Three essays in, and I’m already worried about it. Oversharing, that is. Which is funny, because for most of my life, I’ve been quite the secret keeper.
I tried to type the original secret just now. I’ve typed it out in several other essays, but an internal censor blocked my request for this one. I’m writing an essay about oversharing, and I was about to just hand out the original secret that taught me to keep all the other ones? For free? Please. Buy me dinner first, you schmuck.
I’m being flippant. But I am afraid. I keep reading over the past three essays I posted, wondering if they’re too much. Ditto for my About page. It’s all much more personal than I’m used to being online.
We live in the age of oversharing. Social media allows anyone to confess secrets. And people do. I’ve learned so many shocking things about acquaintances. On the one hand, that’s brave of them, and on the other hand, I think we’re all exhausted. We’re simply interacting with too many people, many of whom we don’t see in our daily lives. We’re ingesting too many details about the lives of people who are not part of ours.
During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, I read an article about how to reconcile compassion fatigue and social responsibility. I could see the author treading a fine line, caught between two camps of liberal rhetoric. Take care of yourself, you deserve it, your mental health comes first. But also, check your privilege, other people have it so much worse. Why are you not doing more to help? Do you only care about yourself?
The article’s takeaway was to find a balance between the two: self-care and activism, that is. It didn’t say how. It was just a couple sentences tacked on at the end, vague as anything. I couldn’t help but feel that this was a cop-out, and that the author was trying to have their cake and lecture it too.
What separates self-expression from self-indulgence? Like with so many endeavors, it seems to be in the execution. This is why I was drawn to essays. Essays can turn the personal into art.
Maybe. That’s the impression I’ve gotten at least, caught as I am between my own creative ambitions and the more immediate catharsis promised by the outlets available to us common folk. I’m talking of course about Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, the service formerly known as Facebook, and all the rest. The little elitist who lives in my head rent-free tries to convince me that withholding things somehow makes me better, more mature and restrained. Of course, if I were so mature and restrained, I wouldn’t indulge the little elitist in my brain so much. I’d evict him straight away without listening to his whispers: we’re different because…we’re better because…
In the piece I wrote for ShoutoutLA, the piece that made me realize me how much I need to write essays, I talk a lot about sublimation. I’m still a big fan. It’s the closest thing I can nail down as my purpose in life. When done right, art makes the grotesque beautiful. A depressing childhood becomes a harrowing narrative of survival and growth. Catastrophe leads to journeys of self-discovery and reinvention. An embarrassing failure becomes something to learn from, an amusing anecdote with lessons for everybody. Unrequited love becomes poetic, not creepy. I could go on, but I think the concept is clear. Make good art and you can make people care.
Sort of. In college, I remember my therapist lambasting this idea when I confessed my ambitions to turn success into empathy, to fill the void that swirls at the center of my being and sucks in validation like sunlight into a black hole. When a friend of mine used to roast me for specific moments of attention whoring, that’s when I would joke back: “Listen, I am a void, and I will never be filled.” It never got a laugh. She looked more disturbed than anything else. But in spite of what the little elitist in my head tells me, it’s not such an uncommon thing to have a void inside of you. With the way life breaks all of us, it’s probably more rare to be whole.
“Think of artists you like,” my college therapist said, trying to bring me back down to earth. “Do you care about their daily lives? Do you think about them every day?”
No. Like most Westerners, I live in a bubble of unintentional solipsism. I am the center. I think of myself foremost, and to truly listen to other people, to truly understand a different way of thinking and being, to consider other people as more than side characters in my story, to acknowledge that other people might have it worse, I have to put in the work.
I do subscribe to the idea that artists are trying to earn attention, often to make up for something that they lacked growing up. But this brings me back to the idea of sublimation. If you can earn attention by way of captivation, isn’t that a win-win?
I hope so, but after living in LA for six and a half years, it’s hard to wax poetic about the nature of art without hearing echoes of the many artists I’ve met who I fear becoming: the ones who traffic in narcissism.
