The pits, 8/15/22

What, loyal readers of this newsletter may be wondering, was Chelsea even doing in the year between last August and this past July? Usually when people go on long hiatuses they emerge with a story of personal calamity or drop big impressive news, like that they've written a novel that's somehow already won the Pulitzer or that they've gestated triplets. I'm sorry to say that I can offer up neither as an excuse—nothing particularly good or bad has befallen me in the past year. I haven't even contracted The Disease yet, to my continuing astonishment, though I did undergo a couple of root canals. My email drafts folder is littered with the false starts of newsletters, mostly chronicling my attempts to finally fix my sleep schedule, knit a sweater, and perfect my whistled rendition of Mozart's Queen of the Night aria.

But there was a problem, and it began last August. The problem was, pretty much, that I almost got a job—a really prestigious job, basically the only job regular people think of in the vanishingly rare moments they are forced to think about book critics. I applied on a whim and was then stunned to be asked when I might be free for an interview, and also could I write up a 1-2 page memo detailing my approach to book criticism and a list of books I'd review every week for the next four months, plus a list of 15 books I would have chosen to review from the prior six months that the outlet hadn't already covered?

I spent three frantic days writing this memo: hours sifting through old emails and spreadsheets, reading countless book reviews, trawling through the 50-page pdf catalogs of every publisher I had ever heard of. I felt some amount of giddiness, of course. I had, after all, suddenly been transported to a bizarre alternate universe in which people who made hiring decisions actually thought I was a reasonable candidate for this job, instead of a hack writer who was also a baby who didn't know anything yet. But now I had to conceal the fact that I was a hack baby who didn't know anything by writing a memo that was knowing, sophisticated, comfortably able to deliver intelligent opinions on everything from how to fix democracy to the philosophy and works of Fernando Pessoa. I was realizing, with a horrible certainty, that I wasn't ready for primetime—I was too weird, too specific, too interested in my own little things to even attempt to be authoritative, and no one had realized this but me.

I didn't get the job, unsurprisingly. By the end of the month, it was even a relief. But I also felt like I couldn't tell anyone about any of it. Nothing had come of the whole affair, after all, and I'm not sure there was even a way to bring it up in conversation without it coming off as a weird flex. But I had spent an entire month with my emotions in twitchy, painful suspension while I was waiting to hear back—I would have anxiety dreams, and then, when I woke up, I'd compulsively check my email even though receiving any new emails made my heart rate shoot up, which made me a useless mess the rest of the day. Eventually all of this bottling-up and evasive answers to "how have you been?" curdled into a confusing kind of shame: my life had become obsessive and boring, and who even went to pieces over a job thing that was by all accounts incredibly flattering anyway? I didn't even tell my parents or sister about it until four months after the fact, and only then with the air of delivering a grave confession.

But I had been changed. I came out of last August, in fact, with the conclusion that if I didn't get the job, I no longer wanted to be a book critic at all. How could I, if I didn't even—if I was really honest with myself—want a job that pretty much every book critic wants? And so when I finally found out, I spent the day ceremoniously purging my email inbox of every book publicity email I had ever gotten, which I had kept on the notion that they might be useful one day. I didn't just archive them; I deleted them. I was no longer a book critic. 

Of course, this did not change the fact that I continued to receive assignments to write book reviews and continued to accept those assignments, and pretty much just carried on as usual. (Much to my boyfriend's bewilderment, as he had been subjected to many a dramatic pronouncement about all of this.) It was, however, noticeably psychologically easier to go about my life this way. I was no longer striving to reach a peak of success that had somehow remained both ambiguous (when could you be said to have “made it”?) and distant (wherever it was, I definitely wasn’t there yet). I had stepped off the path altogether.

