The Overexamined Life of A.V. Phibes

Shedding the incognito: trying to come to terms with my own identity.

So, For the past two years or so, I've been trying to be "incognito."  Now I once again want to be incog-NEATO! (oh god, please make me stop!)  But seriously, identity can be a slippery eel that's hard to keep a grip on.  

I had a dream when I was a young whippersnapper that my life would be interesting and exciting.  The price one pays for this is facing a greater number of challenges, both internal and external.  When I was younger, my battles always seemed to be external:  Me vs. the world and other people.  With age, the battles became more internal: me vs. me vs. me.  The downside of an "interesting" life is that it has to change all the time and you have to change with it. 

Often, when I'm in transition between one "self" and another, I withdraw into a sort of neutral place and re-emerge when I feel like I'm on steady footing.  Often the transition involves rejecting the past self.  Sometimes I have this visual picture of myself from one year to the next, all the me's standing side by side, then I see all the me's make a 45 degree turn to the right and slap the preceding one upside the head.  And so I rejected the past self.

Only problem is: then I started thinking "but wait!  my past self DID have so much fun!  I STILL WANT THAT!" and so, in the process of rejection, there was a sort of re-integration.  Thank god, because this "neutral" phase has gone on for almost three damned years.  

Much of my problem stemmed from placing my "self" out there for public consumption. I made myself a "brand;" and not only my social life, but my career was tied to it. I chafe under the pressure of having to behave a certain way and live up to specific expectations and when I perceived the "expectation" as coming from some anonymous consciousness in the outside world, I started hiding inside.

Now, being "incognito" has been kind of a lovely learning experience in itself. When I was a kid, I felt like an outsider involuntarily... I was "different" and didn't want to be.  When I was a young adult, I decided to be "different" on purpose.  It became very important to me to be seen and to express myself in everything I did.  Once that became a duty instead of a privilege, it just wasn't as fun anymore.  It felt burdensome. I didn't want other people to be telling me who "myself" was. I went from "freedom" meaning being able to express myself to meaning I didn't have to express myself.

These incognito years were my chance to feel what it's like to be "normal."  I mean, there's only so "normal" a person can be in New York, but I just tried to be as neutral as possible. I still have a certain "physical expressiveness" (aka: awkward nerdiness) that gives me away, but if I dressed normal, I could get away with it.  It was nice not to be pre-judged. It was nice to be able to conceal or reveal myself willfully.  It was nice to feel invisible. It was nice to be happy letting other people shine instead of clamoring for the spotlight.  It was nice to watch from the outside for awhile.

Now I'm trying to take the timeline of my life and take all the disparate parts and re-assemble them into some integrated whole of who I am now.  I'm also trying to balance the negative and the positive.  I've always veered between either extreme.  Either from the egotistical "I WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW HOW GREAT MY LIFE IS!" to the paranoid: "Oh god...everyone just thinks I'm a name-dropping attention whore! Maybe I'm giving the wrong impression!"  And the problem when you "put yourself  out there" is that people will confirm both sides.  Trouble was, I was at the point where I was like "I CAN'T BE WHAT YOU WANT ME TO BE! I WILL ONLY DISAPPOINT YOU! I CAN'T TAKE THE PRESSURE!"  

So, yeah, self-re-assembly.  Stay tuned.

Who am I? I am both somebody and nobody.

 So part of where my thought process in the previous post came from the fact that, everything I've done for the past few years, even if i got paid for it, hasn't felt particularly "real."  Every year since 2005, I've described my activities as "dicking around."  

What happened in 2005 was that I was on a rollercoaster going up, up, up and was, soon enough, on a rollercoaster going down, down, down, and I realized that I really had no control over the situation.  That my good fortune wasn't because I was awesome and productive and my bad fortune wasn't because I was suddenly horrible and lazy.  Things just changed and it was external to me.  I worked for my success, but I would not have had it (or my subsequent failure) if not for random market forces that I had no sway over.

I think the major thing that happened at the cresting of that rollercoaster was that I stopped thinking of the things I did as being real and concrete.  Most of the things I did started seeming pointless.  I just do things. I'm waiting until something "catches" again.  Until I'm making mad dough again, I keep considering everything I do to be "dicking around."  Still, I keep doing things because that's all one can do.

Self-identifying as a writer: Not just for douches anymore?

I've always had trouble with the "what do you do?" question. I went through my phase of just answering "office manager," but now I usually stick with the vague "designer,"  which, of course, is true enough because that's actually what I more or less make money at.  Only recently have I been internally questioning: can I self-identify as a writer?  

The New Yorker in me says "Don't say it unless you can put your money where your mouth is," the hater in me says "Self-identifying as a writer when you don't do it for a living is for pretentious douches."  And yet... and yet...

Here is what's been rolling around in the ol' brain pan:  The "publishing industry," or, that which, for all of my life, has been the gatekeeper of what is "real" writing and what is just fucking around (if it's published it counts, if it isn't it doesn't) Is undergoing a tremendous sea change right now.  "books" and "newspapers" and "magazines" and "being published" as we have known them in the past, may be going the way of the corded telephone and the fax-copier.  

What I'm saying is, with all the game-changers of the past decade, blogging is kinda the new writing.  At least, that is to say, it's the most contemporary medium and it doesn't seem to be going away.  Sure, 95% of it is crap, but the 5% that isn't is getting read by people as much as a newspaper or magazine.  Also, as digital distribution replaces those cumbersome paper books and renders printing and shipping costs irrelevant, it's going to change the types and amounts of writing that publishers publish. It's also changing how important a "publisher" even needs to be. From the "gatekeeper" standpoint, the times they are a changin'.

But all this is just random thought.  What I'm trying to get at is:  Bitches, I'm a writer.  I know how to write.  I may possibly know how to write better than I know how to do anything else.  I have never been published, I have never TRIED to get published, for all I know, I may never BE published, but I've been writing for ten years and people have been reading it.  Sometimes a lot of people have been reading it.  Possibly more people than have read those novels with their covers torn off in the sale bin.  Also, since the publishing industry is often trying to turn a buck by pandering to dullards, is publication really such a badge of quality? Have you read "Who Moved my Cheese?"  I mean, have you? If so, how is your head feeling after you felt compelled to beat it against a brick wall? Mine is still a little tender.

Anyhow, being able to string together a grouping of sentences that aren't retarded and don't bore people to sleep is not a skill that everyone possesses.  In fact, I am learning that it is rarer than one would think.  I was once sent an excerpt of a book that someone was planning on self-publishing and it took me about 15 minutes to read the first two pages because the writing was so cumbersome that every laborious sentence was like a pit of quicksand bogging down your progress to the next.  And this was someone who clearly thought they were "a writer." 

And, that, perhaps, is why the hater in me is so down of self-proclaimed "writers:" because the claim is so often accompanied by a certain pomposity and self-delusion.  I didn't want to be "that guy."  I feel like I'm perfectly competent at writing, but I have no "credentials."  Still, I read a lot of stuff on the internets and some of the writers whose bloggy bits I most anticipate aren't even writers.  They're chefs who are good at writing or artists who are good at writing or whatevers who are good at writing.  Can one be considered a writer just by merit of being good at writing?