I wasn’t done arguing. “The office isn’t empty,” I said. “The assistant uses it. Where would she work?”
Who, he wondered, needs a room more, the assistant or the person who is ostensibly to do the work the assistant is meant to facilitate?
Well, when you put it like that, the answer was so obvious.
“She does,” I said.
This feeling of being undeserving, then, and not money, was the heart of the matter. All of this rootlessness, this squatting in corners, in cafés, at the kitchen table, has been a manifestation of my insecurity—not about my failure to earn as much as my husband, but about the inherent value of my work. I don’t feel I deserve a room of my own, because I feel, no matter how much I earn, that my work is worthless.
These are some of the things I’ve said about my work:
? “They’re meant to be read with the amount of attention you can muster while breastfeeding” (about my murder mysteries).
? “It’s kind of glorified Chick Lit” (about Love and Other Impossible Pursuits).
? “It’s more of a polemic than a novel” (about Daughter’s Keeper).
? “I’m not an artist, more of a craftsman.”
I suppose much of this has to do with how I got my start, as the author of a series of commercial murder mysteries, the kind you might find on a rack in a drugstore. When I published those books, I loudly proclaimed I had no literary pretensions. I thought I was being honest, but now I realize I was just being cowardly—saying what I worried others might say about me before they had the chance to. If I dared to nurture creative ambitions, I would put myself in danger of failing to fulfill them.
Though I am proud of my books, there is a vicious voice in my head that tells me I’m worthless. Even when I hold in my hands the finished product, even as I feel my chest expand with pride, the voice says, “This book isn’t any good,” or “It’s okay, but you’ll never be able to do it again.” Every single time I sit down to work, I hear that ugly whisper in my ear. How can I expect others to take me seriously as a writer when I look down on myself?
As I write this, I realize that during this past month that ugly voice has been quieter. There were even days when I didn’t hear her at all. It can only be microdosing (or the mother of all placebo effects) that has allowed me to distract my inner self-loathing insecurity-monster long enough to have what has turned out to be the most productive month of my writing life.
The painter is coming on Wednesday with buckets of white paint. I know there are those who consider what I’m about to do to the paneling, wainscoting, and trim to be a sacrilege, but if Dr. Schaeffer’s consulting room is to be mine, I want it to be bright and clean, antiseptic and new. My room. My own.
Day 29
Transition Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: A little low, but as soon as I started to work, it passed.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Decent night’s sleep.
Work: Productive.
Pain: First really painful day in quite a while.
Why is my shoulder pain back? I had such a great day yesterday, with such profound realizations and resolutions. It sucks to be back in this place of pain. Although, when I sit and really consider my shoulder, I think (though I may be deluding myself) that there’s a different quality to the pain. It’s not merely a matter of intensity, though it is indeed less intense. It feels less…permanent. Or perhaps it’s merely that, having experienced pain-free days, I am optimistic that this bout will soon all be over.
The experience of optimism is an unfamiliar one for me. I am by nature a pessimist, able to anticipate the possibility of doom in virtually any circumstance. Even when the glass is full, I know that it’s likely to get toppled over and its contents spilled, probably right into my open laptop. I imbibed this cocktail of negativity combined with misanthropy and laced with a heady combination of arrogance and self-loathing from my father, without realizing either how unhappy it made me or that there were ten other ways to look at things and I was always choosing the worst. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I realized that a belief that the fucked-up world is filled with stupid people isn’t a necessary corollary of intelligence. It’s actually kinda dumb.
Each morning, I find myself astonished anew at how my husband wakes up convinced that his day will contain a series of delights and pleasures, as if he’s holding a golden ticket to visit Willy Wonka’s factory. Unfortunately, only one of our children shares his seemingly boundless capacity for optimism. When she was younger, this child routinely woke up in the morning and announced, “This is the best day of my life!” She would probably have gotten annoyed at all the looks the rest of us exchanged over her alien sunniness, but she doesn’t really get annoyed, bless her little unblackened heart. The other kids and I, on the other hand, are confident, until proven otherwise, that what we have to look forward to is a more or less typical amount of shit.
And yet here I am, feeling hopeful and optimistic. Is it microdosing with LSD that has allowed my newly plastic brain to wiggle its way out from beneath its typical fog of negativity?
I wonder what would have happened had my father been born ten or twenty years later. What if he had been young when psychedelics first began infiltrating the culture? He was, after all, a political revolutionary. He despised capitalism, hated “the man.” If he had been a young man in the 1960s instead of in the 1940s, perhaps his ideological commitment might have been to the kind of free-range West Coast socialism that flourished right here in Berkeley, rather than to the Zionism of the Israeli kibbutz.
What if my father had taken LSD?