#6. Resolutions (Redux)

ADDITIONAL TOPICS: The Sopranos, transitional objects, Cartoon Network, perfectionism, bad habits and attempts to rectify them

Three days after Christmas, I decided to start rewatching The Sopranos. This decision — to tool up HBO Max and put on the pilot — felt spontaneous and offhand in the moment, but I now see there was a certain inevitability to it. This is my fourth winter in Chicago, and if I stick around through the end of season 6B, it’ll be the third I’ve spent with the show. I totally concede that there are many things I ought to watch: Gabe’s been telling me since 2019 that I’d love Deadwood and my mom keeps pushing The Bear; I’ve never made it all the way through Mad Men or The Wire; insofar as I fancy myself as having my finger on the pulse of my generational zeitgeist, the fact that I’ve never seen a single minute of Game of Thrones feels like something akin to malpractice or fraudulence.

I never clung to a stuffed animal or a blanket as a kid, and I distinctly remember having a certain disdain for those who did. I was an asshole of a six-year-old, chronically frustrated at the friends and peers who preferred playing soccer to make-believe, who rejected my suggestions of Arthur and Magic School Bus in favor of Power Rangers and Dexter’s Lab, who even then already had the inchoate allegiances to sports teams they’d inherited from their fathers or older brothers. I had no older brother; my own father preferred surfing and fishing to watching football. The defense mechanisms I’d spend my late twenties attempting to reverse-engineer and dismantle via psychoanalysis were in hindsight already intact by kindergarten, and so I sublimated my childhood feelings of estrangement into contempt on the grounds of what I chose to see as the primary variable in my alienation, which was not masculinity but intelligence. So it was for me with those peers who had nightmares in the absence of their dirty teddy bears or stuffed Dalmatians: I didn’t know the word “arbitrary” yet, but that’s what I understood their attachments to be; I sympathized with the attachments’ operative logic but derided the attached party’s inability to find affective respite in anything other than the most impersonally obvious.

But what is The Sopranos if not my own security blanket? I could defend my decision to rewatch the series by rehearsing all the things that have been said over the last quarter-century about its brilliance, but the truth is that in my case, the show is fungible in the function it serves. The paragraphs you’re reading could just as easily be about one of six other compulsions, but in light of the fact some of you are likely my parents’ friends or neighbors, I figured this was a more innocuous choice. (I dream of a day when I’m famous or well-regarded enough as a writer to justify writing an essay about my porn consumption habits as a trenchant intellectual exercise, but that day is not yet here.)

I started writing my Substack two years ago for the same reason I’m rewatching The Sopranos. It was the third day of 2022, and I vaguely understood myself to be on the precipice of depression. That’s always the case this time of year, but in this particular historical case it was compounded by a situational and much more acute waywardness. I was four months into my Ph.D., and it would be another fourteen before I finally found enough confidence in my methodological and intellectual fortitude to (i.) justify my presence in academia and (ii.) stop seeking refuge in a complacency that only made the feelings of insolence worse. Foster had just sold to Overlook, but that only made every worst-case-scenario daydream of humiliation or (worse) invisibility as a writer feel another step closer to reality. I was single and very lonely, two facts that I attributed to geography, if only as a handy metaphor for the same abstract feelings of estrangement I’d endured while watching my friends watch Ed, Edd, and Eddy. I’d been proud of myself for not ending up in New York after college like virtually everyone else, but this was easier against the Instagrammable novelty of Hong Kong, where loneliness lent itself to a certain lyricism. There was a miserable banality to my isolation in Chicago that I took as inextricable from Chicago itself; forever reminded that I wouldn’t be able to throw a rock in Manhattan (or many parts of Brooklyn) without hitting at the very least an acquaintance, the “Middle West… seemed like the ragged edge of the universe”¹, and it was shitty.

So I told myself I’d make myself write. I’d always privately nurtured the insufferably elitist conviction that writers are born and not made, but this conviction was really just a corollary to a deeper, narcissistic belief in my own specialness. Twenty-seven months of thrice-weekly psychoanalysis has driven home the point that no one is really born anything, but still, as I wrote in that first post two years ago, I don’t remember a time when putting words on a page hasn’t “brought me an almost somatic pleasure” that’s “better than basically any drug.” It was the closest thing I had to masturbation before I discovered masturbation, not only in the blissful fugue of it — which, let’s be real, doesn’t hold a candle to orgasm — but in the escapism it afforded. My happiest days are the days I spend writing, not least because doing so usually inculcates a certain revved-up euphoria that makes me then want to go for a long run as well. Keeping this Substack, I told myself, would force me to write, which in turn would complement the twenty milligrams of Trintellix and ninety minutes in front of the SAD lamp that would sustain me until April.

