ninaherenorthere.com

It is way harder than writing a blog. And don’t get me started on writing memoir, which is perhaps the hardest kind of book, maybe not to write, but to live with writing. We’ll save that dumb move of mine for another day. But writing a book is harder than writing blog posts because I have to think about things like characters, description, narrative, plot, scene. Not just once, but like, in every chapter, for many, many chapters. Then, there are the words themselves, approximately 65,000. And I fondle all of them, even the little ones—conjunctions and articles–and I’m not talking one-night stand fondle either—I have full-on relationships with each word. My brain feels like mush, like split pea soup. And I can’t tell if that’s a metaphor or a cliche. Because I’ve lost all perspective. Which is why I’m deleting the next five paragraphs or random incoherency I spewed in the past couple days and ending this post. Apparently writing a book is so hard, I can’t even blog. At least not right now.

This weekend I interviewed a trans artist friend of mine. We spoke about his music, dance, writing, as well as my writing, about our identities, trans experience, activism, being “out” in the public eye, and the intersection of it all. Before we met, I’d found myself oddly interested in a fact about him and his work for a reason I couldn’t explain. He’d recorded a song, “Little Girl,” that for the first time in music history had a transman sing alongside his former voice.

I understood that the song was groundbreaking, but when I heard him speak so emotionally about how personally definitive this song was, it got my thinking about something that was already on my mind a lot, the working title of my manuscript in-progress (or the “book” or “memoir,” as I also call it, though those words are really too far ahead of where I am).

My manuscript is tentatively titled, “Nina Here Nor There,” a phrase I don’t say aloud very often though I type and read the phrase all the time, consider its unspokenness between me and new friends who discover my blog and now know my former name. So, it felt a bit weird when I actually said the title during the interview, as if I were breaking the seal on something I could potentially see for the rest of my life. Some of my trepidation comes from that, the title of my first book is simply, in and of itself, a huge deal, but there’s also the concern over making my birth name so visible.

I recently read S. Bear Bergman’s collection of essays, “The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You“–most of them about being a former dyke, queer, Jewish, tranny with faggy tendencies. Let’s just say I had a love/hate relationship with the book, as can only be the case when faced with a writer and person so similar and yet so so so so different from me. (I also had complete respect and admiration for hir and hir work.) Bear, who prefers gender neutral pronouns, is very open in hir essay, “What’s in a Name?” about stating hir birth name. Ze makes it clear that certainly family members, airline personnel, and other people with special privileges, can refer to hir birth name.

Reading the essay as a trans person, I completely understood the underlying message, or at least my interpretation of it: There’s a time and a place for given, birth or legal names. This doesn’t make them real names (that’s Bear’s main point) or names to be used at the discretion of others (that’s my point). After Bear published the book, ze pointed out on hir blog that the media included hir given name in reviews–as if it would be remiss to forget this “fact” the “real” truth. I wondered how these reviewers had missed the whole point of that crucial essay.

Ever since then, I’d been profoundly afraid of what the media, the greater public, will do with my former name on my book, how they will abuse it. Until recently, I’d been saying one of my reasons for wanting “Nina” on the cover of my book was to commemorate it, memorialize it, give it a sort of gravestone. In my book, the characters refer to the narrator as “Nina” a handful of times, and each time I write those moments, I hold this name close to my heart.

The reality is, I see “Nina” more often than others probably realize, almost daily. It’s on mail, my taxes, my driver’s license, passport and any piece of important paperwork. I hear it at the doctor, dentist, library, and occasionally the gym. It’s on the bottom, my signage, of very old strings of emails at work, and on all my travel bookings. The super cute woman who cleans our house (and whom I have a crush on) says, “Hello, Nina” when she calls once a month. It took me six months to figure out why I couldn’t tell her my new name. I love the way she says “Nina.” It’s so beautiful. Too beautiful to tell her the truth and have it disappear from her mouth.

Sometimes, I miss “Nina.” Not as my name, but as the name that was once mine. Sometimes, when I meet new people, when I get over my fear that they’re not  seeing me in a way resonates with how I see myself–the trauma of a many years being seen as a woman–I want to pull them aside, whisper in their ear, “For thirty years of my life, my name was Nina. Thirty years of my life. That was me. How I was known. Nina.” Sometimes, when I’m with trans folk and we don’t have to protect ourselves so fiercely, we drop our guards and remind each other, again and again, to mourn.

