"The Case Against Self-Optimization"
What if you are meant to remain the delightful freak that you already are?
I don’t know why I was born a writer.
Do you?
This is not to say that writers are only born, many are made, some are forged in the fires of some harrowing experience, some are birthed in the undertow of some adventurous voyage, and others are quietly grown, softly over decades like lilies that now bloom in once poisoned fields.
My point is only that I have no idea why any of us might acquire this strange and almost cartoonishly odd affliction, however delightful some aspects of it may be.
My affliction began at age five, just after moving states and starting at a new elementary school. This was my catalyst, awakening the piece of magic handed down to me from my mother and my grandmother, both storytellers, both poets of life and grit and survival.
It was moving that awoke the thing in me. Going from the safety and comfort of a town in which I knew, a place in which I had love mapped and sorted up the cobblestone path to grandma and grandpa’s house, which always smelt delightfully of age and exotic perfumes. It was there, under the shelter of that house, that I partook in spaghetti Wednesdays, a weekly tradition, bringing together my immediate family and my father’s extended kin.
During these delicious nights I, the youngest, would be gifted hugs and kisses and candies and presents. When you are young you are a marvel to the old, a memory from a time they’ve since lost touch with.
An omen of a memory, a refraction of a former self.
It moves them that you cry so easily, that you wear your emotions so close to your sleeve. In their practical and detached adulthood shells, they find it almost remarkable that a child could be so free, so uninhibited, so hopeful — so they give you presents and sing to you and stuff you full of spaghetti and tell you how brilliant you are.
When we moved to a foreign place, a place that was not mine, a place ten hours by truck, I was unsure of where to step, how to be, or what would become of me in a new school with thousands of unknown faces and a house with no cobble-stones lining the drive.
No more spaghetti Wednesdays.
That’s what it means to get old.
During that time my parents were building a house from the ground up, my maternal grandmother lived nearby, and we lived in her basement during construction. Both of my parents were gone a lot, plenty of time to wander that strange almost haunted house of hers, filled with artifacts from other times, books with dusty yellow pages, and grandfather clocks that sang hourly.
It was in that basement that I did some of my best becoming, that I learned to write and to read, with the help of my grandmother Gwendolyn, a sage from another time, who secretly nursed quiet dreams of becoming a writer that never came to fruition, dreams that she passed onto me like an heirloom or a curse.
Gwendolyn was the divine woman who painstakingly taught me what the letters were, how to form them together into spells and incantations, how the right conjecture could make a mortal cry, could remind someone of something vital, could return an old woman to her childhood, all those years of wanting and waiting during the war, rushing down gravel lined drives to mailboxes that remained empty, hoping beyond hope to find news of a father’s life in a letter with his familiar scrawl.
It was in that basement that I became something other than human, a fellow weaver of the threads, the invisible strings that tie us all together, even those who refuse to see them, even those who do not read.
Gwendolyn was a kind woman, and she figured out that if she gave me jelly beans I would more easily acquiesce to my instruction.
I think sometimes children wash up onto the shores of an adult’s life like a portal to their own becoming. Gwendolyn crafted within me the life she never got, and taught me about the power of the written word and what my spells might become if I let my imagination run wild with them.
It was during that fateful period that I became infected by the condition that I and every creative now has. It is a type of condition that renders us mere vessels to something outside of ourselves.
Not God or family, but something otherworldly, a voice that begins to speak stories into your ear, almost as if from another universe itself. It is always there, even when it is quiet, watching you from beyond some veil, wondering when it will next give you greatness, or sorrow, or pain, or love.
I like it best when the thing gives me love.
Creatives will know of this gift, the curse of flow, the trances that begin to appear in people with our condition, that suddenly stories find themselves in your mind’s eye and demand to escape the lonely caverns of your brain, to be born, to make manifest themselves on paper or page, on canvas or screen.
