11/28/10
Many of you may have been wondering where I’ve been for the last three months, and whether The 1585 still existed. It does. As for where I’ve been, I was just out of it for a while, and exactly why will be the subject of this essay. Anyway, I’m back now. I hope you weren’t worried. Actually, roughly half the people reading this are probably Facebook friends with me, and have been seeing my updates for the past three months about closing out the season at Coney Island and the time I saw Courtney Love in that lingerie store in SoHo, so I guess you couldn’t have been that worried. I must admit, part of me was holding out for President Obama to suddenly break off mid-sentence at a press conference and scream “WHERE ARE YOU, SEXO GRAMMATICUS?” like in Superman II, but I guess he’s got other things on his mind, so I’m just coming back without fanfare.
The best way of putting it is that for the past few months I’ve been working on myself. My last serious relationship ended in August, principally because of my insecurity. (This is not a break-up essay and is actually going to be about something really interesting, but the break-up stuff is necessary background information, so just hang on.) When I say this, I don’t mean that my insecurity made me do anything. She simply left me because I am insecure. And I’m not complaining about this. It sucks for me, but she was completely within her rights, and it would have been selfish of me to expect otherwise. After all, male confidence is for women what female physical attractiveness is for men, so for her this must have been like dating a fat girl. This made no sense to me—just as, I guess, men caring about appearance to the exclusion of attitude makes no sense to women—but that’s what women are like, and I’m attracted to women, so I figured I could either sit around and complain about it or stand up and try to change, so I did.
Meaning that I sat around and complained about it. For the first few weeks anyway. But that didn’t help, so then I thought I’d try the second thing.
I went to Barnes & Noble and browsed through the extensive self-help section. I was optimistic at first, because the self-help section was huge, and the majority of the books in this huge section were about how to raise your self-esteem. Then I noticed that about 90% of those books were bright pink and had titles written in such exaggerated cursive that I could barely read them, indicating that they were aimed specifically at women. This struck me as odd, since women are the ones who care about confidence and men don’t. The way I see it, all the books about confidence should have been aimed at men, and the ones for women should have had titles like Dress Your Inner Child in Ripped Fishnets and Chicken Soup for the Making Your Tits Bigger. But maybe this is just one of the many reasons why I am not a self-help author.
I flipped through the ragtag smattering of self-esteem books that were not aimed specifically at women. Note that I do not say “the ones aimed at men,” because there were none aimed at men—just womens ones, and non-gender-specific ones. I later realized that this is because self-esteem books aimed at men are just Pick-Up books. At first I was offended at the insinuation that men wouldn’t want to raise their self-esteem for any reason other than to pick up women. But then I realized that neither do I.
Anyway, I flipped through the ragtag smattering of etc. A good number of the books I rejected because they had some central conceit that was prohibitively stupid. I’m sorry, but even if it contains a bunch of otherwise decent advice, I just can’t get into any book that bases all the reasons I should feel better on the idea that “the universe loves me.” No, it doesn’t. Admittedly, it’s a vast and controversial subject, but I think I’m treading on fairly safe theological ground when I say that if the universe really loved me, I would have a lightsabre. A purple one.
Have you heard the good news?
Eventually,
I went downstairs to the information
desk and asked “Do you have any books about self-esteem for
people who have low
self-esteem for a reason besides
being fat? Because I have low
self-esteem but a totally sick body.” Then
I lifted my shirt
up and did a little twirl. They said no. Then I asked whether
thin people could get self-esteem books at some kind
of thin-person discount, seeing as how half the book is always specific
to fat
people and we don’t need those chapters. They
said no again, in
a manner even more puzzled and annoyed than the
first time. So I left.
But
you can’t say I didn’t try to improve
myself. Those were both fair
questions,
and this is totally on them. No wonder
publishing is a dying industry.
Clearly,
books weren’t going to help. I
guess that’s fitting, since books kind of
got me into this mess to begin with. If
I hadn’t devoted the last half of my life to becoming a
sensitive writer type, maybe
I wouldn’t even be insecure. The
girl
who left me even explicitly mentioned the fact that I was a writer as
part of
the problem. Being a writer
wasn’t one of the charges brought against me
exactly, but it was certainly seen as persuasive evidence regarding the
principal charge—like Joan of Arc’s short hair. But other than to
books, I didn’t know where else to turn. But
I needed to turn somewhere. I felt like I
had to
either stop being
insecure or lie down and die. And then it
hit me. An elegant equation too
simple
and too beautiful to have been seen first, and all the more clearly
true for
having appeared at the close of a draining epic quest that took almost
a whole
hour.
The
five most beautiful words in the
language: Fuck this,
I’ll just lie.
After
all, regardless of what Oprah says, women
are not in fact psychic. The only way
they’ll know I’m insecure is if I tell them.