This weekend, when my trans friend spoke about the combination of his voices on one track, he captured the fear he felt on the cusp of potentially losing his voice (or whatever the uncertain results would be to his vocal chords), the fear of losing everything, of letting it all go. Another thing he said, one of the many that I’m sure I’ll be thinking on for days, was how trans stories are really human stories, striking at something that’s often hard to see in the shock-and-awe factor of gender transition–the universality of the trans experience, of the way people change. My book, while also being an alternative transgender narrative, is, in more general terms, a story about a person finding the courage to let go of who she was.

Hearing my friend speak of his definitive song made me think, at least for the time being, it would be cathartic, empowering, triumphant to have both my names on the cover of my book. How often do any of us get to hold who we once we were and who we are in one place, or have such a defining way to mark the journey, both the fear and the reward. For him, it was through music, his voice. For me, a writer, it is through my words.

Nina. Nick.

There’s a lifetime between those words. Or at least a book.

Last week I had one of those total and complete writing breakdowns. I’d share the trigger, but I really don’t think it matters. Every rejection, criticism, negative word and thought about my writing banged against my skull. I lacked powers of description, I couldn’t find my voice, would I ever learn to use a metaphor, my dialogue was flat filler. I couldn’t come up with anything I could do well other than develop synonyms for failure, inadequacy and shortcoming.

This was about 8 on a weekday morning. I’d been at my computer since 6:30, staring at the screen and trying to convince myself I didn’t suck. Convincing myself required way more strength than I had, so I got in my bed and cried. It was the first time I cried since starting testosterone, and I felt relieved, both because I could still and for the release.

In my torrent of despair, everything swirled. I would never finish my book, which meant I wouldn’t have anything. Like money. This thought almost made me laugh because I hold no hope of making money on writing–not now, not ever. I started thinking about how I wouldn’t be able talk about my writing in public and feel accomplished and proud and important, but it’s been a long time since I cared about those things, since I tried to earn love through my writing.

I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what it was that I was really so afraid of losing. The sun streamed through my windows and it was really bright in my room, as it always is around that time. I get up early, so for me, eight feels like noon. Then, I realized what I was afraid of: having nothing to do before going to my job, of getting up and going to my job first thing in the morning, of having my job be the focus of my life. If I didn’t write or didn’t have a reason to write or became too scared to face my writing demons, I would lose my mornings, my time for me, my meditation, my peace, my will to fucking survive, and my consolation for doing so.

I can’t say I picked myself up right away. I basically spent the next two days begging every friend and mentor to tell me what I needed to hear, “Nick, you are a good writer. You can do this.” And although I have boosted myself upon their words in the past week, it is mostly an awareness of why I write that has kept me going, a feeling and place I refuse to give up, a time before I’ve spoken a word aloud. My space heater is on high, the remnants of night still linger outside my window, my desk is bathed in the glow of only a small lamp; I am a dot of light in the dark world, reaching out in calm desperation.

Paul Auster has written fifteen novels and claims he doesn’t know why he writes. But he knows why I do…

“I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. When young people say I want to be a novelist, I’d say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won’t make any money, you probably won’t become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive. You have to have a tremendous taste for solitude. I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else. On the other hand, when I am writing, even though it’s hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I’m not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I’m not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn’t without that pen in your hand. It’s a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words—but only when you’re writing. You can’t do it in your head. There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.”

-Paul Auster (from The Rumpus interview)

As we move from the arts and film portion (my preferred one) of this year’s Pride festivities to the final drunk and debauched weekend, I feel compelled to comment on some of what I’ve witnessed and experienced.

To kick things off, I attended Fresh Meat, an annual queer/trans performance (mostly dance) that I’d been wanting to go to for years, but never actually did. I think it was hard for me to accept or even believe that in the last five or so years, I went from being a tomboy who obsessed over the sports pages and watched SportsCenter religiously to being an artsy boy who uses the sports pages for kindling and would rather watch gender-variant folks doing modern dance or clog around the stage than even discuss who was in the NBA finals.

I particularly liked Sean Dorsey Dance’s Uncovered: The Diary Project (the full-length version is even better), themed around the diaries of transsexual gay man and pioneer, Lou Sullivan, and a performance piece by D’Lo, who blew me away with hir ability to perform a variety of genders, unraveling the complexities within each, and rocked my heart with the love that s/he expressed for hir bois, reminding me how my expanding network of trans-masculine people is my own source of personal strength.

