Abnormal Service
Actually, I'd say my biggest challenge is that I can be too much of a perfectionist...
Hello, friends and subcribers. First off, I want to thank you for your patience while I sort out a more regular schedule for this Substack. There have been some life explosions, and I’m currently drowning under an immense load of work-I-can’t-talk-about.
That makes the work I’ve a new writer’s room gig which is going gangbusters and eating up my evenings; the daytimes are spent working on other developments projects I owe, a lot of material around the book, and writing essays and columns for this blog. Loads of them, in fact. But somehow, in between typing them down and hitting publish, I’ve been-
….choking up.
Yes, I’ve got an inhuman amount of work to do, and yes, that’s a small part of why I’ve not been posting, but it’s not the main issue. The main issue is that somehow, there’s always a reason not to publish until it’s perfect. And somehow it never seems to be exactly, one hundred percent perfect. Because perfect is such a personal metric, isn’t it? There are days when ‘perfect’ means ‘a piece of work that matters’. And there are days when it just means ‘nobody is going to try to destroy you for doing this.’
That’s the sort of perfectionism that turns good work inside out.
One of my biggest reasons for making the move to Substack from Patreon was to have a deadline driving me to post. It’s the posting that’s the problem, not the writing. I’ll frame out an essay, write thousands of words, and then not post them, because they’re not quite right. Because someone will tear apart every one of them looking for reasons to come after me.
That’s a disturbingly paranoid-sounding sentence, but the sentiment is merely accurately paranoid, because that’s a thing that has happened in the past, that will inevitably happen again, that will keep happening for as long as I keep publishing things some people want to read. Thanks, by the way, for being one of those people.
Yesterday I got a little jolt when a certain social media site reminded me that it was ten years since I published this article at the Independent (accidentally coining the phrase ‘a woman’s opinion is the short skirt of the internet’ in the process).
Ten years. Over those years, a lot of people have been astonished by how someone as frankly fucking snowflakey and sensitive as me managed to stick with it ‘without letting it affect me’. The last time I was asked a version of that question was two days ago. But the answer is: I don’t. It does affect me. Keeping on going doesn’t make me strong, it just makes me stubborn, and I would absolutely not fault anyone in a similar position for making a different choice. I’m lucky enough to have options and support that others might not, and walking away would have seemed ungrateful.
But just because you keep going doesn’t mean there’s not damage.
If I'm honest, the right turn of phrase for what I’m wrangling right now is probably some sort of complex post-traumatic stress. I don’t mean to compare what I’ve gone through over the past decade of flaming and trashing and trolling to anyone who has gone through more tangible traumas. But the fact is, almost all of the handful of people I know who’ve gone through something similar, most of whom are women and/or LGBT, now have some flavor of chronic health issue, even if they claim to be fine. The sort of thing that happens when the body displays the score in massive flashing lights over the pitch. (Hell yeah. Sports metaphor. I’ve seen Ted Lasso).
In Judith Herman Lewis’ foundational text ‘Trauma and Recovery’, she talks about the stages of healing from complex trauma - including the fact that some wounds can only be felt when a ‘base of safety’ has been established. I re-read that book this week for a project I’m working on, and that part hit home (which could well be a second sports metaphor, but I know nothing whatever about baseball).
….Because when it comes to writing and career security, I am - for once, for however long - in a position of relative safety. I’ve proven myself to the people who matter, have a stack of books and screenwriting credits, and I’ve established a reputation in multiple careers that nobody can confiscate unless I fuck up in ways that would be wildly out of character. Thanks to this Substack and my work in screenwriting, I’m financially stable. And I’m surrounded by kind, brave, silly people who love me as much as I love them, when I find the time to step back from staring at the screen. I do not, in other words, strictly have to keep on throwing myself at the frontline of the culture wars to make rent and make the pain worth it. I don’t have to keep on, every day, wrenching open my ribcage, dicing up the contents and putting them on the internet for strangers to jeer at. I’m no longer literally trapped in an abusive work environment like I was in my early twenties.
Which means: it’s finally safe to feel the things I couldn’t let myself feel when I had no choice but to pump out dozens of articles a month. Things like anger, and outrage, and hurt, and fear. I can write, and I am writing, but I find myself choking up when I try to post. Because I know what so often happens when I do post. Particularly if I post something good. And I don’t want to be punished like that again.
And I’m sure it would be more emotionally healthy, in lots of ways, to listen to that trauma talking. To let myself walk away from this sort of writing, forever if I needed to. But that would be a betrayal - of my best self, of promises I’ve made to kind and worthy strangers. It would also mean letting a whole bunch of wankers win in the end.
And I simply can’t be having with that.
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