Sometimes, a ~suffering artist
Which also means being super duper lame
Hello! Happy Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc.
I apologize for the unplanned radio silence these last couple of weeks. I’ve been working on two stories for publication, and it turns out I need some serious practice at managing multiple writing tasks at once. I’m coming to you on a Friday because I want to try that out as the new weekly Kitchen Sink column day. A spicy little experiment these next few weeks.
This last while that I haven’t been shoving essays in your faces, things have been different in my freelance life— a little less romantic and a little more grindstone. It’s not bad; allegedly it’s actually a sign of success, though I’m wary of success that feels like stress. But it has prompted a host of new emotions and thoughts that demand teasing out. (See: it’s broken my brain). In fits of panic over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been writing some of my feelings here.
Though they are far from groundbreaking, I think they merit sharing for the sole reason that they are, for better or worse, the truth!
The other morning, I woke up to realize I had missed a Zoom interview for a story due next Friday. I just forgot about it and slept right through. Not only did I feel like an extraordinarily unprofessional fool, I was also just plain confused. I’d been really looking forward to speaking with this person and had spent days tracking her down to secure a time. It was for a story I’d spent weeks pitching until finally selling. But then, I doubt it helped that I’d been up writing until the wee hours the night before, my mind unraveling trying to perfect a different story.
After rolling my eyes at myself 15 times, sending a pathetically long apology email, and writing a bunch of other unnecessary emails as a sort of self-punishment, I met Sean Foley for lunch, where I pushed cơm tấm around on my plate and bemoaned the recently unearthed fact that I’m a total failure.
Then, I made him sit and listen to me groan at a cafe while I smoked three of his cigarettes, accidentally ashing into my coffee and proceeding to drink it anyway.
Lately, I’ve been experiencing a few flashes of success in the pan of my ~journalism pursuits, and I’m not handling it very well!
Why is it so paralyzing when dreams (puke in my mouth!) start coming true? These last few weeks, finally having opportunities to do what I’ve said for years are the things I want to do more than anything, have felt like heavy, impending doom. Like that Star Wars scene where they’re steadily getting crushed by a trash compactor, I’ve been finding it impossible to imagine it all ending well.
Except I’m not being crushed by a trash compactor (something I’d never have the wherewithal or droid friends to escape); I’m doing journalism (something I have a whole degree in). Dare I say, something I’m a little bit good at. On a practical level, it shouldn’t be this scary: do interviews, think thoughts, write words. I’ve done it before, and (allegedly) I’ll do it again.
I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s the sensation of being in the throes of something that has heretonow always been pretty hypothetical. Coming face-to-face with an ambition is like having to actually ask a question that was always nice as a daydream.
It’s like telling someone you love them for the first time, or admitting to a friend that you’re upset with them. You have so many reasons to believe it will be okay, and so much hope, but in that turning-point moment when the conversation actually begins, you’re opening yourself to the possibility that it won’t go how you expected (or hoped, or idealized). It’s safer to know you love someone and not tell them, because the world of possibilities need only exist in your mind’s eye.
I’ve been conversing with myself a lot about this, mostly late at night when the Swirling Thoughts of Death render me unable to sleep. I’ve also had a few chats with my journal and keyboard, the very reason this blog is so delayed.
Among the things that keep floating to the top of my brain are little voices (okay, screaming voices), fearful that this is all one big fluke. It’s like I’m operating under the assumption that I’m not so much completing an assignment I was hired on good faith to do, but rather trying to trick people who will, at any second, realize that I’m a fraud. Thoughts like, “If I do a good job, then nobody will know that I’m totally lying about being able to do a good job.”
I’m not saying this for encouragement or compliment. You have all given me more time, love, and kind words than I could ever hope for. It’s more to be honest with myself that I’m still wrangling with seeing myself as the very thing I want others to see me as. You also might be reading this and thinking: You’re out of date, girl; there’s a timeworn term for that now.
“Imposter syndrome.” It’s something that I wavered on publishing about here because, well, it’s been written and talked about so many times it feels humiliatingly hackneyed to mention.
It feels similar to talking about the struggle~ of being taken seriously as a woman. Something I also had the urge to write about last week after I sat down with an interviewee and they asked me if this was “for a school project.”
Since then, I’ve started wearing Very Serious Shirts and Tight Ponytail in all interviews. I decided not to bring that up because it seems like such a vapid complaint. Then I kind of did just now. Oops! Silly woman brain.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to bring up impostor syndrome either, until the thoughts just really were all I could think about. And I figured, as is often my modus operandi, typing through it, no matter how embarrassing, might just be a relieving anecdote.
There are the tangible people who I feel afraid of letting down.
There are editors who, in the freelancing social sphere of exclusively email, exist as simply a white background with formal black text outlining an assignment in professional terms. I don’t know anything about them: how they like to dress, if they have kids, if they find me funny. Aside from occasional nuances in lexicon, they are robotic arbiters of assignments, personified to me as targets just high enough to be inevitably disappointed by my work.
Then there are sources, the people who speak to me for a given story. In journalism, we operate under the premise that the collective pursuit of truth and good storytelling is sufficient compensation for the time and honesty of the people we base our stories on. But I’ve still always found it a hefty ask to implore someone to give me an hour of their time in order to simply help me better understand something. Especially when I can’t promise that I’ll even mention them, one of the other possible remittances for sharing your story with a journalist.
