Harmonopoly 21: Please Hold Me Accountable For Telling You About Myself
BY-LINES A-PLENTY! Here’s the places I’ve been published lately:
How Wrestling Saved My Life and Let Me Express My Queerness recently appeared on Catapult. It’s a very raw, personal essay about the last two years of my life and how wrestling gave me something to be happy about in a time when little else was bringing me joy. I’m very proud of it.
Over on The Belladonna, How Dare You Submit To Our Literary Journal is a neat, satirical upwards punch at the many frustrations inherent to the journal submission process. Lots of people like it, and nobody has yelled at me about it yet, so that’s a nice surprise!
Finally on McSweeney’s, A Nervous Breakdown as Captured in a Series of Author Biographies is exactly what it sounds like. Silly, gentle jokes about myself, and my cat. Shout out to James Thurber. Visiting the Thurber House as a kid was how I learned what a humorist was, and that it was a thing I wanted to be.
I HATE READING! I ONLY LOVE SPOKEN WORD! Fine by me, friend. I’m excited to share that I will be hosting Story Club Columbus in August and September! Story Club is a live lit night that is near and dear to my heart. I’ve performed there a few times and I’m thrilled they asked me to fill in as host while super-showrunner Sam Tucker is at a residency (congrats!). Our next show is August 6th at 8pm, and the theme is “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”. We’ve booked three awesome features (Amanda Page, Nicole Roumeliote, and Marylee Williams) and I will be telling a story about my weird summer of dating apps. Pay what you can, everybody’s welcome, and it’s air-conditioned. You have no reason not to join us!
ENOUGH SELF-PROMOTION! EXPLAIN YOUR CRYPTIC HEADLINE! OK, OK, jeeze. I’m fine, by the way! I finally got all my shit moved into my new apartment. We’re settling in great. Thanks for asking.
So over the weekend, a friend of mine gently told me that I suck at promoting myself. Which was a fair comment, because...yes, I totally suck at that. I am terrible at telling people when I am performing, when I am teaching workshops, when I’m about to have something published. All of those things that fans of my work probably want to be aware of, you know?
And yet, I don’t tell people about the things I am doing. I’ve been trying to think about why that is.
First off: I don’t want to be a bother! Everybody gets enough emails and Facebook events and shit. I don’t want to be a part of the signal-to-noise ratio problem. If something seems really really important, I can “ope” my way past my Midwestern politeness and try to attract your attention, but only if it’s like life or death. Like if a baby was stuck on some railroad tracks and the only way to lure them to safety was with a weird, sad essay about how feelings are only explicable through the lens of pop culture, I would feel pressed to let the world know I have such things available. Otherwise, no way!
Another part of it is, well...I have had a bad brain year, y’all. My poor beat-up mind is a forgetful, pain in the ass roommate that I can’t kick out of my body because their name is on the lease. I have been so tired and so sad for so long that the good days I have been having lately are nearly as confusing as the bad ones. Happiness? Self-confidence? In this economy? I often flat-out forget to promote my work because mentally I am simply unstuck in time. Every day I work on recovering from my bout of depression I am pretty much a recently-unfrozen caveman, struggling to understand my current temporal placement via context clues and praying that I do not get killed by the terrifying metal beast I ride to work.
And yet, when my friend asked me why I don’t do a better job promoting myself, I knew the real answer. And it wasn’t either of those things.
It’s because, on some level, I don’t trust that I will succeed. And I do not want you to see me fail. So I’d rather you not know I was doing things at all.
I know this may seem a bit out-of-character for me. Most people don’t realize I don’t have a lot of confidence in myself, because I am very loud and constantly annoyed and years of being a social misfit has taught me how to fake it till I make it in a variety of environments. People also are surprised when I bristle at the idea of vulnerability. Like, I just wrote an essay about how wrestling helped me deal with being gay. Oversharing is the bread and butter of the personal narrative business. How could a person trying to create a career for themselves in doing exactly that lack confidence, or be frightened for people to see them fail?
The truth of it is that I have realized that someday, if I really want to be A-Capital-W Writer, I am going to have to finally bet on myself. I’m going to have to walk away from comfortable but unfulfilling career choices and take some real risks. I’m going to have to increase my grind on stage. I’m going to have to actually send essays out to people who might be willing to publish them. I’m going to have to suck up my social anxiety, toss my business card at whoever will take it, and try to be charming without getting drunk first. I’m going to have to treat my hobby like a job, and assume the money and stability will follow.
I also have to make a plan for what I will do if it doesn’t. I no longer have a spouse, nobody in my support network is in any position to help me out if I bankrupt myself or become homeless, and I live in a city where making a living in the arts feels about as likely as making a living by breeding unicorns. It’s such a scary thing to consider that when I close my eyes and try to think about it I just hear circus music and see a baby elephant waving a banner that says “FAILURE”. It’s weird in here, you guys!
I’m also really good at finding excuses for why I haven’t tried to “make it” yet. In fact, many of them are outlined above! Perhaps in some alternate universe, my year of personal tragedy was a source of fire instead of life-sponging sadness. Somewhere, on Earth B-226, Alternate Harmony just arrived in New York City with the shirt on her back and a head full of dreams and a plan to fake her own death to evade her student loans. Listen! She just asked an annoyed gentleman in a suit how to get to whatever the writing version of Radio City Music Hall is. (The answer of course is the same: practice.)
But I live on this Earth, I have this one life to live, and when it’s over, it's over whether I was happy with it or not. Nothing worth having has ever fallen into my lap. I need to recognize my passivity for what it is: a coping mechanism left over from years of feeling like I didn’t have control over my life, and an easy way to throw blame elsewhere when I take gambles that don’t work out. I am going to have to look at all of the things in my life that have caused me to think of believing in myself as some unpardonable sin, and tell those lesser instincts to kick rocks.
All of this is a long winded way to say: if you are my friend, or a fan, or a general well-wisher that just wants to see an end to all of this self-flagellation in your inbox: hold me accountable. Yell at me when I don’t share my work! Demand to know why you only found out I was in McSweeneys because of clever algorithms! When this email doesn’t come out on Monday, be like ‘hey bitch, where is your newsletter, we are dying for those overwrought jokes and wrestling puns!’.
I need to know you’re out there now because someday, I am going to need you to keep following me when I take the leap into making this all into something permanent and real. So from here on in, if you’re following me or my work, I am going to assume you want to hear from me about it. And I am going to do my best to tell you about it! Be patient with me and the reward will be...well, more of this shit, probably. Hopefully you’re into that.
And if that isn’t your jam, just follow me on Instagram. It’s all fluff and cat photos. You’ll love it over there.