Standards, Nerves and Anxieties Apply
I wish I had the nerve to skip the part where people explain why they’ve started or returned to a writing platform but I can’t. Over the last two to three years, I’ve felt this intense pressure to provide solid reasons as to why I was writing something. That impulse accounts for why my production has dropped so much. I used to be able to crank out a piece with regularity and ease, but now it feels damn near impossible. Or rather, writing something good feels damn near impossible. I’m not sure whether it has something to do with getting older and thus more tentative, becoming less ignorant and therefore more conscious of the stuff I’m putting out there in the book. But here is where I potentially confuse or irritate the reader: last year, I wrote a book. I wrote a collection of easy, accessible and un-literary essays at a time when I was sure I couldn’t write anymore. I wrote a book at a time when I didn’t think I should write anymore.
Again, it’s difficult not to sound insufferable and ungrateful as I write this, but I’ve often felt too insecure and underread to be a writer. A few months ago, I struck up a conversation with someone who’s now become a person I chat to intermittently on the internet. We tend to exchange simple but attentive details about the uneventfulness of our lives, old wrestling matches and our deadend romantic trajectories. I never knew how pleasant it would be to share this platonic intimacy with someone who I will probably never meet. Through our conversations, I discovered that they were a writer. This is where my insecurities started to get get the better of me. I was so intimidated by how much they’d read and how deeply they loved literature which came through in these long, elegant and controlled sentences which made my ignorant, choppy and grammatically incorrect ones look all the more damning. Every time we chatted, I was overwhelmed with this guilt about having a relatively decent “career” without being as thorough, intelligent and well-informed as them. I don’t know if it’s late quarantine, first-book nerves or setting impossible standards for myself, as many people have told me. However, I couldn’t help feel like a cheat, a loser, a charlatan and finally, a poser.
It is for this reason that I avoided discussing my book as I battled to write it. As I moved sleeplessly from one day to the next, I dreaded the day I’d have to promote what I had already decided was going to be my sloppiest piece of work to date. When I relayed this to the people around me, they brought up words, terms and diagnoses that I’ve come to despise: “you’re a perfectionist”, “you’re too hard on yourself”, “I think you may have imposter syndrome”. At first, I sheepishly accepted their opinions. But now as I conduct book promo that requires me to summon an absurd amount of self-confidence and chipperness, I’ve been thinking a lot about those words, terms and diagnoses more and more. And I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t, at all, describe who I am. For starters, I’m not afraid to half-ass tasks without feeling a lick of shame, regardless of how important they are. I’m also capable of overstating my abilities and talents with the ease of a professional fraudster, especially when my deliberately average work ehtic is called into question. And I’ve never strived for perfection because it didn’t seem particularly exciting or worth it to me. Instead, what I think I want is for my work to be decent, tight, clear and coherent which, disturbingly, seems like too much of a demand.
I’m never one to deny the power of self-diagnosis, especially if you’re experiencing symptoms or behaviours that are having an unfavourable impact on your life. As someone who has gone through what I believe were severe depressive episodes, self-diagnosis was how I was able to stop beating myself up for not being able to function at my former capacity. But lately, I’ve been frustrated at how much we pathologise any admittance of falling short, categorising this as an example of perfectionism or imposter syndrome. Sometimes it is not so much the system driving these feelings of self-deprecation, critique or indequacy, though it certainly does play a part. Instead, it could be your own instincts and intuition honouring the truth better than some pop psychology making the rounds online. This isn’t to downplay the very real ways in which predominantly white, male spaces rob us of the confidence necessary to navigate them for our survival. Rather, it is to advocate on behalf of discomfort and dissatisfaction, to see both them as the foundation for growth and change, in spite of how embarrassing and uncomfortable they might be. It is also to reclaim introspection and self-criticism as the ugly, painful and strange exercises they can be, discarding the idea that turning inward is a delicate and soft act.
Living in anticipation of being exposed as a fraud is a deepy unhealthy way to live your life. But so, too, is the impulse to treat the acknowledgement of your shortcomings as a horrifying disorder in need of an algorithm-generated diagnosis or psychological analysis. In the months that I’ve worked on this book, both in pre and post-production, I’ve been humbled by just how little I know, how prone I am to make obvious mistakes which I assumed I was above and how unremarkable I am. Yet these observations, which I used to classify as the definitive traits of a formerly gifted child (shudders), are part of what makes any job or trade shitty. It sucks knowing that you’re not as good at something as you thought you were. It is cringeworthy to commit errors that you could never imagine yourself making. This isn’t to exceptionalise a trade whose workers will never hesitate to tell you just how hard their job is, as writer and critic Lauren Oyler observed in a recent essay for TANK MAGAZINE. Writing is not the most difficult job in the world. Like every other job, it can be boring, thankless, unsatisfying and poorly compensated. It is typified by the kind of precarity and fickleness that makes working under capitalism awful, even for those whose class status appears secure until they stumble upon some bad luck.
These are the kinds of pressures which make work, whatever form it might take, a minefield of anxiety. But not all anxieties are the same. Not all people are the same. Not all needs or expectations are the same. The nervousness that a writer feels in the run-up to their book isn’t the same as that of a service-industry worker forced to deal with the institutionalised entitlement of The Customer on a daily basis. In the days since I received a finished copy of my book, I’ve been mortified at just how underwhelming it is, how many mistakes I’ve detected and how easily this unpolished work was rushed through the post-production process. Not only does it feel like a huge personal failure as a writer who tries to submit clean copy, but it also seems like an inevitable feature of a publishing industry that appears to allocate a short amount of time to the editing and proofreading process. To think that I could escape this fate seems whimsical now, as I look at the gremlins missed or introduced into the manuscript as it moved from one set of eyes to another. But after feeling sorry for myself for a shameful amount of time given that I’m about to be a published author, I see my frustrations, embarrassment, guilt, shame, anger and fear as part of the work that could potentially make me a better writer and thinker.
However, I also know that this approach can make you miserable. Because demanding better from yourself and the people around you is miserable work. It fosters behaviours that aren’t pleasant, desirable or even sustainable. It can make you unforgiving , hostile and intolerant of justifiable explanations about why the thing you envisioned cannot come to pass. It can make you question your sanity and talent, or why you even bother in the first place. But I’ve come to accept all of this as the first step towards shortening the distance between my current set of abilities and the accomplished vision which I hope to see in my writing one day. Right now, that gap seems insurmountable. However, I’m of the belief, albeit faint, that these are the standards, nerves and anxieties that precede the type of work that right now seems like a pipedream.
- My book, “It’s Not Inside, It’s On Top”, comes out on March 22nd. The launch will take place on Zoom on March 30th. You can register for the launch on the pinned tweet here