Disclaimer: my current therapist has told me that narcissism is a very specific and misunderstood disorder. People misrepresent this very specific disorder by throwing the term around whenever they think someone is self-obsessed. My therapist’s clarification came up during a session in which I was worrying about my own narcisstic tendencies. So, in that way, I was focusing too much on how I focus too much on myself. And in this moment, I am focusing too much on how I’ve focused too much on focusing on myself.
And this is why I’m tired all the time.
The funny thing is, it might be the best time to be a traumatized person, if you can spin it right. Trauma is becoming increasingly commodified. There are trauma influencers now, of all things, and illness influencers too. Celebrity after celebrity comes forward to reveal some disorder and remove the stigma. Casting directors seek out groups of people who were once spurned. An online tell-all goes viral and the informant is celebrated. The word brave is thrown around a lot. So are the big T word and D word themselves. Trauma. Disability.
But it is brave to come forward. For many of these individuals, it was a risk. They were pioneers of the public space. And movements like MeToo did change the world. So did Black Lives Matter. What I worry about more is the second wave that seems to follow each progressive movement, when corporations get involved and money starts flowing and over time things that were once so raw and visceral are incorporated into brands. The classic film Network comes to mind.
In entertainment especially, everyone seems to be looking for their angle. I know I’ve considered it, more than I care to admit. The most common thing I see on the About pages of literary agents is a paragraph or two about how they are seeking underrepresented voices. This is also true for basically every screenplay contest I’ve submitted for. I also encountered this a lot in writing groups.
“Please bring your friends,” one white organizer said. “Especially people of color.”
I always cringe when I think about that, the sheer tokenism of it. I cringe especially because I did bring a friend of color once, and you could feel palpable excitement from the group. A real live black woman. What a find. And I did pat myself on the back for having a friend of color to bring, and then I realized how gross that was, and then I realized that recognizing my own grossness was a sign of personal progress, and then I realized that patting myself on the back for recognizing my own grossness was perhaps even more gross…
And this is also why I’m tired all the time.
There’s a real paradox with white liberals. It seems the more we try, the more we mess up. Whether these are necessary failures to learn from or evidence that we’re still missing the point, I’m not sure yet. I don’t think any of us are. This is a liminal period of history. Many arcs are coming to a climax. The world is changing faster and faster.
Whenever I go too far down the rabbit hole of white guilt, I think back to my Southern Baptist days and the self-condemnation required to show God that I was redeemable. You can take the boy out of church, but…
I am not so pure myself, I repeat as a reminder. My motivations can be murky. I have been gross. I have been complicit. I have wanted to be better than other white people. I have grown resentful of the white-passing paradox while wanting to disregard the nuances of others in that category. And while in the bazaar of disadvantages catering almost exclusively to other liberals, I have also pondered what angles to sell.
And I do have my angles. I have my diagnoses. I have my sad and scary childhood anecdotes. I have my disturbing tales of adolescent anti-Semitism. I have the college years with their depressing behind-the-scenes commentary. I have the LA war stories from the battle royale synonymous with pursuing a career in the arts. I have my catalog of the big T word and my catalog of the big D word and they’re a two-part set. You can’t buy one without the other.
The other day I used the big D word. Twice. I have technically been diagnosed with three conditions that fall under the category of disabled, as per federal guidelines. Three. Count ‘em. Have a taste. That’s Grade A dysfunction right there. But I never checked that little box on the job applications before. It didn’t feel right. Whether that was because of foolish pride or guilt for the many advantages that I do have, I don’t know. Maybe it’s an even older compulsion: the idea that secrets make me special, and that bearing them makes me honorable. That one has been with me for as long as I can remember. But the other day I saw a job that I really wanted, and to increase my chances, to sneak in through the government-mandated quota, I checked the box. For the first time, I called myself the big D word. That same day, I submitted to an agent who said she was seeking manuscripts with D word representation. And so, I used the big D word again, and unlike with the job application, I specified two of my long-withheld diagnoses.