In the relationship
that ended three months ago, I had made the mistake
of taking women at their word when they say they want you to be honest
about your
feelings. Well, I guess women
aren’t
exactly lying when they say this; it’s more that they just
don’t mean it the
way you assume. Women do in fact want
you to be honest about your feelings, but it’s not so they
can love you better—it’s
so they know whether to dump your pathetic ass. Women
want you to be
honest about your feelings the way the IRS wants
you to be honest about your finances. What
I realized too late was that it was totally within my power to keep
that
relationship going. All I would have had
to do was lie about what I’m really thinking every moment for
the rest of my
life.
I know that may sound callow, defeatist, immature, and totally unfair to every sense I should have of myself as a fully-realized adult with rights, needs, and a full range of normal human emotions. But you should have seen this girl.
I can't use a real picture of her,
but she looked a lot like this.
So
that was the project before me: never say
anything insecure, ever. At least not in
front of a girl, although I figured it would be good practice to avoid
saying
insecure stuff in front of guys too. This
didn’t
seem like it would be too hard. After all,
we’re not talking about something
subjective here, like comedy, where what one person finds hilarious
another
person might find offputting and vice versa. Everyone
basically
knows the difference between insecure and
non-insecure, even me.
And
with that kind of setup, you’re probably
expecting an essay about how it turned out to be harder than it looks. But
it didn’t. It turned out to be
every bit as easy as I
thought it would. Seriously, all I had
to do was not say insecure things, duh. How
easy or hard it was
isn’t the problem.
Now
you’re probably thinking that it didn’t
work. You’re
expecting me to say that I
refrained from saying insecure stuff, but girls didn’t like
me any better—either
because they could still magically tell I was insecure somehow, or
because it
turns out that girls look deeper than that and aren’t really
as shallow as I
was making them out to be. But
that’s
not it either. Girls—and, to
be fair,
people in general—really are as shallow as I was making them
out to be, and the
simple practice of never saying insecure things worked amazingly well. To
be perfectly honest, I had sex with more
women this past September and October than during any year-long
stretch of my life before, or all four
years of college. And I
didn’t even go out that much. So
without
becoming boorish here, let it be established that never saying insecure
things really
does work, and is incredibly easy. Those
things are not the problem.
The
problem is that, as far as I can tell, I no
longer have a personality.
Until
I adopted this project, I never realized
just how much of my sense of myself and my role in any given social
setting is
based on saying insecure things. Apparently,
virtually all of it was, except for the part that was devoted to
pop-music
trivia (which is probably itself a form of insecurity anyway). My
initial instinctive response to almost anything
that someone else says involves
betraying insecurity on one level or another.
This
isn’t an insurmountable problem if I am just
chatting up some girl in a bar. I can
deal with beating back my instinctive responses for a couple hours,
especially
if doing so might result in sex. It’s
just another version of oneself, like how you resist the impulses to
curse or talk
about drugs during Thanksgiving dinner with your family.
But
you can always find things to talk about with
your family besides drugs. The problem
with cutting insecurity from your conversational diet is that the
things you
replace it with aren’t very flavorful. Simply
put, insecure
things are more interesting than confident things.
The
other week I was at a party and someone asked
me whether being a teacher was stressful. What
I wanted to
say—what immediately popped into my head to say—was
this:
“Holy fuck,
it is the worst shit ever. No other job
in the world compels you to be so defenseless against so much
disrespect. I mean, cops get
disrespected, but at least a
cop can fuck with you back if you disrespect him. As
a teacher, you just have to take it. A
kid can just start ripping on you in the
middle of class, but it’s not like you can call the kid fat
or ugly or a little
retard or something. You just have to
ask him nicely to stop. And those are just
the kids you hear. But at any given time
in some corner of the room there are two little assholes whispering and
laughing,
and you fucking know it’s about you, but there’s
nothing you can do. You deal exclusively,
day-in day-out, with roomfuls
of people who openly think you’re the biggest loser
they’ve ever met and want
you to die, and that is the whole fucking job. I
have been teaching
for ten years and every single day I still feel
like I am going to throw up right before I walk into the room and then
cry once
I get home.”
You
have to admit, that is a pretty interesting
response. But that’s
not what I
said. What I said instead was
“Nah,
’s alright,”
and then I leaned back
in my chair with a smirk on my face, making sure not to look down or
away and to
take up as much space with my body as possible. I
wasn’t
lying. I was just
declining to volunteer information that in the past I would have
volunteered.
But
still, I didn’t like this. I’m
a writer. I like using words.
