Fearing the Highlander Essayist
there can't only be one.
When I was nine, everyone got really into Titanic: The Movie, and I got really into Titanic: The Ship That Sank. Other girls got enthusiastically and swooningly into Leonardo DiCaprio and I got nervously and silently into Kate Winslet, Victor Garber, and conspiracy theories about rivets. Story of my life.
This isn’t to say that I wasn’t like the other girls. I was like a lot of the other girls, a lot of the other kids, really, but we have to grow up a little in order to find each other, even if we’ve been hiding in plain sight from one another the whole time. The protective coloration you take on when you’re a hyper-vigilant kid who senses your differences from your peers as thrown knives outlining you like the assistant in a carnival show, smiling and cringing through the danger because the show must go on and you need friends, don’t you?—we don’t realize what a common experience that is because to name it is to reveal it, and revealing it would be calamitous.
The beauty of the internet is that it has allowed to me to find so many other adults who were kids like me in the full flower of our weird, charming smartness. But the problem with that beauty is, when there are so many people like me in certain wonderful ways, anxiety and insecurity start to set in. You start to feel like there has to be one who is the One True Writer, the One True Quirky and Relatable Writer, whose analogies are always spot-on and who reads much more than you and their glasses probably never need to be cleaned, and that they will certainly slice your head off with a sword kept under their coat like the Highlander. That this essay has been written before and will be again, and we’re all weird, charming, smart people who have thought a lot about childhood and books and movies and media in general and queerness and sexuality and how we become who we are and ultimately are we just a great mass of millennial with a hundred thousand mouths and oh god this ship is going to hit the Too Many Essays Iceberg and we’re going to freeze to death in the ocean of opinions as surely as if, should the extremely unlikely happen and this piece gets seen by any number of people at all, someone is going to be offended by that metaphor because over fifteen hundred people actually died and I am exploiting John Jacob Astor’s ghost and all those people in Third Class, they had names, Miranda, they had lives.
You can see why Victor Garber as a haunted shipbuilder faced with his greatest fears about the flaws in his creation’s design coming true resonates with me. Because what if people pay attention to my writing? That’s the real horror. And yet, like the heroine of a gothic novel who truly does want to know what’s in the attic, here I am.
So somewhere at the intersection of I want to write more nonfiction and I am terrified of putting thoughts with my name on them out in the world, hello! With a format I’ve been attracted to since the first substack I saw in the wild, a serif font, and a dream. The fact that so many people are already into the idea of having what I think about pop into their inboxes is a wonderful birthday present.
The plan is to post once a week or so—which probably means I’m going to post once a month or so, but we’ll see—and to have this be a place to enthuse, to analyze, and to grow as a nonfiction writer. I’m going to continue the practice from my beloved and now-defunct Patreon of reviewing all the books I read to some extent or another, often using those reviews as a springboard to talk about different aspects of writing and world-building. Over the next month I’m going to write about the book I have coming out in April sometime, that big piece of salt-water taffy, The Spare. I know a lot of you are already excited about it, and I’m looking forward to talking about the process of finishing and self-publishing a book for the first time.
I feel very much beset right now, by a constellation of anxieties about COVID-19, by the Democratic primary, by how fragile life is. But I remain determined to think critically and make art, and to amuse myself, and hopefully to amuse you as well. There is no Highlander Essayist. If there was One True Writer, she would want to read other writers, too. This is what I tell myself. As I hunch deeper into my coat and hope, like Kyle Reese, that the Terminator of Self Doubt won’t track me down before I locate the Sarah Connor of Determined Expression and tell her I love her and then wow, okay, I’m shutting this metaphor down right now.
Excelsior, friends. I love you all. Happy birthday to me, and happy birthday to this serif font.