And once you write one down. That first essay, or story, or poem — the beginning of your creative infestation — you are marked. You will spend all of your days in a state of longing for a place you do not know, craving things you cannot see.
Because no person can go back after surrendering to that strange and mighty beast we call creativity, no matter how lovingly or assertively it might announce itself.
Once those infected get the taste, they cannot stop, and the rest of their lives begin to take on an immortal shape, unlike that of their peers, a life of observing and seeing, a life of creating, a life of making things for the rest of the world to consume.
The feeling is that of a hunger, a lust, a desire for something to be acquired or planted. It’s a strange and almost implacable feeling, but I will try to give it a name, as you are here with me in this room and we are casting this spell together.
Like blood to a vampire, the call to creativity beckons its barbarous yawp…
It feels reminiscent in a way of those vampire films, the childish ones, the serious ones, they all reveal the same truth — of the vampire we are kin.
Take for instance when the wisened old vampire talks of having an unrelenting and unquenchable thirst for blood. Only, for people like me (and you), the thirst is for knowledge, creative expression, and the accurate articulation of the world that lives within us, begging to be set free.
I can never have enough writing, even in the months or years when it evades me.
I can never have enough reading, even in the seasons when I do not hold a book.
I can never have enough knowing — and that, my friends, terrifies me.
Because what if the life of a creative is a life spent forever trying to fill a cup that cannot be filled?
What if enough will never feel like enough?
There are wells inside of me that ache to be filled with every thought and idea.
I crave the intricacies and private notions of each of my character's internal lives.
I want to know every story and every word, every secret, and every compulsion.
I want to know how it all functions, and why this character must die and that one must live.
I want to go on the hero's journey again and again, a thousand times, an unlimited spectrum of faces and vantage points. I want to know everything.
Do you feel what I am saying?
Do you understand its consequence, that aching and unhealable stench of anxiety that will not fade, that perpetual fear that I’m not attaining or acquiring or learning enough?
That I must always be and do and experience and see and consume more. more. more.
What would our therapist say?
We know that Buddhism, or meditation, or psychoanalysis would locate some ruptured part of our child psyche that is unhealed, unheard, untended, that same self that chronically seeks out knowing and the greatest fear and pleasure of them all — to be truly and deeply understood and accepted despite one’s flaws.
That perspective would ask of us all first to heal the inner child wound, and then come into the present moment and let ourselves finally be at peace. But truthfully, the more present we are, the more we crave. I know this of us. I know this of you.
What we crave most of all, like vampires crave blood — sinking teeth into flesh — is the reading and devouring of books and ideas and feelings and emotions and life, life as it can be known in its infinite complexity. There is this constant aching feeling that there must be more. More to know, more to see, more to experience.
It physically pains us when we cannot read for at least a few hours each day or each week.
Sometimes our OCD and hyper-fixations create loops where we read the same book over and over, sometimes nightly for months at a time, which is immensely pleasurable — but why? Why do we do this?
From this vantage point, I assume it is because we can safely re-examine the same story again and again from a thousand different angles, noticing little indentations in the nooks and crannies, words that we didn’t see before, and things that we didn’t know were placed just so.
Again, we know what our therapist would say about this, all the ways we mix and fix ourselves. All the ways we can and should glue ourselves back to normal, back to palatable, back to easy.
But this, my dear ones, is an essay against fixing. An essay arguing for the divine fucked-up-ness of the creative. An essay asking what I believe to be a vital question: What if you stopped trying to change and instead embraced yourself exactly as you are, warts and all? What might happen? What might become possible?
We don’t know when it began…
..but for as long as we can remember we’ve been addicted to learning, to knowing more and more about each and every subject we can acquire.
We are filled constantly with the sense that we want to see more, to do more, to touch more, to experience more, to smell more, everything everywhere all at once, every experience, every memory, every hope, every dream, we want it, we want to know it and hold it and tend to it, like a field of many colored flowers in the garden of our mind, we want to keep our soil rich and fertile and always be planting something new, while keeping and never abandoning the old, like a garden, or a valley of trees, or an ever-expanding museum of artwork, we constantly find ourselves in a state of craving.