The problem is that I’m a perfectionist. I always hated this word, which struck me as a convenient euphemism for laziness, and as a lifelong cutter of corners, I certainly never identified with it. Even here, I’m using it as shorthand for something a little more nuanced, which has very little to do with my own unsparing standards of performance and everything to do with you. By you, I mean my imagined audience, but it’s always a thousand times more potent when the audience in question is comprised of figures of authority, real or imagined: my agents, my editors, my professors, my advisor. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love writing, but I also don’t remember a time when my self-esteem — my self-image on whole, actually — wasn’t fully conditioned upon the validation I received from these pseudo-parents: yeah, I learned as a kid that I loved to write, but if I hadn’t been told soon thereafter that I was good at it, I very gravely doubt you’d be sitting here reading my indulgent meditations about my relationship with writing. I almost certainly wouldn’t have written a novel.

The problem is that the pursuit of validation is antithetical to joy. The only reason I was capable of writing six hundred pages of Foster between the summer of 2018 and the fall of 2020 is because I was keenly aware of the possibility that they were total garbage. What’s relevant here wasn’t their measurable quality but the Schrödingerian metaphysics of it: I wrote the first two-thirds of the book essentially in isolation² before finding the gumption to send it to my now-agents, and I genuinely believe that if I’d done so sooner, a consequent paralysis on my part might have kept me from ever finishing it. That’s the irony: I was competent enough as a writer to turn a source of organic pleasure into a vocation, but in doing so — in submitting my writing to the scrutiny of those with the power to determine I’m talentless — I largely denatured it of the very thing that impelled me to do so in the first place. I’ve replaced the heroin of writing with the weak methadone of praise; it’s my desperate fear of being denied the latter that inhibits me from throwing myself into the former.

That’s why I very quickly betrayed my commitment in January of 2022 to writing here every week. What I’d initially envisioned as a space for offhanded extemporaneous musings very quickly mutated into yet another obligation to prove my self-worth; that’s why the posts I wrote that winter ended up being five-thousand-word impersonations of David Foster Wallace, never mind that I’m fairly certain no one bothered reading them start to finish.

This is also why I spent the latter half of 2023 vaguely convinced that Foster had been a fluke and that I’d never be able to write another novel. I’ve always coped with my neuroticism by rewiring it as listlessness, and it was with this neutered ennui that I found myself staring at a short list of ideas for a second book, each of them two-dimensional and utterly impenetrable. They were decent ideas in the abstract, I think, but they’d been rendered sterile by the very soil from which they’d grown: my feelings of obligation to surpass Foster in breadth and ambition and autobiographical remove. I’d laugh at the triteness of the idea of the Great American Novel if it wasn’t the very thing I sought to produce.

God bless my agents, though, who psychoemotionally very much have my number. If it’s my fear of authority figures’ judgment that arrests my cognitive and creative productivity, it’s the more tangible scepter of their disappointment that ultimately galvanizes me into getting over my stasis. I owed them pages of my Next Thing or something that would evolve into it, and while it sucked to have COVID for a second time in October and while I’m still surprised by the magnitude of my grief at my grandfather’s sudden death on Halloween, I couldn’t resist a certain gratitude for the excuses they afforded my delinquency. It was my gradual shame at this selfishness — and a very sympathetic but very blunt email from the two aforementioned authority figures right before Thanksgiving — that ultimately forced me back to the Microsoft Word document I’d neglected since July, when I’d begun to write a short story intended solely to help clarify my lingering grim fascinations around a failed relationship.

When I finally sent them that file last week, what had begun as the ambivalent preamble to a ten-page short story had (very predictably) metastasized into thirty pages of something much longer. I’d produced the final third of those pages over the seventy-two hours before I sent that email, and I’d been delighted to realize how nice it had felt — the very act of writing, I mean, not just the satisfaction at finally sending something I’d promised its recipients three months prior. I’m going to keep going, I think. The project’s gestational narrative doesn’t have the sociological amplitude of the ideas I’d dumbly pawed at last summer or fall, but (i.) the antisocial denizens of Goodreads have forced me to accept that most readers care more about character and dialogue than sociology and (ii.) it’s better than simply writing nothing.

So that’s why I’m here today, I guess: to cup my hand around the little flame of satisfaction I’d felt writing last week in order to shelter it from the wind; to continue lubricating the relevant gears; whatever. Pick your metaphor. I started writing these paragraphs two or three hours ago, while sitting in the back of the undergrad course I’m TAing for this winter, and I’m feeling sunnier as a result. (My parents got me a Peloton subscription for my birthday, and today for the first time in half a decade I exercised in the morning rather than the afternoon, but I’m choosing to credit the writing.) I’m certain I’ll betray this commitment by February, but I am going to make a point to come back here with a little more regularity even when I have nothing meaningful to say, at the expense of the thematic organizing structures³ that otherwise allow me to justify these posts as essays. (Believe it or not, I actually did set out this morning to write about The Sopranos. Oh well/stay tuned.)

1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

2. There were very important exceptions — Steve, Ruth, Nate, et al. — but in hindsight I metabolized their responses as the diplomatic reactions of friends very much aware of how fragile and sensitive I am. Their specific points of feedback were invaluable and evident throughout the final book, but their more general encouragement I refused to take as incontrovertible fact.

3. I could have just said “topic” instead of “thematic organizing structure,” but my hunch is that no one’s gonna read this far anyway.