"Am I even any good at this, do you think?"
I blurted it out, and now that I'd said it, I couldn't walk it back.
She glanced at me. I glanced back and raised my eyebrows, an inaudible, "Go ahead."
"Good at what?"
I was going to do it. How gross.
"You know," I fumbled.
I made a grand gesture with my arm that swept from one shore to the other of the Puget Sound at our backs.
In that second of silence, I felt like a bloated and bumbling caricature of myself, round, clownish face painted in Revlon and lady mustache sweating in the rare Seattle sun. The least possible amount of boss bitch. CEO of Not Even With His D**k.com. Very Where's-my-stapler.
"This. Writing. Marketing. Editing. All this shit," I said with a flourish. "Am I even good at it, do you think? Or is it time to start thinking about getting, like, a job with a drill?"
I counted one, two, three whole steps in the time it took her to reply.
"Mariah," she said, pitch high in surprise, "how would I know? I don't think I've ever read anything you've written."
Everything feels so high-stakes when it's new. So important.
That changes once you find yourself embroiled in any kind of routine. I, for one, love a good rhythm. I like to have things I need to do; it makes the things I want to do feel like something to look forward to instead of just something to kill time. But being part of a routine removes you from the big picture. It puts you in the machinery of the situation, and you become boots on the ground.
Once you're removed from the big picture, you become disconnected from the forward momentum as well. Now you're stuck doing maintanence, cleaning up messes, answering to mistakes that chip away at your morale. Now your job feels more and more like work.
When that happens, you lose touch with what you're actually doing.
That's how it came to pass that I realized, in that second, I had literally been writing disposable things for years. "Placeholder text," the teams who argued our department was expendable called it. I worked at a throwaway business in an industry that specializes in using things wastefully.
But at the time, my job was the only litmus by which I had to judge myself. And if there's one thing that creative people are obsessed with doing, it's examining themselves. Changing themselves. Questioning themselves.
I laughed, but I it was just out of reflex. It took me a minute to figure out what the hell she was saying, scanning her face to figure out if she was being serious.
You see, she absolutely had read things that I'd written. All the things that I had written for the last month, at least. Charlotte and I worked together in a high-production Seattle creative studio.
She had, objectively speaking, read more of my day-to-day work than any other person I'd met in life.
"That's pretty fair." I chuckled, but to be honest, I still wasn't sure what I was laughing at.
For just a few seconds, walking together without any words in the noisy air between the tall buildings that flank the boardwalk, I felt this person I thought I was evolving into glitch, vanish, and reappear again.
But I didn't have some major epiphany. I didn't walk in from our break, stubbing out my cigarette with renewed purpose, and quit to strike out on my own. In fact, I marched right in that door and worked for many more years. Until maybe this very minute, I'm not sure I've acted on it again.
This is not a video from that lunch break that day. But it is a video of a person in the Belltown Community Garden playing Hallelujah in the sun. The office is just across the street. I spent hours and hours here over the years.
If you've met me, you can confirm the following visual: I have all my stock parts and they're not very remarkable. I am just barely tall enough to ride most carnival rides. I eat in such a manner that I cannot own a single white shirt. I am not easy on the ears, either, which is tough because I have a lot to say. If I had to describe my personality in just a couple of words, I would call it an acquired taste.
And it's much more, I fear, than a few lovable quirks. I am a strange person. (I have tried, in earnest, to be someone else, in my defense. The treatments haven't stuck yet, but I'm sure I'll try again.) In my closet, there is a wardrobe that looks the part: plaids and houndstooth and neutrals—oh my! I am mindful and demure on the clean-edged pages of my resume. I can keep up the act for six months, easy.
But I'm getting older, and I have enough data now to support a new and terribly inconvenient truth: I really do have to take me along everywhere I go. And Charlotte's words echo in my head at least once a day: I've never read anything you've written.
I profoundly hate that. Whether I'm good at it or not, it's what I like to do. And if, at the end of all those ego-crushing revisions and genius copy chucked into the infinite dumpster of the internet, I don't make so much as a cameo, I think they call that losing the plot. The point was to work up to being myself, I think, by fitting in and filing up the ranks. Then, I thought, I will have earned the right to be odd out loud.
All of that to say, if you're this far down below the fold, I'm going to use this space to be a little more me. I'm not going to make a commitment to post with any kind of frequency—that would feel like work. And, unfortunately, I don't have a point to make or anything to sell. I'm not even 100% what I'm interested in talking about. (How's that for a sales pitch?)
What I have to offer at this time is a lot of Daria energy and possibly some unsolicited music trivia. But if that sounds like a thing you could sit through, there'll be that sort of thing here.
Tentatively.
And with love.