Perhaps what moved me most about this night was the realization of how many of us there are out there, enough not just for one trans dance troupe, but for every variety of performance and dance — tap, modern, hip-hop, rock, folk — and that we exist across and through every culture, ethnicity, and race. There was a moment when I was sitting there in the audience and I thought, “This explosion of creativity, of self-expression, a sense of openness, support and community, this best represents the world that I want to live in.”

The next day, I watched Boy I Am, a documentary, and the best trans film I’ve ever seen, that played in Frameline two years ago and has nothing to do with this year’s events, except that I watched it in the middle of them. Between this and Fresh Meat, I heard and saw people binding (with ace bandages, layered sports bras, and tanktop binders like the ones I used to wear from Underworks) for the first time since my own surgery, and had what I felt like was a post-traumatic stress response.

I remember a few years ago when a good friend of mine told me he found binding “comfortable,” and how shocked I was, having just started to experience the excessive sweating, chafing, and constriction of crushing my breasts against my chest. I didn’t argue with him, nor did I argue with my father who referred to my behavior as self-injurious. It was destructive, but it was also palliative. Binding was a survival technique, not that I could’ve said that at the time — to acknowledge my struggle, the physical agony that somehow alleviated the mental and emotional agony, was impossible.

I was just developing a transgender identity back then, one that wasn’t predicated on a desire to become a man, the sense that I was a man, or any desire to take on perceived male social or sex roles, but rather an increasing awareness of the deep discomfort with the gendered parts of my body in a way that seemed so different from standard body image issues surrounding things like weight. I struggled with my desire for top surgery as a cosmetic modification and was fearful that speaking about it like that would do a disservice to trans people fighting desperately for health insurance to cover what is most often construed by the industry as “elective” surgery. For awhile, I convinced myself it was elective, at least for me, because to feel like I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t fight it, that I would have to accept the phenomenal challenge of being transgender was too hard.

I’ve changed. We all do. But it is still my fear, especially in discussing/writing about transgender subjects, that I will regret my words, take a stance that is not politically forward thinking to the cause of greater acceptance, understanding, and visibility. At least 70% of my trans friends cannot afford the $8,000 for top surgery and may never be able to on their own. They are not working towards a trans identity like I was; they have one. And as I continue to step up to the challenge of embracing myself as transgender, it is remarkable how I am still one of the privileged, the lucky ones, to be white and raised upper middle class, is to be instilled with the foundation and expectation that I always get what I want, even if it’s something socially deviant like having my breasts cut off.

I have sat with one of my old binders by my side (I gave the rest away to friends) as a writing prod, but it did nothing compared to the trigger of seeing other human beings wearing them, the ache in my heart for the pain I couldn’t let myself feel, and the empathy for those who don’t know what it is like to take a deep breath, who must convince themselves that suffocation is comfortable.

The best film I saw in this year’s film festival was “Diagnosing Difference,” a one-hour documentary analyzing, deconstructing and ripping apart the DSM-IV criteria for Gender Identity Disorder. I *had* to procure a letter diagnosing me with this something that is significantly easier to do these days, and although I’ve read extensively on the hoops that those before me had to jump through, hearing someone like Shawna Virago describe going to a gender dysphoria clinic and having to reiterate the standard narrative or the “transgender myth” still moved me.

I’m still trying to understand on how pathology has affected me (my solution was to handle it with humor), how it affects social (non)-acceptance of trans folk, and working to see more clearly how services can be accessed if a medical as opposed to psychological diagnosis is rendered, or if there’s a better solution, something I feel like this movie talked around. But maybe I’m dense. Or looking for simple answers to something that is still being problematized.

There were two thoughts that are not particularly profound, but that resonated with me in that lightbulb kind of way. One was the focus on the word “stereotypical” and how the diagnostic criteria considers it a disease to oppose gender stereotypes. Wow. Need I say more. I believe it was Dylan Scholinski, author of Last Time I Wore a Dress, institutionalized in part for gender identity disorder (an archaic form of treatment reminiscent of electroshock therapy for homosexuals pre-1973) who spoke eloquently (and I’m paraphrasing) about how much sense it makes to question our genders, explore ourselves, build consciousness around who we are, that to miss out on that journey in life is abnormal. It is that sentiment that makes me feel the gift of being transgender for the ways in which it grounds me and connects me to others who care about self-awarenss.

