Please please please please please please please please please please pleeeeaase like me

It’s not a secret that I’ve struggled with this blog. I’ve given up on it an embarrassing amount of times, which I’ve addressed again and again, and tried to joke about, and tried to insist even more times that each time would be the last time that I’d try, but I always come back. Something always pulls me back, pathetically. It’s probably because I am a writer, and because of that I crave attention, and I crave people looking at me and seeing the stupid fragile wet sloppy narcissistic insides of my brain even if I worry about what they might say about them. Even though I write from 9 to 5 for the job that pays my rent, which has been exhausting me for nearly a year and kept me from feeling motivated to get back to writing for myself and not just for money, it’s not the same as writing that is truly mine. Writing that isn’t censored by edits and SEO. Writing that is probably worse, but is still me.

Still, I’ve always kind of hated this blog. I hate the writing that I’ve done on it, and if I don’t hate the writing initially, I come to hate it over time. I’ve hated the persona that I’ve felt I need to put up in order to be someone who has a Substack. When I started it up again last year, I tried doing a mix of culture writing and personal essay writing, and I hated doing both, and that’s part of why I abandoned the blog yet again. My heart was never in any of it, it made me feel miserable and even gross to do. I became too obsessed with getting likes because I believed I was doing work that should be getting a response from people. I’ve also always felt that I become someone else when I come back to this blog, someone who I don’t necessarily like.

I did The Artist’s Way from late winter until mid-spring. Sure, whatever, another writer in crisis who came groveling like a dog to Julia Cameron and her Morning Pages. But I’ve been struggling with my creative identity since the fire that destroyed my apartment and I’ve needed to do something about it. I’ve lost almost complete interest in reviewing movies and being a culture writer, and it’s forced me into this career purgatory where I want to write and be a creative person again but I don’t know in what way or what about. For years, I thought my path forward was writing creatively about film and pop culture, and simply doing this until I died, but the trauma I experienced from the fire fundamentally altered the way I feel about pop culture and how I think about it and respond to it. At this point, I’ve given up believing that it’s ever going to be the same again. In a conversation I still think about, my closest friend once said to me something along the lines of “You’re desperate to get your writing back to the way it was, but after going through what you went through, it’s never going to be the same again. It’s going to be different, but that’s not a bad thing.”

It also hasn’t helped that since last September, I’ve been fully writing as my day job. Then I was laid off back in May, and while I was incredibly lucky to be able to move on to something else immediately, it’s basically more of the same, even though it’s quite a bit better. But for the past nine months, I’ve been writing from morning until afternoon, and despite the fact that I’d literally always wanted a staff position in publishing, I underestimated just how fucking exhausting writing as my legit job could be. At the end of my work days, and even on the weekends, the last thing I want to do is keep writing. I just want to put on The Real Housewives of Rhode Island and listen to Alicia talk about how much she loves her crackas.

So a few months ago, I tried to get out of this funk by starting my Artist’s Way journey. To be clear, I have fully bucked Julia Cameron’s insistence that I would come to love the Morning Pages. I hate the Morning Pages, I always hated them, and I ended the course hating them. It’s probably because I have never liked journaling or keeping a diary, which is what the Morning Pages basically are. I understand the purpose, and I should like doing them, but I hate writing by hand, because I get cramps in my fingers, and it frustrates me that my brain works faster than my fingers can, manifesting ideas that are just too insistent on getting to the page. I also just don’t like writing every single day when I already spend all day writing. The Morning Pages never stopped being a chore for me, and I mostly did them in the evenings and afternoons because waking up early in the morning when I don’t really have to is something I’m just not going to do. I signed the little agreement at the end of the book that I’d continue to do Morning Pages for three months but I didn’t, even though I earnestly thought that there was a small chance that maybe I would. Once The Artist’s Way was behind me, I happily said goodbye to the Morning Pages. I was free. I’m sorry Julia.

