden weird complex about calling myself a writer?
Part of it is, in no uncertain terms, that I haven’t published anything significant in the realm of fiction in five years. You tell people you’re a writer and they say, “Oh, what have you written?” And you say, “Three short stories that got published, a whole bunch I never finished, and a 95% completed novel that I haven’t sold yet and have lost all faith in.” Is that what you say? Does that mean you’re a writer? Or does that mean you’re just another fucking dillettante who likes to arrogate to themselves the status of artist when what they really do is print logos on prefab American Apparel t-shirts? I sometimes think that if I hadn’t cultivated such an elaborate, bone-deep distain for that kind of thing, that might make me feel better, too. But the problem is that I just do have a bone-deep distain for the idea that everybody’s an artist just because they write Harry Potter fanfic or weave baskets or wrote a funny song for their kids. And then we’re right back around to the problem where I feel like I’m not committed enough, either.
In no uncertain terms, some of this is about a fear of success. I have finally walked right up to the edge of finishing a book I’ve been working on for the better part of a decade. If I ever do finish it, then I have to let it be evaluated — first by publishers, then by editors, then by critics, then by readers. At each step, there’s a way for success to feel like failure. Like a bigger failure, because the stakes will be higher. And so I’m here, bleating about my fairly minor woes, rather than doing the last little bit of work on the book. Because if I finish the book, then people might actually read it, and that could be a calamity of epic proportions.
Bah. I think I’m just tired.