The other day, I looked in the mirror and said, What would happen if you became the opposite of what you are? I tried it, and I could see I was still rubbish at it.
What has changed is the way I look back. In the past, feeling a sense of failure about a relationship, I’d get that elevator dropping panic in my stomach, and then I’d quickly think there was all the time in the world to become something else. There isn't that sense of time now.
Perhaps the truth is I didn't care enough to change. I didn't want to do the work. I wanted to learn to write. Can you do both? How would I know?
I remember reading a piece about intense female friendships by the novelist Elisa Albert, a brilliant, klutzy and tender meditation, published in Salon in 2012. “Where is my girl?” she writes. “The one with whom I can just be quiet and un-self-conscious? . . . I used to be terrified of being a lesbian. The fierce homophobia in my family, the intensity of relation I always want with other women. The way I yearn for them, want to study them and be physically close to them and memorize them and learn from them and emulate them and show myself to them. Just be very, very near to them. Wanting, at the very least, to wrap myself around particular women, touch them. The comfort I’d find there. Wanting to kiss particular women. An acquaintance whose mouth is so transfixing I’d like to spend a few days alone with her, exploring it.”
I love the sense from reading Albert there is no way out of this, and it’s bigger than personal friendships for women like me, which may be all women. When I meet a mean girl, I want to lay down and die—for her or just die in general—because I am the opposite of cool.
I remember reading Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be (2010), about a friendship between the narrator, a writer in her 30s, and a woman her age, a painter. Early on, the narrator, “Sheila” is falling into a passionate friendship with the painter “Margaux,” and she begins to think about the nature of female friendship: “Trust had to be won from ground zero at every encounter. That’s the reason you always see women being so effusive with each other—crying out shrilly upon recognizing each other in the street. Women always have to confirm with each other, even after so many years: We are still all right. But in the exaggeration of their effusiveness, you know that things are not all right between them, and that they never will be. A woman can’t find rest or take up home in the heart of another woman—not permanently. It’s just not a safe place to land. I knew the heart of a woman could be the landing ground for a man, but for a woman to try to land in another woman’s heart? That would be like landing on something wobbly, without form . . ..”
If women are “wobbly” and “without form” because we have lived the way people live who are told what they are by others and the things they are told are lies, if we are unsafe as places to land for this reason, might we become something else if we stripped off all our clothes? Heti’s “Sheila” character wonders about this, too. “Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on,” she writes, “and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human.”
If women are unsafe because we are liars, might we become something else if we stripped off all our clothes, I ask again? “Sheila” would like to think so, but I have no idea. I’m a difficult person, so around me there is no experimental control. I’m not overstating. Please don’t tell me otherwise. You don’t know me. I will find a fight when there is no fight. My favorite phrase in the English language is, “I don’t think so.” I don’t know when to leave when it’s time to leave. I don’t take social cues. My mother was married to my sister. I could never get into the thing they had together. My mother was beautiful. My sister was beautiful. As a kid I was fat. I’m selfish. I always want to do my own work more than I want to ease the lives of other people.
I’m difficult for men as well as for women, but men are pushovers. They don’t even see clearly what you look like. A man walks into a bar I like the look of, and he sees in my face a place to land. I had a friend who wanted to know why men liked me. I said, “They can see, in a second, I like them back, if I do. I’m not suspicious. They’re not going to fail if they come close.” That is a sentence that has never in my life described my friendships with women.
Today, I’m happy. By happy, I mean I’m in the fuzz ball of individual happiness that has a life of its own. In the fuzz ball of individual happiness, you watch a bee on a rose, inside an awareness that right over there, close enough for you to see, ignorant armies are clashing by night. In the fuzz ball of individual happiness, you get turned on watching a Buñuel movie while women are reminded every day that the world doesn’t want them to have rights.
I love writing on deadline. My stack is one day on and four days off. Basically, I’m still writing for the Village Voice. The other day, a stranger gave us perennial plants, and now we are digging holes, and wherever we place a new shrub or clump of ornamental grass the older plants perk up. Last week, before driving to the city, Richard and I cut each other's hair. I have been cutting his hair for 18 years. That is the equivalent of walking from London to Inverness.
I started working as a cater-waiter in 1999, at age 53. I thought I would quit catering once I stabilized my life. I didn’t stabilize my life, and I didn’t quit catering. Working in a team is what I liked best. It’s good exercise, too. Most people in catering are thin. Many are actors and models, so they have to be. On jobs, you burn calories, hauling heavy tables and ice, walking miles carrying platters and plates. During the breakdown of a big party, thousands of glasses have to be slopped and placed in lugs, which grow heavier with every champagne flute and wine tulip added. Catering isn't like serving tables in a restaurant. It's closer to building a circus environment for each event and then tearing it down.
Sometimes, I’d find myself serving people I knew. Invariably, they’d pretend they didn’t see me. I thought it was because to them I represented failure and they were embarrassed for me. I thought this until I told Richard a story about serving at a gala for PEN, the writers’ organization I belong to, and awkwardly running into dozens of people I knew. He said, “You didn’t represent failure. You represented confusion. Most people would pick a side. Either be a writer and hang out with the writers, if you can, or, if you can’t, then leave the place where the writers are and make common cause with the workers and only the workers. Laugh about the guests and not care about anything else while you’re on the job. You were a fork in the wrong place at the table. People didn’t know how to relate to you. That’s why you made them uncomfortable. You have no understanding of boundaries.”
When he said this, I thought he was right, and it struck me the secret of a mistake is in the ways it is also not a mistake. In catering, there are boundaries, and even if you don’t always observe them, they are there, and it’s comforting to perform an assigned role. Similarly, I can embrace a very short-term relationship. If you are going to collapse on the street, do it in front of me. I will not leave you. I will talk to you kindly and try to make you comfortable. I will call for medical help, and I will stay with you, continuing to be reassuring, until you are in someone else’s competent hands.
Have you ever thought you lived in a place when you were only passing through? Or thought you were a visitor in the place where you lived? Sometimes, in the garden of forking paths, you move past the possibility of return, and it becomes interesting.
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Biz
Above all, a huge thanks to those of you who support the stack with a paid subscription. This week, inside the mysteries of who decides? and what does it mean?, Everything is Personal was ranked “#20 and rising” in the Literature Leaderboard. I suspect this has something to do with you, supporters.
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Every Twenty Minutes preview of this Friday’s post on how became a cyborg:
In 1999, Andy Clark published Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence. I invited him to give a talk at the science center where I was working. He gave a lively performance in the center’s film theatre, standing at a lectern against a white screen that rose six stories high. He looked tiny and distant at the bottom, as if floating in space, which seemed fitting for the Kubrick moment he conjured. He said humans, all by themselves, were born cyborgs in their unique ability to enter into deep relationships with the objects around them. To quote Clark—to form intimate relationships with “non biological constructs, props, and aids.” He was talking about prosthetics and the way the human mind can extend itself through the technologies it invents or picks up in the natural world. It didn’t occur to me back then, as it does now, that my insulin pump was a perfect example of the intimate and necessary relationship he was talking about. To read and subscribe, click here: richardtoon1.substack.com/p/complications
Your writing never disappoints. I'm a nurse/artist (not caterer) so I understand the dichotomy. I was resentful of having to work as an RN to support my art but now see that it has provided lots of subject matter with "something to say" as many artists lack.
Daaaaaang I love this, for both the content and the construction of it.