We’ve found that nothing satisfies these desires quite like a book, especially meaty and dexterous novels.
A moment of pause for Stephanie Meyer…
Recently, I re-read the entirety of the Twilight Saga (I know, please stay with me). As a child, I was particularly invested in those books because they served as an entry point to questioning and discovering my sexuality.
In a Gothic literature course at Dartmouth, I learned that this is actually the point of vampires. The very concept was invented in the Victorian period (and before, I imagine, in regions around the world), both in oral tradition and the written word so that writers and readers could explore taboo subjects like sex, penetration, lust, and carnal desire. Look no further than the eighteen-century lesbian-coded vampire thriller Carmilla.
These same ideas morphed and molded themselves, and just after the turn of the century, we were given Meyer's wildly popular Twilight books.
I’ve always felt a bit bad for her, even though it's probably strange to feel bad for a woman who made upwards of 100 million dollars from her creativity. The reason is because I sense in her this feeling of shame and judgment of herself.
She’s even been quoted as saying that Twilight hasn’t always been the happiest mental headspace for her, notably after the stars and fans turned on her publicly in the mid-2010s and online discourse swiftly decided that the books were trite, contrived, anti-feminist, etc.
While I do not claim to know Stephenie or her intentions, I do think that any book that inspires a person to read so voraciously, no matter the topic, is a win for society.
The reason I feel empathy, and perhaps a bit of pain for her, is that I can’t even imagine how terrible it feels to be criticized by such famous people, some of whom were her literary idols, on such a massive scale.
Perhaps time and perspective have changed her relationship to the franchise, eased by the ways in which the world seems to have circled back and decided, you know what, these movies are camp and incredible, and we’re sorry for ever doubting you, Stephanie!
With the release of Midnight Sun (a novel from Edward Cullen's perspective), the global success of 50 Shades of Grey (originally a Twilight fanfic), and the news of a Twilight reboot in TV form, it seems that all is likely well and good in Stephenie Meyer-land, though I was tapped into that somewhat despondent period of her life when she disappeared from the public eye, and only agreed to interviews occasionally. I found myself worried for her often. Worried that she might do something to harm herself.
I wonder how she thinks of that time, what words hurt her the most, and all the ways she tried to cope, and what people or stories or ideas or things she needed to know to get through it.
Do you see what I mean? This endless desire to know?
That I would even wonder so often about this particular person’s interior thoughts, a woman I will never know, it is like this will all stories that infect, that lodge their way into the soil of our minds, demanding of us devotion, compassion, obsession, something beyond mere attention.
It is almost like an unending desire to replenish that which can never be filled….
There is something so strange about being a writer. Do you see what I mean?
I think my point in even telling you all this is that I would never wish this life on anyone. Under any circumstance.
While I love being a writer, and respect and find community with my fellow writers to be glorious, there is an undeniable sadness to the vessel that is permanently bewitched by either passion or duty or subservience to some higher knowing that must constantly create meaning from that which the vessel experiences, especially when that meaning is so easily mocked, so likely to never yield profit, and so difficult to even be read or taken seriously as the masses, ever fickle, shift their attention to short-form video and some other newer, shinier technology.
Call it evolution, blame it on the amygdala, but there is something somewhat unnatural about being a storyteller, and this is precisely the fascination that so many people have with our kind.
We are strange.
Odd.
Sacred to some.
An annoyance to others.
Some perceive our introversion (or our extroversion) in ways we do not intend. Some believe us gods and others believe us demons.
To be a creative is to exist in a perpetual state of becoming, of offering, of scrutiny, of judgment. To be a creator is to be naked and to let the world look upon you, to decide your worth, to have its way with you, to take what it can from your heart to preserve its own.
Perhaps there is a more loving way to speak this into being, but I cannot find it.
