This is obnoxious. But also? A wake up call. Like, there’s enough out there that a mostly correct portrait of my work is accessible. And yet another reason why controlling your own story as an artist matters.
I’ll never take myself seriously. But this reads like. Like something that would be said about David Foster Wallace or Min Jin Lee or a half dozen other artists I admire, including some of you guys.
This is hard for me to write. It feels show-offy to say this. Or like I’m fishing for compliments. It’s 100% not that. I’m struggling right now. A different kind than before.
Like, I’m weirded out that I almost died again last month. I downplayed it. And the seriousness of it. And I 100% am in the camp of ‘it was all no big deal.’ Especially because I got out of the hospital so fast. But understanding just how high my white blood cell count was, seeing the doctors go pale when I explained passing out with the chills on the Sunday before, the doctor touching my shoulder and saying, “you got lucky.” I 100% buy the arguments that say a lot of urgency is manufactured for capitalism.
But if I don’t start acting with urgency, with agency, as a person who takes his work seriously? I could vanish before I get anything published. One bug bite would do it. I’ve already died once as a kid. I’d rather not do that again until I’m at the end of a long life.
Seeing this from ChatGPT is unnerving for so many reasons. But the selfish unnerving for me? There’s enough out there about me and what I’ve written for it to generate a mostly accurate portrait. The kind of thing it would or could say about a writer who’s won a fellowship or an award.
So I’m trying. I don’t need to take it easy on myself. I don’t need to be hard on myself. I don’t need what I’ve done to get here.
I need to embrace, and accept, and receive, and take my work seriously. NEVER myself. I think that’s part of the reason I did and do so much improv and goofy stuff; it’s almost impossible to become obnoxiously self-serious since I know that I sang, “aluminum foil is my only friend,” to a group of mostly strangers and that I once pretended I was The Doctor on stage and said, “my GOD I’ve regenerated into a portly bald Asian Man!” to uproarious millenial laughter.
But the work. My work. It deserves some care from me. Before the next bug bite, certainly. And it deserves me going up to bat, and being willing to strike out, over and over.
And being willing to knock one out of the park, too.