*tap tap* Is this thing on???
For the last few years I’ve directed my creative energies toward writing novels and short stories with a goal of being published and succeeded only in sucking every last bit of the joy from writing, and then I remembered blogging. So—hello again! Please don’t unsubscribe; my ego is very fragile right now.
Retreating to blogging feels—as my use of the word “retreating” implies—like admitting defeat. But what is adulthood other than admitting defeat over and over again? At nearly thirty-seven, I have been felled by, to name just a few representative examples, my dream of becoming a Broadway actress, cholesterol, my eyebrows (where did they go?!), migraines, eyeliner, handstands… the list of things I have come to understand I will never achieve or master or eradicate only grows with each passing year.
It’s become increasingly apparent to me that I must learn to find happiness in things like, God help me, sunsets, or the scent of a loaf of fresh-baked bread, or—yes—blogging. The kind of things that make you happy when you can’t make enough of yourself to get a hold of it through elbow grease. It’s enough to make one contemplate having children.
Years ago, when I was crossing into my twenties and trying to torque myself into being more highbrow than I actually, I spent a few months trying to enjoy midlife crisis literature. John Updike, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen—men in middle age* quitting their jobs and injuring themselves physically and morally against a backdrop of women whose primary personality trait was “shrill.” There are many legitimate reasons a twenty-year-old woman might abandon such an endeavor, but it turns out that “there’s no way being an adult is actually that miserable” is not one of them.
At twenty I still had faith in my ability to become a more able person than I already was in the ways that I cared about. I felt that in scratching certain obvious impossibilities off my bingo card, I had taken sufficient stock of myself and was clear-eyed about my future. Having given up on, say, developing hand-eye coordination or a talent for advanced math, there was no reason I couldn’t now become a chorus girl on Broadway, never mind that I couldn’t break out of the understudy slot in my not-a-conservatory college’s dance company. It felt simply unfathomable that within just a decade or two I could be so jaded by my own existence as to want to burn the whole thing down.
Even after I gave up on that particular dream—which I did almost immediately upon graduating from college, without attending even a single audition, because I was delusional but not that delusional—I still felt I was on an unimpeachably upward trajectory. It helped that I zagged onto an entirely unexpected path and discovered my latent talents for business writing and office politicking. For several years I made hay on that, until suddenly I couldn’t any longer.
I didn’t wake up one day thinking Christ, I’m a John Updike protagonist; I didn’t stomp out of the office and purchase a red sports car. It was more of a creeping sensation that I had bloomed in the wrong garden and once I had seen it, I couldn’t unsee it. I couldn’t muster the energy I needed to keep being good at something I was no longer interested in being good at and so I decided it was time to try for something preposterous again: I’d finally write that novel I had been dreaming about for years!
Alas, it stopped feeling preposterous only long enough for me to convince myself that I had unlocked the life I actually wanted to be living all along. Which means that as I confront the realities of a publishing industry that is mostly interested in sexy dragons and books by social media influencers, I find myself as empty-handed as I was when I was twenty-two and cladding myself in the hair shirt of having put away a childish thing.
The problem is that at thirty-six, the world is less of my oyster than it was fourteen years ago. Because I’m older, and because the robots are taking over, and because you can only withstand so many gut-wrenching misses before swinging no longer seems worth it. And while this would be a great lead-in to an exhortation to try one last time, I think the things I’m coming to realize about growing up—about having grown up—are that:
- You are probably never going to be as good as you want to be at the thing you most desperately want to be really good at
- Even if you were, you’d still be low-grade miserable a shocking percentage of the time
So what does one do with this information? Am I doomed to get really into appreciating sunsets, or worse, take up a lesser hobby and talk loudly to everyone I meet about how “it’s really fun to be bad at something?” Because it’s not. It’s really fun to be admired for your skills and accomplishments and the unique ways in which you exceed other people. Spending hundreds of dollars to make misshapen pottery is simply a distraction from everything you’d rather be doing, and more adeptly.
But I can’t bring myself to give up the things I want to be good at. I want to be good at them because I love them, and because on the occasions when I fumble into a half-second of greatness I can taste it for months afterward. I would rather stumble ungainly through a dance class, conscious of everyone in the room wondering if I really think I belong there, than spend the rest of my life forming a kyphotic hump watching videos of other people dancing on my phone. Because that’s the alternative, isn’t it? Do something or do nothing? And better “something” be writing my fourth poorly conceived manuscript than, idk, try to stage a coup in Lithuania, right?
*I just looked at the Wikipedia summary of Rabbit, Run (sue me; I’m not putting myself through reading Updike again in this lifetime) and Rabbit is TWENTY-SIX? Jesus. At least at twenty-six, I was still double-fisting Negronis at corporate conference afterparties and holding court to a larger-than-appropriate audience about who my favorite and least favorite colleagues were.
the anti-lifestyle blog 