All I can think of is the mother octopus that sacrifices her life for her children, crucifies herself so that her babies can be born, and how her body sinks to the ocean floor and is eaten by the community that surrounds her, sustaining themselves for yet another night on earth.
Isn’t this all a bit Cullen-eske?
This feeling, for lack of a more sophisticated metaphor, is sort of how Edward Cullen felt about turning Bella Swan in The Twilight Saga’s sophomore novel, New Moon.
While Edward loves his family and takes pride in some aspects of his vampiric life, he would never want to condemn Bella to a life of insatiable and unquenchable desire.
To me, this is so apt to the metaphor of writing and creating of any kind.
I love writing. I love reading. I love that I have an unquenchable desire for endless knowledge and creative expression, but I would never want to make someone else into this, to condemn someone to the way I experience sentience, no matter how lovely and beautiful it so often is.
I would wish those I love free of worry entirely, suspended in a protected state of nurtured peacefulness, a state in which they do not think of themselves as needing to change or become anything other than that which they already are, because that is always what is perfect enough.
I’m so glad that my dad doesn’t read, for example. I love that for him. What a simpler and less fretful existence to not have your every waking thought constantly fixed in a state of perpetual reflection, wondering, and excavation.
The present moment, that elusive poltergeist…
Sometimes it feels as if I’m unable to even be in this specific moment because I’m already thinking of how this scene will be reincarnated within the world of my characters.
I am thinking of how I will reminisce about this moment at a later date, what the world will think of my words, who will identify, and who will condemn, who will see themselves, and who will seek to correct me, to take me somewhere worse, to cut me down, or even — how I in ten years might reflect back on this piece, this time in my life, this season of knowing.
There is a sickness to it, a sickness I’ve come to accept, but one that I am so glad is not contagious. This preoccupation that beguiles the creative life is one that many pretend to have righteously rid themselves of. But I know all of your favorite authors and behind the scenes, they are riddled with the same self-doubt and insecurity that plagues you.
It’s in vogue to be the swan, effortlessly gliding across the crystalline waters, while pedaling feverishly beneath the surface, but the reality is that so many of us are tired, and our swan selves are fleeting, mere performances. That behind the facades of confidence, we are like everyone else, insecure heaps that need constant reassuring that we matter, that we exist, that we are heard, that we are headed someplace worthwhile.
Do not misunderstand me, I beg of you, the life of the mind is beautiful and extraordinary in many ways, and while I am happy for those who can live their creative lives with such ease and without fear — without obsession or anxiety or self-doubt — there are many more of us, who are unable to change these facets of ourselves.
For some of us, there will always be this feeling of deep, inexorable, and exhausting extraction to the creative process.
There was an author who once said, “Every one of my books kills me a little more,” and I felt that so deeply.
There is something so painful and vulnerable about this whole thing. About breaking the axe of your frozen lake and letting the world swim in your turquoise waters.
Beautiful, but painful. Like the mother octopus, who must now watch beyond the veil as her children live the life she was never afforded.
What if you’re perfectly correct just the way you are?
Let me be clear, I wish it wasn’t this way.
I’m not some masochistic, patriarchy-obsessed, all-writers-must-suffer fool. Quite the opposite. I’m a Latinx queer leftist who dreams of love and liberation and peace and bounty for all.
For those reasons, I both resonate with and feel alienated from popular literature on the subject. Take Elizabeth Gilbert’s recollection of this whole thing in Big Magic, a book I love, from an author I adore. A seminal classic.
Her thought, rightfully so, is that it doesn't have to be this way, that you can be a writer or artist and tackle big, scary, deep subjects and still be happy and stable. This I agree with, but the thing that is difficult for me to reconcile is the notion of what could be versus what is.
Like Byron Katie's immortal reflection, Loving What Is, part of me wonders if there's perhaps something even more daring in just accepting your creative suffering as it is and not trying to change it.