“Although Blue Tendril is fantasy, much of it was informed by my own experiences with…”
I felt liberated, for a little bit. I had been diagnosed. I had struggled. I had experienced hate crimes. I had made my therapists gasp when I told them stories from childhood. Why shouldn’t I own all of that? Wasn’t I declassifying my secrets now? Isn’t that what drew me to art in the first place? Isn’t that why I started writing essays? In my quest for self-actualization, wasn’t this progress?
I haven’t heard back from the agent yet, but the job in question sent me a form rejection within a few days. That’s when I started to feel dirty.
Man, I thought. I whored myself out for nothing.
And that is how it feels sometimes, when I clutch my mental folder of the private distressing things that I also hope will make me special, when I prepare all my little rebuttals to the barrage of privilege checking. That’s especially how it feels when the little elitist in me starts to get competitive: they think that’s bad…that’s nothing…we’ll show them…they’ll be so disturbed…
The Jewish question seems to really confuse people, Jewish people included. Depending on where you stand, Jews can be quirky white people, off-white fakers, the architects of every conspiracy known to humanity, or the Chosen People. It’s a real toss-up.
But I’m not a regular Jew. I’m a Golden Jew, a contradictory Aryan-looking kvetch who grew up more Christian than anything else. Like Boz, Golden Jew is a nickname that I’ve grown very attached to. It captures something specific that I couldn’t find the right words for until recently. But, like so many of the asides that I cram into these word counts, my status as a Golden Jew will need its own essay.
For about four years, eighth grade through junior year, I was a kike. I was a pet Jew. They told me so. Every day. And then one day it stopped. I haven’t been called a kike since. I’ve had JEW thrown into my face plenty, particularly when people thought I was being cheap, but not kike. Not since high school.
I don’t know yet if anti-Semitism will be part of the Golden Jew essay, but I suspect it will have to be. My essays keep spilling over into each other. In this case, I wouldn’t be the Golden Jew I am now if I hadn’t been a kike first. Eighth grade was the year I decided to take it back. They had made me into a kike, but I would remake myself into a Jew. Capital J.
But I’m going on too long. I said all that would be its own essay or several. I have to leave it for now. I’ll never finish this one otherwise.
Until I can write about the big J question in more detail, it would suffice to say that I have a lot of imposter syndrome when it comes to my Jewishness. Also, it doesn’t seem accepted under most categories of diversity. Jewishness seems to have a very volatile value in the market of oversharing.
“I would like Jewish stories that don’t focus on anti-Semitism.”
That’s a tweet I saw on Twitter, posted by a literary agent. I bristled at it. With less than a 140 characters, she had disregarded a whole chapter of my T word catalog. She had also made that chapter feel trite, overdone. But later, I chuckled. At least this agent was honest. That’s something. I bet she said what a lot of other agents were thinking.
When we talk about the Suffering Olympics, I think what we’re really discussing is the realization that we all have only so much time, energy, and focus. Empathy requires all three of those. When we talk about virtue signaling, I think what we’re really talking about is the difficulty of being truly altruistic. None of us is one person. We all have many selves housed in one body, and all these selves want different things. When we talk about cries for attention, I think what we’re really talking about is how hard it can be to hold that precious resource, to be understood, to pierce the bubbles of solipsism bumping against each other, to stand out in the saturated algorithms of curated content.
But those are all just guesses from a tired and confused kvetch. And I am tired of carrying around my catalogs; I’m tired of worrying whether people will want to look through them, and whether after that, they’ll want to look through them again. I’m tired of feeling competitive, and I’m tired of feeling guilty about feeling competitive. I’m tired of debating whether to sell my T word and D word entries, and I’m tired of trying to figure out what they’re worth. But, most of all, as I write essay after essay and debate posting each one, I’m worried about the same thing that led me to write this particular entry.
I’m worried that I will say too much.