I worry, sometimes, that the attitudes you hold as a kid leave scar tissue. I was a misogynist as a teenager, and every now and then I’ll take a beat before I question the severity of my reaction to a female public figure saying something stupid (as opposed to the endless tide of male public figures). There is sometimes this ugly sneer that rises up, committing the sin of simplifying feminism to an always-conscious ideology; as if the women who act to perpetuate patriarchal systems on a cultural and legal level aren’t also victims of an incredibly pervasive culture, that instead they’re traitors to their species, worse than the men who directly benefit from being at the top.
I used to be aggressively misanthropic. At the time, I thought that I was at the bottom of the social ladder, but in hindsight that just wasn’t true. My problem was more that the attitudes I cultivated, and the attitudes others cultivated in me, were profoundly outsider-y. I was lucky enough to be one of the few who parlayed that otherness into social capital; my best friend and I were often welcomed to the social gatherings and parties of people we barely knew, and all we had to do to keep that welcome was act a little weird and put on some outlandish performance. That way, we were free to keep nursing our private hatred while having enough fun to keep ourselves fizzing with energy.
Even that summary isn’t quite right, though. There’s this impulse to be reductive when you think about your past, but adolescence is more of a rollercoaster ride than anything else. There were moments of unfathomable sweetness mixed up in there. The boy who bullied me for three years was also often revealed as someone desperate for control, and we performed together at pretty much every concert the school put on (he had an incredible range, and I was alright when it came to hammering at a piano). Even my romantic relationship at the time, which I’d love to characterize as one huge fuck-up, didn’t always play out that way - more often than not, it was just two inexperienced teenagers trying to figure out how love worked. We were humans, not cartoon characters. Even the worst of us are sometimes good. And, you know, misanthropes can be really funny.
These days, I am plagued with self-doubt - in my abilities, sure, but also with regards to my identity. Once you pass twenty-one, it’s as if the rulebook is thrown out. The character you spent the last couple of decades carefully inking suddenly looks deformed and cartoonish, and somehow missing vital truths you can’t quite access. Whenever I refer to myself as a writer, I want to qualify it - I don’t write for money, I’ve only ever self-published, I’m not that good - when, fuck it, E.L. James called herself a writer long before she got a publishing deal.
There are countless more successful and talented writers out there, of course, but there are also tens of thousands of writers who suck that I’ll never hear about. And we’re all writers. As a title, I should be happy to embrace it. When I was fifteen, at a time when I was writing material that would eventually be destroyed under obscenity laws, I had no issues with referring to myself as an author; now, when I’m supposedly respectable if a little less prolific, I should hold onto that part of myself even tighter.