This seemed healthy, mature—perhaps now I could finally figure out what I actually wanted for myself instead of what I had been taught to want. For months every morning I would sit in bed with my laptop for two hours, surrounded by pillows and blankets, and try to write "my own stuff." At first, this felt great. Hey look, I’m actually doing this writer thing! Who needs external validation? But it turns out sitting quietly with yourself and writing things that no one has asked you to write is hard, like attempting to win a staring contest with the abyss hard. You open up a Word document and are immediately besieged by your own inadequacies and inarticulacies, and any visions of grandeur you cook up in your head are dashed pretty much as soon as you type anything. (Just me?) Everything I wrote turned out forced and pretentious, and I started going around feeling deep in my bones that I was a bad writer, an unsalvageable one—something I used to think was physically impossible for people who had managed to appear in the New York Times. Writers are always saying that the insecurity never goes away, and young writers are always never believing them. 

To stave off my yawning sense of purposelessness, I became dutiful. I tracked my time more assiduously than ever, tried to only ever do one thing at a time, and became very good about doing the dishes and going on walks and checking the mail and clearing my inbox. But at night when I had unscheduled time, I hardly knew what to do with myself. I wasn't interested in anything anymore; whenever I'd consider starting any sort of project I would go through a strenuous process of convincing myself I wanted to do anything at all. It got to the point where one of the items on my to-do list was, simply, "think about what I like to do." 

None of this vague personal quasi-drama made for very interesting writing either, I told myself. This was yet more rarefied, navel-gazey stuff that was totally irrelevant to non-writers' lives. Who even cared? I was convinced that none of my experiences were important enough to write about, which mysteriously did not lead to the production of 1500-word newsletters. And the longer I went without writing, the more intimidating and high-stakes the very act of putting words on virtual paper became, and the more boring and unworthy everything started to seem.

The only reason you're reading about any of this is because of Justin Bieber, so please direct all your complaints to him. One weekday, I was sitting braless and unwashed in my pajamas sometime around noon, clicking around on the internet and feeling for once aimless and okay with it. My careful schedule was in shambles, but I was jet-lagged and had just spent more than two weeks in a foreign country, so surely some allowances could be made. It was under these conditions that I first listened to "Peaches." 

"Peaches,” for those of you who live under rocks like I do, is a 2021 single off the Biebs’ newest album and apparently a worldwide smash hit. It is not a particularly elaborate song. Nearly half of it is just the chorus repeated over and over again, and the chorus doesn't even really cohere, lyrically—it's mostly a series of disparate but convenient clichés. The dude even rhymes the words "shit" and "yeah" with themselves:

I got my peaches out in Georgia (oh yeah shit)
I get my weed from California (that's that shit)
I took my chick up to the north, yeah (badass bitch)
I get my light right from the source, yeah (yeah, that's it)

And yet. I spent two hours that day listening to "Peaches" on repeat, completely mesmerized by the video (particularly the parts where Justin Bieber struts around in front of the camera in an orange suit and a bandana), and proceeded to have an epiphany. "Peaches" is slouchy, easy, a song with almost nothing to it—just rhyme some words together, come up with a single verse, get two other people to come up with verses of their own, chorus x4—but it works. It's summery and crisp, and I found it almost unbearably appealing. 

And, well, why couldn't it all be that effortless?, I found myself thinking after I had clicked the little "replay" button on YouTube for the 32nd time. What if I stopped trying to control my life so rigidly, stopped tracking every minute of my time, freed myself from my constant sense of duty? What if I planned less? What if I no longer forced myself to do things "for my own good"?  What if I embarked on a completely new path, a life informed entirely by the dictates of total hedonism??? 

Okay, so I didn't become a hedonist. But what I realized was that creating things—art, whatever—didn't necessarily have to be as hard as I was making it. I had been contorting myself into all sorts of strained attitudes, in my writing and in life, on the conviction that who I was wasn't particularly good enough, but perhaps if I disguised that fact in the most artful way I could I might get there in the end. But this was sad and self-dramatizing, not to mention counterproductive. Because it seems to me now that there’s really no way around it: you need to use what you have. You try to make it as good as you can, of course, but some of it will suck and some of it will turn out magically amazing and you have very little control over any of it.  This is apparently what I have, and you're all just going to have to deal with it. 

—Chelsea