Monthly Archives: January 2016

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On having no hustle

Several major players in my life have recently pointed out that I lack hustle. They say that I don’t apply to enough things. I don’t ingratiate myself with powerful people. I don’t ask my former writing professors to recommend me for fellowships and residencies. I don’t dress like a ham sandwich and hang out on the street corner, proselytizing about ham sandwiches. I just don’t have the temperament for it. Which is not to say that I haven’t defied my own nature at times and attempted to hustle. I’ve sent some embarrassing emails over the years. These bids for love and attention trill with false modesty and labored charm. I always feel far more sympathetic to the poor souls on the receiving end of these needy emails than I do to myself, the sender.

We’re told that everyone hates the hustle, but you just have to suck up your pride and crippling social anxiety and do it or you’ll never get anywhere. You have to play the game, fake it til you make it, network, ask for help, never give up, never surrender. But I’m not sure hustle is a quality I want to have. Other people impress me when they aggressively go after what they want. I don’t devalue their hustle (unless they’re Republicans). And I’m not naïve enough to believe that successful careers just happen organically, without cocktail parties and emails. But why do I need to be successful in the first place? I think my real life’s ambition is something more in line with being an anonymous contemplative than sharing a billboard with Jeffrey Eugenides.

Which brings me back to my perennial dream of working as a long-distance truck driver. A person has to make money somehow, and I love to drive. I love to think about things through a wide window. And you can only go so fast behind the wheel. There’s always a speed limit. I find that fact really comforting, especially coming from the literary field where there’s no cap on how smart or talented or prolific you’re supposed to be. Even if you’re happily driving your beat-up Subaru 35 miles an hour through a school zone, you imagine that someone else is driving 95 miles an hour, with the cops chasing him, jumping drawbridges and shit, and your experience is ruined. As a professional truck driver I can drive 65 miles an hour all day long, receive a consistent paycheck, eat snacks from my lap, and have total freedom to meditate quietly on life while an unobtrusive radio bolsters my thoughts with an 80s soundtrack.

I can still write short stories at truck stops. I can still read books if they’re on tape. But no one will be able to accuse me of not having hustle. “In this business,” I’ll say, “hustle kills.”

And just like that I’m a mommy blogger

At the age of 35, a woman has to answer some tough questions. Is boxed mac & cheese an essential food group? Yes. Does infinite time remain to incubate a human being in one’s uterus? No.

Temporal Anxiety was supposed to drive me to publish several brilliant and precocious novels by the time I turned 30, but instead it just hovered around my desk year after year, reminding me that I was a failure. Writing books takes serious time, and conceiving a baby takes an instant. It’s no wonder that Temporal Anxiety is so much more effective in getting women pregnant than in getting them published.

Last fall I became furious with the male psychiatrist I was seeing when I came to him with morning sickness, mood disorder flaring, looking for medication advice so I wouldn’t give birth to an artichoke. “Are you happy to be pregnant?” he said. “Because you don’t sound happy to be pregnant.” Just because he couldn’t hear “the angel of the house,” he wanted to reduce my first-trimester mental state to some binary notion of happy mom/sad mom, and this made me an angry mom indeed. I soon found another doctor, a woman who recognized my neurochemical needs, who didn’t prescribe feelings, and who didn’t try to see my inner world in terms of black and white.

Most women I know are ambivalent about having kids. I was ambivalent about having kids. I might spawn a dozen babies who grow up to be magnanimous world leaders and still be ambivalent about having kids. It mystifies me how anyone can plunge headfirst into parenthood without having a full-blown psychological crisis. Birthing centers should have mental wards attached. Because this transformation from person to mother-person is hard and often paradoxical. You’re happy, and also sad. You feel gain, and also loss. You’re elated, and also emetic (I spent New Year’s Eve toasting the toilet water with my stomach bile). You want to have a child, but you also resent that you weren’t allowed to wait until age 80 to do it. Thanks a lot, bod.

But also, non-sarcastically, thanks a lot, bod.

Now that the ultimate biological decision has been made, I can resume racing against the clock with my creative projects. In six months I’ll probably have to put my pen down for a little while (is a couple days realistic?) in order to cater to a helpless baby, so I’d better knock out some grownup fiction in the meantime. I wonder if the prevalence of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll peak in the work of female writers just before they give birth. I actually suspect this happens postpartum. If there’s one thing I don’t anticipate motherhood making me, it’s soft. I’ll probably come home from the hospital and immediately start writing gritty crime fiction about homicidal babies.

I’m also comforted by the fact that I’m entering motherhood with my innate selfishness still entirely intact. I’m already hatching ways I can use this child to advance my business ventures. Thanks to having a photographer father, the kid will be the most photographed kid in America. And thanks to having a writer mom, the kid will be the most photographed barn in America. And Dad will stage-dad the hell out of the kid while Mom will Anne-Lamott the shit out of the kid and the kid will just have to put up with it until he’s old enough to move in with Grandma, and everyone will be…yes, I think, happy.