There is a world in which I strive to make every aspect of my creative process idyllic and frictionless and without misery, in which I strive to become like Elizabeth Gilbert's ideal (again, who I love), but perhaps there is a wiser world in which I work with myself, accept all of my limitations, including the fact that the process of creation has never been sunshine and rainbows for me and it might never well be.
One of my favorite mind shifts of this decade comes from my best friend, Ayanda. She told me once that she learned to always question the “shoulds” that pop up in our minds.
“I should care less about what others think of me…”
“I should not want this life or that thing…”
“I should be happier when I create…”
“This shouldn’t feel like work since it is my passion…”
“I shouldn’t ever feel unhappy, because I’m living a life many dream of…”
What Ayanda asked in response to these types of internal dialogues that so often plague us, is a profound reframe. She encouraged me to ask, “Whose should is this? Who told me I have to be this specific way? What if I drop the should and accept this aspect of myself?”
What if I accept that I will always be this anxious, that I will always be this strange mix of both deeply happy and irrevocably sad? What if I stop trying to change myself or mold myself or move myself against the currents of my being and instead ride alongside them, accept their choppy waters, and choose to sail despite it all?
What if my natural reactions and ways of being are my body trying to teach me something about myself? What life could I create if I stopped trying to self-optimize and instead accepted that I am who I am and I am unlikely to change? What if I allowed that to be beautiful?
How much more might I produce if I let myself create without constraints? And how much more connected might I become to my own life, if I stopped beating myself up internally for not being perfect? For not being like this person or that person and instead divinely and unconditionally accepting and loving myself exactly as I am?
Now I recognize that all of this is not so black and white. There are definite lines. If your creativity causes you to have suicidal thoughts, perhaps the relationship to your creativity needs to be deeply explored and a more loving process needs to be created in tandem with the support and guidance of a mental health professional.
But if the thing you buck up against is just the unique quirks of your being, your desires, your obsessions, your eccentricities, that are in stark contrast to the “ideal creative life” touted by books and media, what would happen if you stopped trying to change yourself and just embraced yourself fully instead?
What would happen if you just let yourself exist without judgment? If you just put yourself on the page or the canvas exactly as you are and recognize that you are magic, you are human, you are perfectly divinely imperfect on purpose, just like the crooked tree or the strange oblong tortoise.
You aren’t meant to go through this life self-optimizing to death, and perhaps the way to get to your dream life is to realize that you’re already in it. This is your dream life, right now, because it’s the only life you have.
Nobody is coming to save you or whisk you away. You have yourself and your creativity and your friends and your loved ones and your community and your dreams and your amazing life, exactly as it is.
What if that’s the person, the place, and the thing you’ve been searching for all along? What if you allowed yourself to revel in your you-ness completely and with passionate awe? What if you are already enough?
There are things that are amazing and things that completely suck, but this is your life right now, and there’s no making any other. There's no ideal future self, there's no changed version of you, because you are you are you are you, and that is exactly what and how you are supposed to be.
Obviously, all this comes with the caveat that your way of existing is not causing direct harm to any other being or person around you, because if it is, then please, it's time to change and adopt new habits and stop whatever it is that is causing harm to others.
But if your setback is just that you’re weird and peculiar and imperfect and odd and anxious and obsessive, then why not just embrace your inner freak?
Better to be a freak than a boring-ass normie, you dig?
An example that I feel somewhat ashamed to admit…
I, for example, HATE waking up early. I am one of the most productive people I know, and I sleep till noon almost daily.
I typically stay up until four or five a.m. I’m up for the same amount of hours as everyone else and sleeping for the same amount of hours, but for some reason, there is a stigma to being a person who works at night or in the afternoon, instead of the morning.
Capitalism is obsessed with mornings. It's obsessed with self-optimization and tells you that unless you are a good little worker who wakes up at the crack of dawn, then you’re a dastardly piece of shit who will forever fail and be a succubus on the rest of us.