As someone prone to spiraling, this wrecks my head. If I were to write a story about, say, ducks, and I interview a duck expert, it always leaves me wondering, “Why isn’t the duck expert just writing this article? Am I simply extracting from this duck expert only to write something they could do better? How can I possibly do right by them with an assigned word count of just 1,000 words?” And on and on and on. Quack, quack.
And don’t even get me started on family and friends. We’ll be here all day!
And then there are the more imaginary people I’m afraid of disappointing. Well, not imaginary, but once real, and always real to me. This is where my anguish becomes particularly delusional.
There’s the childhood version of myself who was confused when she learned that you can’t publish your own magazine by cutting and pasting articles from other magazines together. Even if you think it would be really fun. Stubborn high school Ryley, who made the case to her parents every night at dinner, bless their hearts, that journalism school would be a Very Good and Also Practical Idea.
The Ryley who sat at Cinema Rif in Tangier for eight hours a day toiling over the school project that was her first taste of Very Real Reporting. As I picture them now, I can remember the way they wondered about me, this version, present day, as the one who would follow through on their wild hopes.
I think I’m supposed to feel more grown-up now, but in a way I sometimes still feel like another iteration of childlike hope and uncertainty. But now with a handful of big-kid opportunities on my kid-sized plate. Grown-ups don’t miss interviews, etc.
But then, in a cruel but perhaps informative twist, I’m a bit angry with myself (this version) for not enjoying it all as much as I always planned to. Somewhere along the way, my mindset switched from feeling like every success is pure gravy (baby), to feeling like I’ll never be able to do enough to have the gravy. It’s all potato!
And that’s annoying, because my ambitions were never about prestige but rather about pursuing excellence at something that felt worthwhile and, importantly, fun. Self-inflicted suffering is antithetical to that dream, because it turns a labor of love into a chore.
Maybe that’s why ~impostor syndrome feels so embarrassing to bring up, because something about the premise of it feels a little… stupid. Like in a second-wave feminism kind of way. It’s based the fallacy that you’re not living up to something that, in the purest iterations of your dreams, you never cared to live up to at all.
I rescheduled that missed interview for the very next day. The woman I spoke to was incredibly delightful and understanding and had, in fact, not used the intermittent 24 hours developing technology that allows you to spit at someone through Zoom (my suspicion).
Over the course of our hour-long conversation, between her knowledge and my questions, my spirits naturally began to lift with the genuine fun of getting to call someone up and chat about something they care about. My anxieties softened as I began to envision the story I was working on and where different quotes might slot in.
Maybe this is the reward for doing good work, or the real target to aim for. Those divine moments when it doesn’t feel like work at all, but something closer to being alive.
And perhaps the real reason I cringe to bring up ~impostor syndrome is that I don’t fundamentally agree with the very complaint I’m making, or the anxieties I’m feeling. I don’t want to be calloused to the work I’m doing, or deluded into thinking I’m above it. I think these vulnerable, overanalyzing, second-guessing qualities make me a better writer. It would be like solving the inherent imperfections of womanhood by just adopting any and all masculine qualities. Gross!
It’s not a weakness to feel the weight of wanting to do right by the people in my stories. Why should I be afraid of being found out for not knowing more than them, when I don’t and that was never even the point to begin with?
There is a part of me, buried beneath the tangle of nerves, who knows that childlike curiosity and gratitude for the opportunities presented are not things I actually want to stamp out. Removing youthful enthusiasm, like tampering with feminine inclinations, might serve to toughen me against the general metrics of success, but would do nothing to help me serve the people and stories that made me want to pursue writing in the first place. Not to mention the lost opportunities for joy and discovery, which only come with vulnerability.
In the end, imagining what it might feel like to hear an “I love you, too” is nice, but hearing it out loud is better. And even hearing, “I actually hate your guts; stop fantasizing about telling me you love me,” is still a chance to be a part of something very real.
The Bullet Points:
I was tricked into signing up for this Hyrox thing that gym girls do. Which means I’ve had to go against everything I believe and attend CrossFit classes. Look out for my May column tentatively titled “Can Crossfit Be Fun?” Hint: probably not.
In preparation for my penniless move to NYC, I want to start reacclimating myself to Drinking At Home Where It’s Cheaper. Do you have a favorite at-home booze/snack combo? Tell me! Mine right now is tequila and Cheetos :P
There is a mouse (potentially rat?) in my house, cry cry cry. Accepting ideas for how to get rid of him humanely.
Thanks for bearing with me,
Ryley
If you’re loving Kitchen Sink and are interested in supporting my work, you can always Buy Me a Coffee.
Look up a product called Evolve - it's a contraceptive food for mice and rats that they eat and then fail to reproduce :) It doesn't harm them in any way; it just controls the population. I believe the company is Senestek (?) something like that!
“My ambitions were never about prestige but rather about pursuing excellence at something that felt worthwhile and, importantly, fun.”
Sorry if there is a cuter way to quote you here (I’m bad at substack), but I loved this part and I love you!! (Please say it back)