Getting Over Yourself
I’m a person who has spent a lot of time living in terminal fear. My brain is a chatter box, more daydreamy than plagued by a yappy inner-saboteur but it’s detrimental in its own way. My mom says that when I was a very little girl, my parents had to keep from me that people were visiting or we were going to have a party because, even a day in advance, I’d have imagined everything that could happen and would then later be disappointed by what actually did.
Having a restless imagination has caused a lot of stagnation in other parts of my life, too. If you imagine the best outcome, it’s really easy to get it into your weaselly little head that nothing is ever going to be any good in real life, so why even bother?
I learned a few months ago that this is self-obsession. That monopolizing your mind with your own perceived inadequacies and drilling yourself down to a powder over it is the stuff of hypertrophied egos. I had thought being obsessed with yourself was categorically an outward state but, really, it’s a slop-trough that a lot of us are wading through to varying degrees in various states. Some people’s egos weigh less than the goop, so they float on top of it for all of us to see. Others of us, like me, sink under the sludge, negative thoughts on loop, hoping you never, ever know what we’re thinking.
Listen, I could write a whole little treatise about the detritus-filled road that is ~learning to love yourself~. Walking this path has been essential for me to start building a real and sustainable practice of creating things I actually like because that practice involves, surprise!, a lot of fucking time with yourself. Things aren’t going to be perfect the first or second or ninth time you do them, Brenda. You gotta hang out with yourself and your brain and your taste and your abilities to synthesize it all.
Not to get all “Greatest Love of All” here*—I’m absolutely about to get all “Greatest Love of All” here—but if you do things in service of personal fulfillment, not what you think will make you look good or popular or trendy or whatever, then whether you get it right or not, at least it is still reallyreallyreally what you believe in. You’re heeding the call to create with truthfulness to your own vision and that is everything.
Getting to a place where I can read something I’m working on, know that it’s not great (yet!) and that it not being great just means I have more work to do, not that I should flush myself down the toilet, is really freeing.
Stuff to read:
Kaitlyn Greenridge, “On Kenosha” (What It Is I Think I’m Doing)
“Biden Reminds Us of What America Can Be” the headlines said all last week. I didn’t. listen to the speeches in real time. I couldn’t. I don’t know that I will ever be comfortable with listening to people repeat the lie, lovingly, that this country has ever been benevolent towards any lives other than white ones. The booty is rotten. To ignore that doesn’t make it clean, it makes you covered in shit.
An excerpt of Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Right now I’m on the hunt to read novels where the hegemony of whiteness is acknowledged and excavated. I only started Such a Fun Age yesterday but zipped through a quarter of it before I had to go to a meeting, so I can champion it as something instantly immersive and gripping. The first chapter is something someone might call “especially relevant in these times” but it’s perennial and we know it. We wouldn’t have ever heard of Jacob Blake if it weren’t. But this isn’t a difficult book or a book that centers pain. It’s fun and funny and true and because one of the protagonists is a Black woman, it means the scrutiny of white supremacy is present.
*The sound-check look in this video is so close to how I always want to dress.
Sorry for the cheese but Whitney Houston’s is the first music I remember and I’ve been genuflecting at the altar of Newark Nippy ever since ¯_(ツ)_/¯