Susan Stryker, my favorite queer “celebrity” (activist/historian/filmmaker/writer/theorist/insightful and brilliant mind) said the simplest and for me, the most mindblowing thing: that because of including GLB and T together, people outside the queer community tend to think of transgender as a sexual orientation. Oh fuck, I thought, if we’re still doing remedial education, which of course we are, the complexity with which I want to discuss my ideas and experience is not only going to get lost on people, but could be catastrophically misleading. For example, living for so many years as a dyke allowed me to see my masculine reflection in my more feminine partners and allowed me to take refuge in a community that embraced masculinity. And where I am now, I see my desire to embrace masculinity as almost a posturing for my unrecognized maleness that is now full of feminine (or rather effeminate) traits. But it’s a bad idea to say something like that to someone like my brother who associates my “gender thing” with my “gay thing” and doesn’t understand that sexual orientation, sex and gender are all different and that masculinity does NOT necessarily correlate with being male.

Finally, I attended the annual Transforming Community event last night in which a handful of diverse queer/transgender people read or spoke about their experiences, followed by a Q&A, more like a conversation, with the audience. Afterwards, my companion said she heard and felt a great deal of pain in the room. On some level, I felt the same way, but of course sexual abuse, violence, discrimination, and improsonment are painful, and for a moment I had some concern that I was dangerously inured to what almost seems standard for gender-variant people. I wanted to go deeper into what was so upsetting and it came in a moment when I could see the trauma in the face of Felicia Elizondo, a community elder who for the sake of this post can be best described as a person who has worked and fought to make my existence possible, and her resistence to the word queer. Of all the horrors she experienced in her life, the one that was most moving to me was seeing her struggle to try to embrace the only word I can find that encompasses me, a word we’ve supposedly “reclaimed. But for the first time ever, watching this transgender activist and leader try to heal from the damage that this word cause, I felt I didn’t have the right to throw it around, to take it as mine.

In the end, I think what I found most painful was what was beneath the surface — that despite our likeness, we are still so different and that the inspiration of our uniqueness is also tinged with loneliness, something that seems dispiriting in a battle whose key feature, for the rest of my lifetime I imagine at least, will be us against the world, not us against us. As with most things honest and compassionate, there was little that was truly divisive during this event, and the conversation, in both intent and practice, increased my awarenss of others and my confidence that in our ability to listen and care, we are building a greater unification. The pervasive sentiment of the evening that rose above the aggrieved voices was that we are each entitled and deserve our own experience and identity and that nobody else’s experience invalidates or erases our own.

A few things I expect to think more about are the “good human being” model of educating society vs. the raising hell model of forced change, and Yosenio V. Lewis’ comment, “There is no art without activism and no activism without art,” and the role I, as a writer, a queer and trans person, and a burgeoning activist can and will play in continuing this conversation.

The most meaningful question I was ever asked and reminded of by teachers repeatedly in graduate school for creative writing was, “Where do you want to enter the dialogue?” It had never occured to me to frame a book in that way, as another voice in one long conversation. This is very hard to do. It requires a person to understand both the historical and contemporary discussion, and there is a great deal of listening needed in order to gather the courage to speak, or for me, anyways. I hope that what I write (and will be published in my memoir as the case now seems to be) contributes and pushes forward the conversations of my community, as well as educates and of course entertains, just like the events of this past week did.

So now it’s time for the party portion of Pride… After all that we’ve been through, I think we deserve the celebration.

Mostly, I write in the morning. It is rare that I write in the afternoon or evening, as rare as it is for me to skip writing two days in a row. When I take more than one day off, things can get ugly.

On Friday morning, I got to my desk around 9am, opened MS Word, moved around a few paragraphs, and then got back into bed to read until a mid-day appointment. On Saturday morning, instead of working on my book at my desk on my computer, I sat in my reading chair and wrote about a recent experience in my journal, only half-convincing myself this qualified as writing. I went to bed early on Saturday night so I’d have time to write before my 11am yoga class on Sunday. I was up by 8am on Sunday. I let myself read until 9. I perused the Book Review section of the NY Times. I checked Facebook. I knew I was not going to write and started to hate myself. I jerked off. I still had an hour-and-a-half to kill before yoga. I thougt about my consicous and purposeful decision not to write. I blamed it on my upcoming trip, the fact that I’m already mentally vacating. I watched Greys Fucking Anatomy on the Internet even though the audio and video skipped regularly. I got angry at myself for getting up at 8am on a Sunday morning to do nothing. I blamed the nice weather. I blamed myself for being a bad writer working on a bad book. I yearned for yoga, an excuse to simply breathe and sweat, and stop thinking about how I was incapable of seeing any activity I’d done in the past few days as anything other than “not writing.” I promised myself it would be easier on Monday; it’s always easier to write on a weekday before work. (On weekends, there’s that annoyingly debhilitating freedom of too much time.)