But the thing is, I started achieving so much more and being so much happier when I fully accepted this aspect of myself. Now, I work a job with flexible hours, and I’m able to exist on a schedule that is perfect for me.
I want that for you too. What is the thing about yourself that you can't accept, and how is it holding you back? What if you decided that thing was perfect as it is? How much would your life change?
What if instead of forcing yourself to write or create at the crack of dawn, you instead allowed yourself to intuitively follow what your body is telling you it wants, to write into the wee hours of the night?
What if everywhere could be Paris?
A final reflection.
In college, I had a best friend named Anna. We lived together and read books together and ate mozzarella sticks together and traveled the world by each other’s side.
One day Anna introduced me to a movie and novel called Revolutionary Road.
The story, about a young couple trapped in the conformity of the U.S. in the 1950s, resonated with me deeply.
Both members of the couple, Frank and April, had big dreams for their lives. Like most, they dreamed of who and what they might become in the far-off land of adulthood.
Frank often talked, when they first got together, about how much he dreamed of living in Paris, how it would be there that he could be truly free and live a life he loved and was effortlessly passionate about. The life of the artist, unencumbered, rich and full.
Anna and I were terrified by the novel, because through a series of events, the characters do not ever realize the lives they had once envisioned for themselves, but instead, they become something much more sinister, uninspired burnt-out adults trapped in the suburbs. This outcome was unimaginably horrific for two college students who dreamt of lives of adventure and artistic ambition.
Frank and April become subsumed by their situation and then one another. Years pass, and jobs and babies and the crushing monotony of life wash them far away from their youthful ambitions, and they find themselves on the shores of a future they did not bargain for.
Right there and then, Anna and I made a promise to one another, that from that moment forward, no matter what: Everywhere is Paris.
That we wouldn’t wait until we’d reached our idyllic future selves, our future weights or jobs or countries or whatevers, to allow ourselves the freedom and joy of feeling like we had arrived in the Paris of our own lives.
No matter how shitty the town, no matter how boring the job, we would pretend as if we’d just arrived in Paris and treat the thing like a portal into the life of our dreams.
So many of us do the opposite. We wait for permission to be happy.
We say,
when I lose the weight,
once I’m finally in a relationship,
once I get the job or that raise,
once I finally pay off this debt,
after I move out,
after I move on,
once I finally heal,
after I take this course,
once I finally get that degree,
…then I’ll let myself be happy.
What Anna and I decided — and it is not always easy! — is fuck that.
We are going to be happy now, no matter how broke or indebted we are. No matter how good or bad the circumstances are that we are currently within: Everywhere is Paris.
I leave you with this, my dear ones: You are not a thing to be fixed.
You are weird and strange and anxious and perfect just as you are. Not everything in your life must be something from which to flee. No matter how terrible the cards you’ve been dealt, you have your one and only life, how can you make the best of it? How can you stop changing yourself and try to work with yourself? How can you accept your compulsions and eccentricities as integral and lively parts of your being?
How can you decide, right now, that this place, wherever you are, it is your Paris?
How can you decide, once and for all, to finally — finally — let yourself start living?
I hope you enjoyed this piece and found it worth your time. Please become a paid subscriber so that I can survive the dystopian hellscape of capitalism and keep writing weird funky things for you all.
I love you lots. Thank you for being here. I miss you already. :’)
It took me three attempts to read this. Not because it wasn't interesting, rather because it resonated so strongly that it left me disquieted.
I just wrote my first piece on substance this week in which I far less eloquently noted the same idea--that I have always suspected my creativity was deeply rooted in my "flaws", and getting "fixed" would seal those wells forever. so I stay "broken" because I can't imagine a life in which I don't write.
https://open.substack.com/pub/timduxfield/p/need-ashes-and-alcohol?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=27aj4e
What a nut cake!
I mean this in an exquisitely good way, such a variety of tasty nibbles.
"She encouraged me to ask, “Whose should is this? Who told me I have to be this specific way?"
Yes x 20.