I
like saying
interesting things, and putting them in an interesting way. The
answer I wanted to give accomplished
that. The answer I did give
was barely
verbal. It communicated
essentially
nothing. But the manner in which
I
uttered it was evocative of confidence, whereas what I wanted to say
was
evocative of paranoia, self-loathing, and a profound sense of
inferiority to
barely-literate children. The response I
gave—which, once again, barely even consisted of
words—would clearly make women
want to have sex with me more than would the response I wanted to give. I
had to choose between being sexually attractive
and interesting. And like I said, if all
we’re talking about is how I had to act at some party for a
few hours, this is
no big deal.
But
for the last three weeks, I’ve been regularly seeing
a girl that I really like. And—for
the
first time in any relationship—I have from the very beginning
avoided ever
saying insecure things in front of her, right down to never asking her
advice
about what I should wear or what kind of haircut I should get. I want
to ask her all those things. Hell, I want
to ask her every five minutes
whether she really likes me and then not believe her when she says yes. I
just don’t do it. Instead, I slap
her on
the ass and then lean against
something.
Most
of the funny stories I could spin out of my
day-to-day life are out the window too. Like
a couple weeks
ago, when I was interviewing potential new
roommates. One of the first people
I met
with was this guy who seemed totally nice and laid-back, but there was
just one
problem: he was bizarrely, frighteningly good-looking.
I
mean, I’m good-looking too, but this guy
was like 6’3’’, five years younger than
me, a freaking ballet
dancer—meaning he was
in better shape than guys who play pro
sports—and bore an uncanny resemblance to a cross between
Matthew McConaughey
and Christian Bale. And I know what
you’re
thinking, but by some miracle he was in fact straight.
All
I could think was, “Jesus Christ, if I am
within 10 miles of this guy, I will never get laid again.” So
I crossed him off the list. Now, this is a
classic
funny story. Not hilarious, maybe,
but amusing and
memorable. Exactly the sort of
thing one
might share with their significant other at the end of the day. Did
I tell this story to the girl I’m
seeing? Hell no, because it
involves me
being insecure about something. Granted,
it involves feeling insecure about a guy who would make any reasonable
person
feel insecure, but still. My new rule is
that I have to appear to think I am the greatest guy in the universe 24
hours a
day, so the story was out. (Women,
don’t
bother e-mailing me to ask for this guy’s number—I
threw it out, and then set
the garbage on fire.)
Just
this morning, I was watching TV with my new girl,
and the show mentioned something about San Francisco and I offhandedly
said that
I loved it there and that I would pick San Francisco if I had to live
somewhere
besides New York. She asked why and I
froze. The real reason is that
San
Francisco is the only other city where I’m not constantly
afraid that people will
make fun of me on the street. But I
obviously couldn’t say that, so instead I just mumbled
something about how it’s
pretty there. I had to keep up my
streak
of never saying insecure things. But
day
by day, I am just digging myself deeper into a relationship with
someone who
lacks basic information about what I am really like.
Of
course, she reads this website, so I am
essentially telling her now. Will it
make a difference that the insecurity is being communicated textually? She
isn’t seeing me do
or say
something
insecure in person… Will that cause
the
insecurity to have a different effect, because it is revealing itself
via
artistic production instead of day-to-day life? After
all, women do
like artists, and there’s not a ton of great art
that completely refuses to communicate vulnerability (the oeuvre of
Leni
Riefenstahl notwithstanding). The point
of confidence is that, as seduction experts would put it, it flips the
“leader
of men” switch. But artists are
leaders
of men—we’re just leading them someplace besides
battle.
The
fact is, I didn’t write for three months
because I couldn’t think of anything to say that
wasn’t insecure in some way. I
had ideas, but they all involved admitting
that I am not in fact the most macho guy in the entire world, and so I
couldn’t
bring myself to write them. Even the
essays that don’t mention anything personal and are just
rants about stupid
people don’t pass the test, because women perceive ranting as
a form of
insecurity (since it demonstrates that you let things get to you).
Sure,
cool guys that women like in TV and movies show
vulnerability, but you have to examine the level at which that
vulnerability
emerges. It is not an everyday
level. A normal guy is simply
never
going to be in a situation where he is about to be frozen in carbonite,
or has
to leap from a helicopter to ensure the rescue of the woman he loves,
or wakes
up in an Italian hospital after being tied to a chair and having his
balls
bashed in by members of an international criminal syndicate. If
you are showing vulnerability in real
life, odds are it is over some stupid shit.
But
I had to make a choice. I thought
eventually I
would have an idea for
an essay that was funny, insightful, and also made me look supremely
confident
about absolutely everything. But I never
did. And it became clear
that I was
never going to. I had to stop
pretending
to be confident, at least enough to become a writer again.
I
had to let myself believe that Art does not
count as stupid shit.
So here’s the new essay. It may not be confident, but it’s brave.