On Monday morning my alarm went off at 5:45am. I snoozed to 6am. I started the coffee, showered, put product in my hair, dressed, sat at the kitchen table and had one bowl of cereal, and then another. I drank half my coffee and brought it into my room. I looked at my desk. Then I put my mug down on my dresser, took off my pants and my shirt, crawled back into bed and set my alarm for 8:30. Now, I’m just kinda disgusted with myself.

I recently discovered that my mother found my blog. The exchange went like this:

Mom: I can’t keep a secret. I saw your blog. What, did you think I wouldn’t find it?

Me: It only took you a year.

I always knew it was only a matter of time before my mom, an IT professional, Googled me, clicked, and followed two links. Right before we hung up the phone, she said something like, “Don’t let my reading your blog affect your writing.”

As much as I’d like to blame my mother for all my shortcomings, failures, and blocks, and although I haven’t been able to open my blog without seeing her little mommy face, which I can’t in good conscience describe now that I know she is reading, I will not blame my inability to post for awhile on my mother.

I’ve also been completely slammed with trying to finish a book proposal. I contemplating blogging about that process, but then I came across the following question and answer in Poets & Writers magazine.

Q: What is the dumbest mistake that a writer can make in dealing with their editor or agent?

A: Be very careful about what you blog…If I am submitting your book to publishers and an editor wants to buy it, they’re probably going to Google you before they even call me. And if they find things out there that are curious or disturbing?

So now, sitting on my shoulder next to my mother was my agent, whose face I can in good conscience describe because it is always smiling and positive. Next to my agent are the potential editors that she is trying to woo. My shoulders hurt a bit from all of the weight on them. But please prospective editors, understand that I’m not calling you fat, but rather referring to the burden, metaphorically speaking, of your potential readership, or skimmership. And just so everyone knows, this is not of those things that can be helped by picturing the audience naked.

But really, what is curious or disturbing? Is using a cliche? Maybe. Is bad grammar or spelling errors? Perhaps. Is admitting you read Poets & Writers magazine? Definitely. And what if you and the premise of your book are both curious and disturbing? What if that is the whole point?

I tried not to let my fears about the publishing industry contribute to my block, and instead focused on my fears about my boss. I tend to think it’s safe to blog about work as long as I don’t explain why I use the day time stamp rather than the hour one to indicate when my posts are published. It’s also safer now that I moved from contractor to employee because it’s much harder to fire someone than to not hire someone for having a blog, especially one that never mentions the company name.

The only reason I’d want to blog about work is that it’s been taking up a large percentage of my time and energy for the past month or two, and I need an outlet to whine or mock it. Like today, I am dreading my fourth full-day training session, during which I will grow increasingly agitated about a methodology built upon bad metaphors (scrum, stories, and sprints to name just a few). I will remember what it was like to sit in a Wharton classroom surrounding by future Arthur Anderson consultants while caring about nothing other than my “P” for pass and dreams of a career I could love. When I realize a decade has passed since then, I will go to the catered food table and have another donut.

Work, my book, and my mother were only a few of the reasons I kept hitting “Save as draft” rather than the “Publish” button. There were also the typical writer fears, or at least mine, the self-questioning flagellations: How come you’re not funny anymore, say something funny, goddamnit; do you really think people care about your life because they don’t; you’ve waited long enough, this better be good—earth, moon, and sun-shattering good; trans this and trans that and trans shut up already. From experience, I know that the best way to get over blogger’s block is to say something, say anything. Then hit post.

It’s official. I’ve maintained this blog for one year. I’ve written 76 posts. Woa. And received 99 comments. Thank You! I’m pretty damn pleased. In honor of this anniversary, I thought I’d point out some of my favorite posts. The choices are inspired by your input. But feel free to comment on your favorite post of the year, or just review some of the links.

An Interview with the Blogger – About Me

A Day in the Life of an Unemployed Writer - December 7, 2007

Lying for a Job - January 23, 2008

The Denial of Death – June 24, 2008

My Name – October 12, 2008

My Big Day: December 3, 2008 – December 2, 2008

They say it’s easy to start a blog. Pick a template, name your site, and you’re up in 5 minutes. It took me at least a month to get my blog up. First, I had to teach myself basic HTML so I could customize the layout. (This resulted in complicating my index page and making it hard to alter the template of my blog without relearning HTML). Then, I had to organize a titling committee and wait for a spark of creativity. (Thank you, EverydayCaitlin.) Of course, I also had to stress about what I was going to write about. So, I glued my forehead to a baseball bat and spun myself in circles until I was too dizzy to care about writing in a straight line.

