Dogshit

Learning to trust myself at my big age is like climbing a rock face with my teeth.

Every word I’ve written for nearly a full calendar year has felt like dogshit.

I’m overly critical of most things I make, but even this is new to me. I read back and hear my narrative voices as ugly and frantic, all over the place, cluttered and horrible and worthy of nobody’s hours. The practice of being kind to myself seems like a grift; something only other people are allowed to do.

Last fall, my publisher declined to acquire my next novel and closed our working relationship. It’s difficult to admit how deeply that rocked my sense of worth and ability to dredge up the energy to write, but it really fucked me up. Change has a nasty talent for passing itself off as abject, irredeemable failure to me.

I want to be the aloof, worldly writer above caring, yet I care so much all the time about everything. All of it. I care about what people think of my work, I care about being worth an editor’s time, I care about how I measure up to others, how I look, how I speak, and I want desperately to be seen. I want to be understood and lauded for my bravery every morning I so much as sit up to face another day, but how does that make me special? We’re all in this to be witnessed. Why else would we bother bleeding all over the page in the first place?

Most of my dreams at night since summer began have been of large ships carving into tall cities full of people through strange, elaborate ports. I’ve found over the past several months in particular that I can be shockingly cruel to myself if I’m not careful, dashing my own safe harbors to splinters from the inside out. It’s a strange and violent anger, to hurl fury at yourself for feeling behind in adulthood. I should know better by now; I should know who I am. Shouldn’t I?

Overwhelmingly I live with the sense that others received a playbook as young people that I wasn’t given, and everyone else knows so much more about how to function in each season of life. On hard days I see myself as little more than hungry and selfish, trapped in an infantile loop of needy confusion. My most destructive belief is that to be seen is to have a purpose, and going unseen means I have none.

I’ve learned to crave an audience not only to understand my work, but to tell me who I am. External validation is a safety to me as warm as my mother’s affection, and historically I’ve sought to earn it just as fiercely. Someone else’s approval in how they see me means I don’t have to do the work of my own exploration, of delicately fostering the curiosity one needs to dig into the messy self-strata. When I rely on others to tell me what I’m made of, I can believe I am harmless and good and capable of making someone happy by being exactly what they expect. I can push truth to the back of my mind and perform. I don’t have to climb down and run my fingers along inner shelves of shame, guilt, fear, anger, dig past leagues of uglies to reach the stuff I consider worthy.

It’s worse than people-pleasing. It’s self-denial: If I can take someone else’s belief that I don’t have teeth and make it mine, I can avoid looking for my own face in every mirror I’m given.

How do I fix this? I’m reading more, and with a wider breadth than ever before. I’m getting up to leave the house for no reason in particular on my days off †. I’m playing music and not recording or writing it down, letting it go into the passing time it decorates. I’m sitting quietly with my spouse and letting life breathe around us. I’m asking myself small questions every day, and looking forward to when I have strength to ask some bigger ones.

This has been an exceptionally difficult year for me. Choosing the hard work is a tall order, but the only option. As frightening as it is getting to truly know myself with the brakes off, to take the things I create and the feelings I feel as they are and want to be expressed without trimming and docking and tucking them just-so before they even have names, it’s even more frightening to not create anything at all.

So for now it all feels like dogshit, and I can’t tell for how much longer, but there was unshakeable love here once. I’ll find it again.

† I’m working as a bookseller these days, stop by if you’re local :)

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