The Things That We Do

Good Ones was a bi-weekly or so personal essay newsletter that covers art, music, movies, food, drink, or whatever. Now, the frequency is much less predictable. Click subscribe below to get the newsletter directly to your inbox whenever they’re published.

It’s A Trap

When my brother first moved to Japan, he relayed that most people, when you meet them for the first time, tend to fixate on what your hobby is as a way to get to know you. If you respond to their inquiry with “Well, I like to ride my bike around, and I play guitar, and I really like to read…” you might immediately be halted for the clarifying question: “No, no, I mean, what do you do?”

For a lot of people in Japan, self-identity is tied to a singular activity. You can see this play out in the first season of Terrace House, a reality show about young people living together, where one resident is criticized for his lack of dedication to baseball practice and another is fully confronted by everyone in the house for not having her identity defined clearly enough by a singular interest. She works for a company that promotes a soccer-like sport, and when she tells her housemates that is what she’s interested in, they don’t believe her and declare that she doesn’t have a passion yet and that she needs to find one or they can’t be friends.

Being so neatly defined by a singular interest terrifies me. It’s not that I’m worried people will judge me for how palatable my favorite thing is — I’m confident enough in my cringiest behaviors — it’s that as soon as you’re identified with a singular passion you become easily judged against how successful you are at achieving success in that field.

Being a writer is not a thing that I am, writing is just a thing that I do.

Having just finished Rax King’s Tacky, I no longer feel like I can hide behind that technicality. In what I would describe as the best written book I’ve read in literal years, King tackles deeply intimate and personal essays about love, lust, companionship, family, and the pop culture signifiers that color the landscape of those stories in a way that is sharp, thoughtful, insightful, raw, and polished at the same time. I laughed, I cried, I flipped pages like a madman, and woke up every morning excited to tackle a new essay with my coffee.

In short: it’s the type of book that made me want to be a writer in the first place.

When I graduated from college with a degree in Fiction Writing, I was hesitant to pursue what two straight years of schooling had been focused on. I excelled in all my classes, usually found myself singled out by teachers for a dedicated work ethic, and I was thoroughly encouraged to keep pushing forward and submit to literary journals and attend readings.

Instead of trying to write fiction, I wanted to get paid to write about music for a living. Reviewing was a consolation prize, a version of what my passion was distilled into a workaday system of assignments and execution of said assignments. I didn’t make it, and instead, I allowed one of my other hobbies, the making and intentional tasting of coffee, to take the forefront. Sixteen years later, I climbed the heap, achieved everything I thought would take me a lifetime in my mid-30s, and had to face the truth that a career in coffee wasn’t satisfying in the way I thought it could be.

I’m in awe at people who can dedicate themselves to practicing and perfecting skills. What my teachers thought was work ethic was actually just speed and some wit. I could fake my way through long essays about books I never read, I could turn in ten pages of fiction I smashed out after breakfast because I forgot to do the assignment. The reality is that I’m lazy, I rarely want to put in the work, and I know that if I actually try at something, I’m going to fail. It’s why I transferred for my sophomore year to a school that had a Fiction Writing program. The only C I ever received was at the first college I attended, during a Sociology course, where I found that if I didn’t pay attention in class and didn’t do the reading, I wasn’t going to excel. I addressed that problem by moving two states away.

Identifying as a writer always felt like a trap: a profession, a vocation, a state of being — it all felt charged in a way that sat like a rock in my gut. Identifying as a writer meant trying, and trying was always too earnest, too sincere, and too vulnerable for me to adopt as a mode of operation. If you tried at something, then your failure is much more devastating. If you succeed while winging it, then, by god, you’re just naturally talented and who could hold that against you?

The best writers read so effortlessly that you have to imagine their writing came just as effortlessly, or even moreso. When the craft and quality are high, the content becomes immediately relatable. When King writes about falling in love with a married man, I could feel the same pangs of distress and emptiness inside me. When she writes about her abusive marriage, I can see how the outline of my own marriage shares some of the same shape if you took both and overlaid one on top of the other. When she writes a defense of Creed, a band I find unlistenable, I feel an appropriate amount of shame for my snark that is pierced thoroughly by a well-crafted argument.

Refusing to try isn’t a way to get ahead in the world, but pretending that you don’t totally is. As newsletter readers can note, I wrote a first draft of a novel last year, and sent it off to a handful of interested readers. It’s easy to pretend that it just fell out of my skull with little to no effort, but that’s untrue. It was hard. It took time. It took effort. And it’s an absolute mess that needs to be broken down, re-written, and salvaged for parts. I’d love to pretend I didn’t try, but I did. I’d love to pretend that writing is just a thing that I do, but it’s not. It’s part of who I am.

I am a writer.

I spent last Friday wandering around the Milwaukee Art Museum, curious more about the striking modern building that looks like the skeleton of a futuristic schooner more than about the art inside. I find visual art fun, but generally, it doesn’t hit me in the sternum with a pointed finger, taunting me to truly look inside myself. Sure, the modern wing was fun, the folk art mezzanine was charming, and the early Italian religious portraits were striking, but it wasn’t until I saw a small canvas from Kay Sage in the back corner of the top floor that I felt something. To describe the painting could never do it justice. Titled Reflex Arc, it shows the side of a building, a variety of poles and masts, and a few colored cloths draped around them all. Whatever it was, I gasped.

Art should have an affect on you, and if we use the Supreme Court’s former definition of pornography, you’ll know it when you see it. I might read twenty to thirty books in a year and find the process enjoyable, but nothing has kicked me in the stomach harder than Tacky. The book is art, and art makes me want to create my own art. But more than anything, art helps us understand more about ourselves even if we don’t perfectly see our reflection in that piece. It might have taken me 37 years to get here, but here I am:

I am a writer.

And I didn’t want to admit it until I read Rax King’s Tacky.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.