You will find
this hard to believe if you don’t know me, but easy to believe if you do: I
hoped to start off 2018 posting from the get-go, and posting more regularly, as
in more often.
What went wrong?
Well might you
ask.
I have been hard
at work finishing a novel that I started eight or nine years ago. I had to take
break to write other things as well as teach a few courses and read some other
manuscripts in one editorial capacity or another, all within the framework of
doing more work for less pay.
The year 2018
seems neither a good year nor a bad year, just another year.
This notion is
neither grim nor celebratory. This is another year we need to get through, like
every year preceding it and every year to come.
Granted we don’t
do something like die.
I’ve explained
elsewhere that around the time I reached sixty, I gave myself points for still
being around. People who knew me when I was considerably younger would not have
bet on that possibility. But I made it, out of sheer luck, or stubbornness. Having survived this long is one of the few
accomplishments I can claim without some awkward qualification.
“Wow, Rich, you
made it to sixty-two. How did you do that?”
“By not dying.”
Life should
always be so easy.
Already this
year, the list of folks who won’t make it to the year 2019 is pretty long, and
getting longer. Folks I’ve known personally. Folks I’ve known by reputation.
The one thing you never get used to about living is that it never gets easier
to look around at all the people who are dying before you.
One advantage to
being sixty-two (going on sixty-three) is that you no longer have to imagine
what you’re going to do before you get to the age of sixty-two; you’ve already
done it. That can relieve you of a lot of worries.
Late at night, I
find myself thinking something or saying something, then I stop and ask, “Is
that really me? Is this who I really am?” Maybe it’s a symptom of dementia, but
I doubt it. I just find it hard to believe that I’m the person that I have
become – not because I didn’t think I would, but because everyone else thought
I was going to become someone else, some other person; that I would gain some
inner wisdom or lose some critical flaw they saw in me. Instead, they got this.
I’ve tried to
write about “Imposter Syndrome” before. Maybe I did. I don’t remember and at
the moment don’t much care. It’s common to writers, artists, musicians,
creative people in general, and anyone who aspires to one of those positions to
which the said individual ascribes a great deal of respect and reverence.
Somehow, you assume that the status you aspire to is one must be born to; it’s
all destiny and DNA – you cannot “become” a writer, a composer, painter, a
physicist, a world leader. Therefore, if you try to become such a person, you’re
really an imposter. An imposter, along with other things, is a person who lives
in dread of being discovered an imposter.
Whenever it was I
was going to write about Imposter Syndrome, I was going to say that a person,
if or she lives long enough, wakes up one morning (or whenever it is one wakes
up) and discovers he or she is not an imposter. You may not be who you aspired
to be, but you are who you are and no one else. For better or worse.
Many of us have
had to take on jobs that we needed to
take – to make a living. We also may have taken the jobs we were convinced, by
others, we needed to do – again, maybe to make a living, or because others, or
ourselves, we didn’t think we had what it took to be the person we wanted to
be. It may not make much difference why. We took jobs we were expected to have or had to have.
And in this
country, in this world, a person is the job. You’re not a poet who washes
dishes, you’re a dishwasher. You’re not a guitarist who paints houses, you’re a
housepainter. That’s how you do business in the country whose business is
business. At best, you’re a dishwasher who writes poetry, or a housepainter who
plays guitar. But … you are the job.
I was a
Production Assistant (I clipped tearsheets for an ad agency). I was a Mailing
Machine Operator. I was a film inspector. I was a Cold Type Compositor (whatever that is). I was a Makeup Desk editor. I
was a Copy Editor. I was a Communist for the FBI …
No. Scratch that last
one.
Actually, no. I
wasn’t any of those things. Scratch all of them.
I was an
imposter.
An imposter
whenever I did anything but write, or
teach, or fiddle in one way or another with the texts of others. I was even an
imposter when I tried to be a scholar of a certain sort I imagined I should be,
and could be, if given the chance.
All the times I
thought I was not being an imposter,
I was.
All the times I
thought I was being an imposter, I was being who I really was.
No wonder it took
me sixty-two years to stop spinning around. I was going in through the “Out”
door, looking through the wrong end of the telescope, taking the right train in
the wrong direction, from the wrong station.
It’s always been
thus for me.
Do I repeat
myself? Then I repeat myself. I repeat multitudes.
Something that
does change, if you’re lucky, are your dreams. Not your aspiration-dreams, your
what-you-do-when-you-sleep dreams.
For years my
dreams always took me off course – in the dream I needed to get to Place A, and
by the end of the dream I was riding past Place Z with little hope of returning.
Now, my dreams leave me off somewhere, somewhere uncertain, but wherever it is,
it’s where I seem I’m supposed to be.
More about this
later. You’d think I was getting paid by the word to write all this. But after
concentrating so deeply on that novel, I just needed to let my brain run off
without a leash, before the year gets any older …