That being said, working on The Artist’s Way was, as everyone says it is, very helpful. It forced me to think about where my insecurities and blocks with writing and creativity have been coming from, even though writing has been something that comes easy to me and I’ve been praised for my entire life. Sorry if that’s unnecessarily boastful, but I literally came out of the womb knowing how to string sentences together — as soon as essays became integral to my school curriculum, the uniting sentiment from all my teachers was “She’s the most disruptive, annoying, ridiculous child, but damn that little bitch can write.” I’ve never been insecure about whether or not I can write, I know I can write (even though I think this essay is pretty badly written, but I’m truly just vomiting out my thoughts right now). This assurance in my abilities has been integral in guiding me through my career. I once said to a prospective employer who ultimately rejected me in the final round of interviews that my greatest asset is not that I’m a good writer, but that I’m confident in my writing, because it makes me fearless. I had also prepared to recite this line in a notes app that I was eyeing on my laptop screen for the entire Zoom interview. Maybe they thought it sounded too perfect. Maybe they knew.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really have any friends. I had kids who managed to tolerate me. Not to be like “oh woe is me boo hoo hoo” because it’s true and it’s part of the point I’m going to make. Because I had no friends, I was desperate to be liked. I did things and behaved in ways that I fundamentally knew would make people detest me. I bothered my seat mates, talked in their ears about various kid-aged inanities, demanded attention that they were loath to give me. I was the kid in all my classes every year throughout the entirety of grade school who ended up with their desk in the corner or out in the hall at least once a week. When my teachers tried to strategically place me next to shy children who didn’t like to talk, it didn’t matter. I’d keep talking to them even if they didn’t respond to me. I needed to do something, anything, to get them to be my friends.

Doing The Artist’s Way made me think about my struggles not with writing, but with creativity. And with being myself. The artists and the art I admire are very different from me and the art that I create. My new therapist pointed this out to me the other week. I play things safe, where people I admire like Sarah Sherman or Ivy Wolk or David Lynch live(d) to disrupt, disturb, and upset. I started thinking back to that kid who wanted so badly to be liked because no one did, because even if she was awful in her efforts to get attention, she remained wholly herself. She was desperate to be loved but not at the expense of who she was. She did things without fear of being judged, she was weird in a way that was deeply isolating to other people and kept at it even when she was taunted and picked on. It’s ironic how little that bullying affected me back then, because that judgment affects me now. As an adult, the most terrifying thing to me is the idea of being disliked.

When I reached junior high, I finally made friends. And I made friends quickly. And I didn’t do it by making myself smaller, making myself easy to digest — instead, I met girls who were just like me. Strange, off-putting, annoying, very much themselves, and often very alienating towards others as a result. Yet now, I look at myself and I realize that the only time I feel fully myself is when I’m with my boyfriend. No one else sees this, unless I’m drunk, because alcohol not only gives me the confidence to be ok with being more who I am, it gives me an excuse to act that way. “She’s being weird, she’s just drunk.” Otherwise, I muzzle myself. I behave. I perform the personality I think the world wants me to have, but deep down it feels like I’m struggling to be a real person. It took me doing The Artist’s Way to realize that somewhere along the way between tweendom and 31, I sanded off the rough corners of my personality. I think this is because, once I knew how it felt to be liked, I wanted to make sure that I never let it go.

I guess where I’m at now, is understanding what my creative weakness is, what is holding me back, what has always made this Substack blog a failure: needing everyone to like me, needing to be what I believe everyone wants me to be, needing everyone to adore what I do and not criticize it or be offended by it, and somehow learning how to claw back that part of myself that demanded to be liked for who I was, not who I thought people wanted, and who felt no shame if the way I presented myself to others generated scorn or contempt. I used to think that my biggest problem in my writing and creativity was not having any ideas at all, that this was the reason for abandoning fiction writing and instead retreating to the safety of writing about other peoples’ work (Julia Cameron points out at one point in The Artist’s Way that critics are often failed creatives, and while I don’t think that is necessarily always true, I don’t think it’s always untrue).

But really, my problem is feeling too afraid to put any original ideas out into the world at all for fear of failing, being humiliated, being seen as cringe and weird, and maybe the worst thing a woman can be: annoying. Spend even a day on X the everything app and you come to understand that a woman who is annoying is 100x more worthy of death than a man who rapes. For the most formative years of my life, I was told I was annoying, and now all that I have done with my adult life is do everything I can to never be annoying again. This has, ultimately, been to my overwhelming detriment, both in my life and in my writing. The people whose work I admire the most in the world are fucking annoying, and it’s awesome. Still, at the end of the day, as artists and writers, we are all trying to get people to like us even if the art we create and the persona we put on may be difficult to like. Our work can and should be for us, but it is also in service of an audience. All performance is for the sake of an audience, but I also think it shouldn’t be at the expense of ourselves.