Thought Catalog

8. HOW TO STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT YOUR LIFE

Do not think in terms of “have to” or “need to.” You literally do not “have to” go to work, respond to someone’s email, or clean the bathtub. View what you are about to do as what you “want to” do. If you are unable to view something you are about to do as what you “want to” do, then don’t do it. Why would you have dinner with your co-worker if you don’t want to? If your answer is “because my co-workers will think I’m weird if I don’t” then you “want to” have dinner with your co-worker because you want your co-workers to think you’re normal. It isn’t required that your co-workers not think you’re weird. If you fall off a building you “have to” move in a downward manner, due to gravity, that can be calculated in an equation. The other physical laws of the universe are also required. Nothing else is required.

DO NOT EMAIL PEOPLE PRESSURING THEM TO RESPOND TO YOUR EMAILS

When interacting with someone, or thinking about interacting with someone, assume that your existence does not benefit them, that they don’t want to interact with you, that interacting with you is not one of their evolutionary or existential needs. Doing this will cause you to be more considerate, more inclined to improve yourself so that you may become more desirable and have a larger chance of being reciprocated, and less likely to resent the other person when they don’t reciprocate your affection or communications in an equal or—in especially belligerent cases—greater manner.

Be aware that if someone has not responded to your email or Facebook message they either don’t want to or simply haven’t done it yet, naturally and without ill-will, due to the nature of time and space, that one unit of matter cannot occupy more than one space at one time and that time is unidirectional, which results in “having priorities”—an unavoidable method of existence for non-schizophrenic humans that, in its more deliberate forms, is inherently considerate, in part because it decreases the chances of misleading people. Be aware that someone may not respond to your email even if you are amazingly considerate to them (via never pressuring them to respond to you, continuing to support their endeavors in a non-pressuring manner by participating non-pressuringly in their projects, never expressing or implying they’re causing you to feel sad or lonely or abandoned or unimportant) for 15 years after sending your email. If this happens do not feel negatively toward the other person; try to focus on liking someone for reasons that aren’t “because they like me” or “because they’re giving me attention.”

Accepting non-reciprocation quietly, without suddenly and nonsequiturly “hating” the person, is not only considerate but also productive, in that it’s probably the most effective, if not the only, way to “convince” the other person—some day, maybe, in some form—to sincerely reciprocate. If you feel jealous of who or what has been prioritized over you, or if you begin to feel resentment toward the person who isn’t reciprocating your affections, then you’re operating on the assumption that you own someone or that you’re defaultedly owed things and are being “cheated” out of those things—that the other person, or the universe, is “wronging” you. Behaving in this manner is illogical (in part because if people owned what they desired you would need to continually relent your desires to be someone else’s possession) and will cause people to dislike you and want to disassociate from you, increasing the amount of emails you send that receive no response.

There is a performance to this sort of confessional writing — the performance and testing of the self, of limits and boundaries, not only what one could do, but whether one has the nerve or dumbness to write about it, to publish it — so besides Anais Nin and Jean Rhys, Dodie Bellamy and Chris Kraus, Marie’s piece also reminded me of a young Sophie Calle or Tracey Emin or Marina Abramovic, fucking for sport, performance, commentary.

I don’t argue that there is an ethics for writing the autobiographical. However, those who are all agog that Marie C. wrote about a real, locatable person, insular in a literary scene, must not remember or know the history of modern literature, where this happened all the fucking time (D.H. Lawrence sending up Bloomsbury in Women in Love, Mary McCarthy writing of her affairs, Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Beats, I mean, I could go on and on and on. And most of the time in modern literature it is the more famous man writing about his wife or mistress). What I don’t understand, or rather, I do understand all too well, and don’t like, is why in these situations it is almost always the girl branded as the criminal for the “confessional” and asked to feel bad, to feel guilt or shame for writing the truths of their experiences, are sometimes even diagnosed as being borderline, inappropriate, toxic, messy, etc., while men have written of their affairs and sexual relationships always and their ethics are rarely questioned. This to me is a form of discipline and punishment that we internalize, which is why so many women writers self-censor. You know what it’s called when male writers write of their sexual exploits? LITERATURE. And I kept on thinking reading through all the comments, essays, dialogues, etc., around this one girl and her story, a dialogue that was mostly moralizing or dismissive, as if her youth was a disease she would outgrow someday, is that if the Guy in question — the Marxist scholar, the pop-intellectual, had written his version, it would have been published in the best locales and feted. We would never have been questioning his ethics. We would never worry or wonder that he was writing these female writers or artists as ciphers, as muses, as opposed to embodied women.

At one point I had an erection and it seemed like we were both trying to undo my belt and unbutton my jeans. I weakly imagined what would happen if my jeans were removed and heard her say “we just met” from what seemed like an enormous distance and felt that I was asleep, or dreaming, or something, while “knowing” I was moving and therefore not asleep. Some areas of my brain seemed to be thinking things in a deliberately obscured manner—to be private from other areas of my brain. At one point I expressed confusion at her outfit, referencing my inability to remove any of it, and she said something like “it’s just…a skirt…tights…” and didn’t move as I continued to weakly “paw” at it.