If I was to call the magazine editor who used to invite me to his fancy canyon house parties, and ask him directly why he stopped inviting me over- Is it because you didn’t like my shoes? Was I too nervous/obviously green? Not an heiress? Overall pretty illegitimate?- what would he say? I am curious about his disappearance because it makes me question whether I was “interesting” enough, and it’s an upsetting thought that, yes, it’s true after all, people care about what you do and who you know, and that these things are often the gauge for how interesting you are to the world. And often, the individuals with the flimsiest moral characters are indeed the ones buying bungalows and getting press. Not to say this particular editor has a flimsy moral character; I believe he is good, but his parties weren’t environments where I felt comfortable telling anyone I didn’t have an agent. Usually I left in a sort of restless career-related terror, amazed that someone could keep champagne grapes on hand, and troubled by the knowledge that I would never be such a person.
I’d like a bungalow, very much so. But I’m learning something here. A few years ago, when I was going to canyon-type parties, when I was publishing more non-fiction, and when I was writing here often, I received feedback from the world that reassured me I was interesting. This justified my efforts. However, at this time, I have no memory of being interesting to myself. The more I wrote online, the less I did the work I really wanted to do. But this work required being invisible, and invisibility is not valuable. Presence is, and for good reason. It’s how you get published. You also get published by actually writing, but the problem with dedicating much of my work to online forums was an increasing reliance on an online audience for gratification. You don’t have to be a narcissist to be self-aware, and if you keep a personal writing blog, you are to some extent self-interested and aware, which is not necessarily bad. But the more I blogged, the more self-interested I became, the more I judged my work against others’, the more I cared what others thought, and the more stressed I felt over the state of my “career.” Slowly, as I grew too invested in projecting a certain image to the world, I got bored with myself. I sat down to write a post about something or other, and gradually stopped caring about what I had to say. I don’t know what it means that as I focused in on my own personal thoughts, the less curious I became about those very thoughts. The problem was that it was all too deliberate, too full of intention. This is a forum that demands eloquence and wit and depth in under five-hundred or so words, and it’s corrosive to real thought. And I demanded these things of myself. It’s not as if I ever had a real following, at best it was meager, but I had a standard to live up to; I had to be a certain way in order to matter.
Well, I completely failed at being this way. Had I succeeded I’d probably matter a lot less to myself, and to others, because over-intellectualized self-awareness is the first exit on the road to nihilism. I began to witness it around me, vain ambition working like tobacco smoke over teeth. Slowly, imperceptibly, the enamel yellows and stains, eventually rots. I observed the implosion of a ladies choir I joined amid the most insidious sort of sweet-as-pie female artificiality. As the last domino fell, a spread on the choir appeared in a national lifestyle magazine, boasting of weekly organic potluck rehearsals and rare womanly harmony, with pictures of the choir holding hands in vintage prairie dresses. In my several-months-long experience with the choir, no such event had ever happened except on the day of another big deal fashion magazine photo shoot. The choir hasn’t met since. It would have been easy to get cynical about female friendship had vanity not been such an obvious culprit. Nothing is as it seems, really.
What ambition needs to thrive (not just to engender external success, but to co-exist with contentment) is detachment- from caring what others think, from social hierarchy, from invitations, from your own paralyzing self-awareness, from standards of cleverness, from feeling rushed, from all bullshit etc.- and wonder. I think the wise ones recede, even as they succeed, because purely vain ambition, even on the part of a genuinely nice person, precludes happiness for others’ successes, occasions jealousy, stymies creativity.
While it’s a little unsettling to remember, it’s liberating to admit I used to be the kind of person who thought New York and Los Angeles were the only places worth living. I used to write off all conservatives as idiots, and all religious people as fools. I used to think the only people worth knowing were “artists.” I judged people with “real jobs” as boring, and thought that all people with “real jobs” were obviously unhappy- because how could they not be? I got sad if I wasn’t invited to some launch party for some book or music video or whatever. I spent real amounts of time fiddling with my Tumblr page so as to achieve the perfect aspect of subtlety. I fretted about my career- am I publishing enough? In the right places? I am probably making myself worse than I actually was, and to my credit I wasn’t this way for all that long (or was I? It’s not something you can time), but the point is I cared- too much. I thought I was right. And I annoyed myself all the time and cried often, because I was wrong and tired, and inside I knew it. Recognition doesn’t make this kind of attitude go away, it feeds it. Detachment from whether or not recognition ever comes is what makes it go away. It’s the kind of deceptively obvious conclusion you have to arrive at yourself, even if you’ve heard it a million times. That gradual detachment felt like a warm hand on my shoulder saying, it’s okay to smile wide in pictures, to never get published if that’s how things turn out, not to be on Facebook, not to prove anything, okay to wear sweatpants all the time, to be poor (even if it’s a bummer and not your preference), to love and believe, to not have read all the “important” books, to participate, okay to be yourself and not go to canyon-parties because, really, you never cared about that anyway, and even if you did care for awhile, it’s not worth blaming yourself over. I realized that I felt calm, that I felt joy. So then my very real love of and devotion to writing clarified itself, shook itself out into a more patient sort of ambition. And that’s where it stands now, very imperfect, good days and terrible days, but freer.