I wrote about my passions–writing, books, sports, queer, and transgender issues. And I watched the subjects of my posts change as my life changed and I got a job, went through a break-up, pursued top surgery. I discovered I love blogging–the power of self-publishing, the immediacy of communicating my emotional state and getting a response from my readers, a connection to friends, near and far, as well as strangers, some of whom I’ve written about and others who stumbled upon this blog through links and acquaintances. The quickest way into my heart is to tell me that you read my blog. I will blush, smile, say thank you, and never forget that you take time out of your life to read my words. It is something I return to again and again when I doubt my ability to write, when I forget one of my main reasons for writing–sharing my experiences with others makes me feel a little less lonely.

I also discovered that blogging is hard. That some days, I just have to throw something up there to fill the space and keep the momentum. But other days, I don’t know how I’d survive without a blog, days when *something* triggers me, and my mind is moving so fast to structure a story that I’m sweating puddles, and I’m so pre-occupied writing and re-writing descriptions or sentences or something humorous in my head that I nearly get nailed by a taxi while jaywalking across the street.

Happy anniversary to www.ninaherenorthere.com…

I rarely read books twice, but I recently picked up a copy of Augusten Burrough’s, Dry, from the library for a second go around.

“Why would pick that one again? My friend, a voracious re-reader of high quality literature, asked.

“Because I want to figure out how to write mass-market best-selling page-turning crap.” I said. “I’m looking for inspiration”

My MFA cost too much money for an answer like that, but it was the truth. By page 70, I wanted to chuck the book out the window. It reads like a skeletal screenplay with some decent one-liners. I did learn how much a good joke can mask a bad description and how much a tight narrative can mask pages and pages of generic dialogue. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve read bad, yet totally competent writing. And the book couldn’t have been that awful. I cried around page 175, although it should be known I also cry during Lifetime movies.

Sadly, the book was an inspiration to me. I don’t remember the last time I put down a book and felt capable of writing my own publishable book. I can do what he does; I really can; I may even be able to do it better.

I was inspired by last week’s New Yorker, the one with “Red Death on Wall Street” on the cover, no schadenfraude intended. Despite the nightmares in which I’m greeted by the Grim Reaper in Dennis Rodman hip-hop garb and I cry tears of blood, the Malcolm Gladwell article, “Late Bloomers,” gave me a bit of artistic hope.

It opens with an anecdote (warning: article spoiler) about this guy who quits his job as a lawyer with the dream we all know too well of being A Writer. He has little literary training, but is disciplined. He sells a few stories, and is obviously intelligent, having passed the bar and all. At this point in my reading, I start shaking my head and muttering obscenities. I’m having flashbacks to the Murakami article several months ago (culled from his new running memoir) in which he describes quitting his bar-owning lifestyle to become a best-selling prolific novelist because it “suited” him. I’m not sure if I’m revising Murakami here, but I basically understood his career path as an I-decided-to-be-a-writer-and-so-it-happened tale.

So, this lawyer sells some stories, then there’s a dark period, an unpublished novel, then something in Harper’s, a short story collection, then lots of awards. I’m envious and bitter and pretty sure I’m on the local bus to nowheresville, when Gladwell tells us the catch: the timeline. This lawyer guy’s rise took 18 years. Immediately, I felt buoyant.

The article explores our natural inclination to associate genuis with precocity, using examples like Ben Fountain (the lawyer and late bloomer) and Jonathon Saffron Foer (the precocious genius), as well as Picasso and Cezanne. It debunks some myths and introduces the concept of the “patron,” the person or people who fund the artist on the long walk to glory. I began to find that it helps me deal with my job if I consider my company my patron rather than my employer.

This is one of my favorite quotes: ”On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

I like the quote and the article because they give me the illusion of hope, offering a nod to the blind faith that is the antithesis to my logical constitution. It is one of last lines in the article that left me the most encouraged, “sometimes genuis is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”

I have more rejections coming my way. More setbacks. More thoughts of failure. More crappy patrons. More ass sores from sitting in that damn desk chair. But someday, I tell you, some day…