Always Hurt, Always Hating

A fond farewell

Friends, comrades, readers, and supporters: This will be the last of my Substack newsletters.

The proximate cause isn’t hard to explain, and a serviceable summary can be found here by the Defector’s Tom Ley. Like every other attempt by tech ‘innovators’ to insert themselves between artists and their work, it showed promise at first only to run in to the familiar capitalist dilemma of needing to sacrifice the creators it allegedly existed to serve in order to feed the boundless appetites of the investors who pay the bills. Like Patreon before it (and like everything that will follow), it dressed itself up in high-minded ideals only to grind them into the dirt when the money-men came calling.

Despite the great enjoyment I have had (and will continue to have) reading the works of other writers on this platform, I can’t in good conscience be a part of it myself, not anymore. It’s just another hustle to give to them that’s got, to comfort the comfortable, and, eventually, to sell all the creators who use it to grow their audiences and expand their influence for scrap.

Now would be the point at which I normally say “I’ll be moving my content back to my website, so I hope to see you there”. But if you’re a subscriber to this newsletter — and if you aren’t, how are you even reading this? — you’re already asking: What content? And believe me, I know. It’s a more than fair point. I’ve never been fully happy with my website; even when I updated it daily — a feat that now seems as distant as the Andromeda galaxy — I lacked the design skills to make it appealing, and the grind to build its audience. It was always more of a parking lot for ideas that I was lucky enough to affix my own name to, and recently, it’s just been another item on a list of things I pay for and can’t afford given what I get out of it. At the end of this summer, for the first time, I will be without a website in my name for the first time since the 1990s.

But it’s more than that. I think that I’m going to stop writing.

Not entirely, of course. Lacking any other skills that can be converted into money, and being a 52-year-old high school dropout in a job market that values those qualities less than just about anything, I will keep working as a writer and editor, because I have to earn my living. My clients will get the best I can give them. And I may write for myself, when the mood strikes me, because one cannot easily shed the habits of a lifetime. But beyond that, I think I’m done.

This was not an easy decision to arrive at. I have written and spoken before about what relief there was in admitting to myself after so many years that I was not a great writer, that I would not produce the Great American (or even Mediocre Chicago) novel in my lifetime. It freed me up from the unrealistic expectation — maintained only by me — that I was meant for better things, and allowed me, for a time, to focus on producing what I hoped was smaller, better, more attainable work.

In recent months, though, even this seemed too high a hill to climb. As I began putting off more and more writing, as I made excuse after excuse for why I didn’t finish this project, why I didn’t expand this idea, why I didn’t work on this story, I began to ask broader, more meaningful questions: Are my ideas really that good? Is the execution that well-crafted? Are my exquisite political opinions doing anything at all to change the world for the better? And each time, the answer was no.

Beyond that, I began to understand that the world did not need to hear from me. I was not only not getting any joy from writing — one of the few things that has consistently brought me joy throughout my life — I was also denying myself joy in other areas of life because of the guilt, shame, and failure I felt from not writing. I was growing resentful, prickly, and bitter, and what’s more, it was from pressures that were being exerted by no one but myself. I began to violate one of the cardinal rules I have followed in life: Don’t complain about something nobody asked you to do in the first place.

It was a familiar sting: the sting of alienation. I was becoming estranged from my own passions. Why was I salty with other people for not helping me with projects they had no reason to care about? Why was I beating myself up over the failure of my socialist tirades to amount to anything but preaching to an ever-smaller choir? Why was I letting my desire to write about movies, television, comics, books, and other art that needed no more champions or enemies than they already had intrude on my actual enjoyment of them? I was routinely breaking another personal rule, one which said “Critique the work you experience, not the work you wish you were experiencing”. Worse still, I was stripping the pleasure I got out of the culture to appliqué it to a model no one needed to see. I found myself drifting towards watching things I had no interest in just so I could write about why I hated them, and it made me feel like a crank.

I don’t want to keep doing this. I don’t want to deny myself time with my wife and friends so I can crank out content nobody cares about. I don’t want to indulge in critique for the sake of critique, writing for the sake of writing. I want to get back to my love of reading, which I do less and less of these days; and if it was reading that inspired me to write, it’s an irony that I don’t care to turn over and over in my mind anymore. I am indescribably grateful for all the support you have given me over the years, which is why I feel like such a heel for going on at such length about why I am so exhausted cultivating an audience that never grows. It is time to return to reading, watching, and listening to work done by people who had the time, talent, dedication, and good fortune to do what I cannot.

I have been writing in some capacity since I was a boy, and there is a great melancholy in putting that boy’s dreams in cold storage. I have been writing for publication for thirty-five years, and it is long past time that I admit to the limitations of my abilities and to the way creative work that will never be realized has a way of eating up time that, in retrospect, seems ghastly and self-devouring to me. I will never fully stop writing, but I must finally and fully take in the wisdom of Cyril Connolly’s judgment that it is better to write for one’s self and have no audience than to write for an audience and have no self. Even writing this, what was meant to be a humble explanation of why I can’t go on, I feel the old urge tickling at me, teasing me that this pretentious mess of self-recrimination is something that people want or need to read. It’s madness.

Connolly was a phenomenal figure. His greatest work, Enemies of Promise, was the greatest of contradictions: a great work of art about a brilliant young man’s inability to create a great work of art. No one has written more or written better about the failure of youthful promise, the poisonous neurosis that bleeds from the creator to the creation, and what being unable to live up to one’s potential can turn you into. When I first read it, in my early 20s, I recognized enough of myself in it that it resonated with me for decades; but not enough that I realized that it was not just an analysis, it was a prophecy. In it, in this baffling and wonderful book, a masterpiece of his own failure, he made the claim which I must now embrace: “Never will I make that extra effort to live according to the reality which alone makes good writing possible.”

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all that you have done for me over these many years; it has been gratifying beyond conception and appreciated beyond reason. I am sorry to end it this way, but unlike everything else I’ve tried, it deserves an ending.