Exactly Backwards

For a long time, I was under the impression that to have an interesting life, one needed to be an interesting person. 

Being an interesting person meant adding things on. Doing things, having done things, knowing stuff, knowing people, knowing how to do things, knowing places, plays, books, knowing cities—and making sure others heard about it. A lot of this stuff wasn’t real, or was exaggerated, which only reinforced the importance of all the actual life experience I didn’t have. 

The assumption was that someday I could accumulate enough badges of interest, and in the meantime, I could fake it.  

All the while, my world was getting smaller. For some years that was because I was drinking more and more and very literally shrinking my ambit around the various sad apartments I inhabited, more wraith than man. For several more after that, it was because I was desperately pursuing relevance—shopping books, pitching screenplays, submitting stories, networking with all the wrong intentions, competing on social media, counting myself among professionals in whose company I had no business. 

Delusion is transparent, of course, and I wouldn’t have described this activity as such while I was doing it. I was “playing the game.” Delusion’s effects, too, are impossible to see, and it wasn’t until the smoke cleared that I realized extent to which I was discounting as peripheral everything else in my very rich life that didn’t directly contribute to my plans. 

The more I piled onto this idea of my future self, the narrower the future became. Only a limited set of circumstances presented as success. Two, really: Great American Author, which I felt entitled to; and Baker of the Climate Revolution, which I supposed would suffice while the novels got traction. 

And the narrower the future became, the more desperate I was to get there. The writing was no longer about the stories I was telling or the language I was using, but rather was in service only to my eventual renown. Which only made success less and less likely. Stuff from that period oozes self-absorption and it is no longer any surprise that no one wanted to run with it. 

I had it all exactly backwards. 

Something happened to me in mid 2020. Maybe it was the pandemic—the kids at home, the walls closing in, the global upset, the rupture in all these social contracts we took for granted—that finally cracked me open. Maybe it was simply time. 

I was sitting at the caster table we’d set up as my desk in the bedroom, which I’d wheel 36 inches into place every morning, doing my to-do list, when I saw myself as an old man. Nothing mystical, but it was more than just a daydream or a passing thought. It was like recalling visit I’d made to someone the previous day. The old me I’d seen was angry, bitter, and alone—and certain to his core that it was all everyone else’s fault. There was no conversation, but it was all clear. I knew this guy. Knew the whole deal. 

And I wanted nothing to do with him. But—and this was the real impact—he seemed inescapable. I looked around and saw a dozen ways in which I was heading directly for him. And in the next moment I saw with perfect, icy blue clarity that I had generated, was generating, all the paths that led there. 

I walked around for days with a great heaviness, something almost like grief, a sense of physical exhaustion combined with utter despondency. My motivation vanished. I was weary at the level of my bones. Not of the world, not of the other people in it that had always, until just that moment, been an imposition—that particular weariness, of the impatient and asocial artist, I’d long cultivated as an intrinsic part of my destiny. 

No, I was weary of myself, of this person operating within me, seemingly on my behalf, who had barbed all these hooks. It’s not that all the things I cared about suddenly lost interest. That would’ve been great. A clean slate! Instead, I realized that the things I’d placed at the center of my life were poison. I wanted out, but I didn’t know how. This particular problem, in a life of self-created problems, was new. 

So I asked my friend Phil what to do. And the whole of his response was, “Can you give up the idea of yourself as a writer?” 

My reaction, of course, was to be appalled. Didn’t he know me? Hadn’t he read my drafts? What idea was there to give up? How do you give up something you are? 

“I didn’t say give up writing,” he said a few days later. “I said the idea.” 

And it dawned on me that what I wanted from him was to know how to settle down and get back to writing, how to push through this hiccup and get my ego in check and tap back into the source where the writing was true—so that the writing would be good enough to accomplish what I’d always expected it to accomplish for me. 

I was either going to be a successful writer—or not. Success/failure. Renown/obscurity. Promise/futility. I couldn’t see around it as the defining criterion of my life. 

I wrote a list of all the things thinking of myself as A Writer had gotten me. Other than a handful of fun times I’d tricked others into letting me have, and the onanistic fantasy of delivering Oscar speeches and The Art of Fiction interviews as I drove around town, its contributions to my life amounted to disappointment and resentment. Which I had, in turn, inflicted on others. 

The writing itself, when it was real and true, had never let me down. But if I had ever really valued that, besides as a talking point, I’d long ago lost touch with it.  

So, I started cutting the idea away. 

I stopped working on the novel and screenplay in progress. I haven’t written any fiction in over a year. I’ve barely read any. I stopped selling bread. I stopped reading about other writers. I unfollowed the bakers I thought I was competing against. 

I went back to the beginning of Buddhism: there is suffering; the root of suffering is change; there is a way out of suffering; the path is the way. 

There is no future. There is no event. You already have everything you need. 

Relevance and renown were my north stars for thirty years. I was six or seven when I saw that poster of Mark Spitz with all his medals around his neck and thought, “Yes, that.” Thirty years I added things on to try to get there. Hook or crook. 

I don’t want any of it, anymore.

And this is the paradox of it: the more I pare away, the wider the future becomes. 

Not in any concrete sense. I don’t have a bunch of leads on how to change my course. I wouldn’t say I have any kind of course at all. Not in any way a guidance counselor or life coach would recognize. 

I’m not saying I’ve traded in my lifelong cynicism for nihilism. I’ll be productive and useful for my wife and kids, my community. Probably more so than when they were backseat to my ambition. And I know I’ll get back to creative activity. Its absence is taking its own toll. Whether it’s novels and bread or something else entirely, who knows. I want to be open to anything. But I also want to be fit for duty, and I’m not there yet. I picked the novel back up at the beginning of the year and was immediately back into the old, wrong headspace. 

What I am saying is that I no longer expect my happiness and fulfillment to be contingent on one specific future event. On any future event. I’ve realized there is nothing that can happen after which I will be a different person with some different mode of fulfillment. 

And with this expectation, so went the fear. For the first time in my life, I’m not scared or anxious or desperate about the future. 

For the first time, the possibilities seem endless.