What If I Titled All My Substack Letters, Like, "On The Exquisitely Fragile Art Of Living" Or Something
JK, but this one is called: On Baring Your Soul On Substack.com For Absolutely No Reason To An Audience 6 Followers, One Whom Is You, Jewel
A long time ago, in college, I read the Joan Didion essay “On Self Respect.” I was at almost the exact point in college that Didion (I’m going to call her Didion) was writing about—the fall of senior year, when she found out that she hadn’t gotten into the ostensibly prestigious honors society Phi Beta Kappa [NOTE: Phi Beta Kappa is basically a list of college seniors who have high GPAs]. This failure shattered her (Didion’s) sense that she was special and talented, and that achievements would come as easily to her in the adult world as they had in her childhood.
My reaction to the essay at the time was, I guess it’s nice that Joan Didion decided to stop relying on external validation, but she’s gotta be pretty stupid if she didn’t get into Phi Beta Kappa. And not too long after, I did get into Phi Beta Kappa, which made me go like, Whew, okay, I still don’t 100% “get” what Phi Beta Kappa “is,” but I’m relieved I made it in, unlike Joan Didion, who I guess is an actual fucking idiot compared to me, a college senior with a high GPA.
The reason I mention all this, other than to brag about being in Phi Beta Kappa to my six subscribers one of whom is me, is that I am thinking about the lesson of self respect that I willfully ignored when I first read (Joan) Didion’s essay. Especially as it relates to writing, which is actually what I am sitting and doing right now.
I am always looking for tips and tricks for being a writer without going permanently insane. The problem is that I still, to this very day, have a severe perfectionism issue, which I think is common for writers, and which some seem to have solved by either acting extremely weird or dying. Personally, I have not found away around it, and sometimes I spend what many would consider too much time ruminating on what to write about and what medium to write it in, or worse, trying to get “in character” as a friend or acquaintance in order to figure out what that person might say about I write once I actually do write it. This is a kind of behavior that psychiatrists have termed “annoying,” and is not the type of thing a carefree artist engages in. FYI when I say “carefree artist” I am involuntarily picturing Willy Wonka. I hope that gives you a sense of what I think someone who is not a perfectionist is like.
The World Wide Web is an amazing place where you can post content that strangers will then tear down in the cruelest and most public ways possible. I am tired of giving in to the compulsion to present a bulletproof facade of “being awesome” online, and that’s why I am doing the opposite, which for me involves writing a casual newsletter and blasting it directly into the email inboxes of 5-10 people, only some of whom I know personally. One perceived “flaw” in this newsletter might be that I invoked an essay by Joan Didion up top and really did not delve into its content much at all. And like all flaws, that is one of the things about it that people are like “Aww, no, I actually think that’s really cute.”
In conclusion, if you are thinking “Your Substack letter was annoying and it made me want to come to your house and kill you,” I welcome that. It is such a rewarding experience to write something that people may either like or dislike or feel absolutely nothing towards, and it is my honor to do so on this Thursday evening. In the name of Joan Didion’s #SelfRespectNation, rock ON and self respect UP!!!!