If at First You Don't Succeed—Tough Luck, Bucko
The internet isn’t a great place if you write and have anxiety. At least if you write, have anxiety, and are me.
Transition is difficult. And it’s especially difficult when it happens live and in public. There’s lots of transitions going in the world and in the country and with me personally and just like how moving to a new place leaves a lot of doors to your home open and precious things exposed, so too does public transition.
As a standup comedian I had a decent enough “career”. I use quotes because I barely ever made any money and ran at a loss for years, but that’s literally how standup comedy is designed to operate (which is a whole other essay). Even though I was not financially successful, I still felt success and still felt like I was doing things. I was constantly working and running shows and performing on shows and festivals. It was easy to find busywork with standup and it was easy to feel the forward momentum even when it was slight. The staircase was the same height as others, but the steps (at least at the bottom) are shorter. Doing open mics just required signing up and getting on stage. Getting a booking just required showing up to mics for a bit. Getting more bookings, then longer, then bigger, then applying to festivals, on and on. Sure, there’s lots of bullshit (and again, that’s another essay for another time) but it felt like I was busy and it gave me the creative flexibility I liked. In standup, I would generate premises, work on them and a punchline, my perspective, then I’d fuck around with it on stage for awhile until I felt it was good, then it slid into the act for paid shows.
My current career as an internet writer is… not that. It’s far more self-driven—which is something I like, but also struggle with. It’s also pretty much “showtime” all the time. There aren’t a ton of “open mic” versions for writing anymore that aren’t just rough drafts you alone see. If you have a support writing group or friend network, then you can possibly circulate things to them, but you can’t exactly do that for every single thing you write if you’re writing regularly. It used to be that blogs and such were where the open mic field was, but everything you put in public is IN PUBLIC and will be attached to your permanent record of style, thought, and worth. Different pitfalls for different types of writers. I’m sure fiction writers are more concerned with their style being frozen in amber for some people so that when they grow as an artist people have already written them off from past exposure to their earlier work.
For me, it’s a constant fear that I’ll phrase an insight or opinion in a way that is far more controversial than I intend to (shockingly, I—a person with adochd—hates conflict and controversy directed at myself) and I will be damned to the pits of hell. This isn’t a rail against “PC culture” or anything of the like, this has been going on for forever, but the level of upkeep I feel required of myself to make it clear to everyone who followed my previous career that I’M STILL HERE along with the schedule I’ve given myself to not feel like a lazy failure (haha, as if) has created an untenable and unrealistic expectation of regular perfection produced mostly through frantic, anxiety-fueled first drafts which after being posted drop me off into a cool, serene chasm of fear and depression.
This isn’t a woe-is-me post, but I guess more of a eulogy of the cocoon. I have a Patreon losing backers every month and a Twitter account shedding followers like a winter coat and as much as I appreciate what I was able to do in the past, and as ridiculous as it is to hold odd and sometimes arbitrary social media numbers to such a locus of control, it’s hard to not feel like I’m backsliding—like my light is fading at age 31 and soon I will be nothing more than Israel Bissell: crowded out by the flashy Paul Reveres of culture.
Boy howdy, this one got away from me. I’ve just been doing a lot of introspection lately (somehow even moreso than usual) and thinking a lot about the history of writing. I feel beholden to people, to the audience, in a way that I doubt a lot of writers of the past did. They wanted an audience, but usually the audience came after the work, at least in the beginning. My anxiety and the modern internet design of media causes me to feel like I’ve got a living room full of people who are constantly asking me when my next thing is coming out and every once in awhile someone complains about the wait and leaves and then once I finally come out of my office, everyone’s watching a movie now and I just put the piece on the coffee table where maybe one or two of them will read it and then we all go to sleep.
Anxiety’s a hell of an emotional cat. It wants praise and love and attention and the minute it gets any of it, it bats it away like modern science at a PTA meeting in Portland. How do we soothe the savage beast? Apparently, for me, it’s getting addicted to Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.
This week I’ve had a huge assortment of songs stuck in my head, but the underlying current (which also speaks to my recent state of mind) has been a soft, dull hum of the theme song from _Bananas in Pajamas_—a television show I have never watched.
