On Being Loathsome.
A man once asked me why I wanted to be a writer. He stopped me before I could answer: “Every writer I know is a loathsome, lonely individual.” He said this looking sideways at me, our shoulders nearly touching as we sat, side by side, along a sleek grey bar in Chelsea.
He said this as though he already doubted me, already saw in me something other than the tortured, isolated individual who could devote themselves to words, to rhetoric, to the repeated ripping of pulpy flesh from one’s soul. He also said this to me as a man who’d spent over two years penning me propositions from afar, who led with lust when a country and two screens lay between us but always seemed taken aback when I stood several inches taller than him in person.
Men like him love to do things like that: tell you certainties about yourself while secretly bemoaning the fact you wore heels.
I didn’t like what I heard, though I don’t think flashing a smile and tilting my head helped argue my case, helped convince him of what I knew to be true. I could be loathsome. I could be lonely. I could forsake everything for the search, for the mastery, for the sublime nirvana of becoming that elusive thing, that “writer.”
He had to rush off to another engagement, perhaps with his wife or perhaps with someone else whose time might actually profit him; he lingered alongside my face, still uncertain if I was leaving open a window. Perhaps trained to experiences past, he departed before I could remind him that there was never a window to begin with.
“Every writer I know is a loathsome, lonely individual.” When I first sat across from him, in a dark bar with a dark pencil skirt and my dark eyes uncertain over the menu, I told him I was leaving New York to write a book. He was good, he was; he didn’t coddle me, didn’t patronize me, didn’t blink an eye or raise a brow. When he mentioned Nabokov and I blurted out how Lolita is my favorite, he didn’t so much as smirk, despite the irony of the light pink lace of my bra subtly slipping out from my blouse. He was nearly old enough to be my, albeit very young, father.
I received an email several days later, an email that would have been the last had I been a different, less curious woman. “Given the lilliputian attention span of your generation, I find the fact that you want to write long form prose subversive, perhaps even revolutionary.” Despite the near smut that followed, my mind settled onto the word- subversive- and it remained there during our long summer of coastal correspondence and the ripe exchanges occurring occasionally afterwards.
It’s been several years since he alluded to me not being the right candidate for a writer and even more since he called me revolutionary; it’s been one year since I last saw or spoke to him. But whenever I have a moment like the one I’m having right now, when I’m taking in the lilies on my desk and the palms in my San Francisco window, when I’m relishing in the sun setting over the tiled steeple of the mission and the windows on the hills aflame in the day’s final rays, I think of how I’m not writing. I think of how he’s always been right: I’m not loathsome.
(Lonely, at times, painfully so, but never loathsome. I like being liked too much.)
But then I remind myself of how I felt that other evening, that one years and countries and past lives ago, and how I knew there was something inside of me he still hadn’t seen. With or without him or anyone else looking, I know how badly I need to tend to it.
I’m not quite sure what the process will look like; I tend to trip over my own perfectionism and worry too much about packaging and final products. But I know that I can be a writer without being loathsome just like that man can be correct without being right, just like I know the only one to remove the words and the stories from myself will be me.
