A tiny, insignificant thing made me gloriously happy this week: the satirical website McSweeney’s published a story from my upcoming book.
Were this a potato, it would be small.
It won’t change my career.
It won’t make me famous.
It won’t sell a single book, and it hasn’t brought even one new Substack subscriber.
They paid me $40 for the story.
And yet it made me tap-dance around my living room happy.
I think, maybe, mostly, because fifteen years ago I became briefly bedridden.
Yeah, that wasn’t great.
Needing to fill the days, and needing, more than that, to find some outlet for my irritation at being flat on my front for weeks felt like, I decided to write a book. It was a collection of absurd short stories called A Picnic for Perverts. Honestly, there’s not much to recommend about it. It had swagger but very little idea what to do with a comma, or how to make a story compelling.
I thought it was amazing, though. That it would part literature’s sea like Moses. That it would have an epoch named after it. I guess the gift of youth is that what you lack in talent, you more than make up for in confidence.
I submitted several of that book’s stories to McSweeney’s. They rejected them, and were right to.
I kept writing, but as I did so, a strange thing happened: the more I wrote, the less confident I became in what I created. My tastes became more refined, I suppose, and I became more aware of all the ways I was now disappointing them.
Life is not a computer game with clear levels, bosses we can defeat and bar charts of our skills that rise with our efforts. Improvement, when it’s happening, rarely comes with any notification. No certificate arrives in the post announcing that we are substantially better at our job, or our writing, parenting, or anything else we spend years quietly studying and refining.
Instead, we have to just keep plowing on.
Or not.
Because I could have quit writing. No one was asking me to continue. Wording for a living has always been an idiotic way to make money—more so now that AI can do what I do, and is exploding supply into already dwindling demand.
I don’t think it was heroic that I didn’t give up. In fact, I think the only reason I’m still here, doing this, is because I don’t know how to not be.
For some reason I am drawn to words. When people use them incorrectly, I experience an almost physical pain. If they fire a hundred of them at me when a dozen would have sufficed, I become quietly livid. I am forever rephrasing the things people say as they say them.
If they are lucky, I do this in my head.
They are not always lucky.
It isn’t only that they got it wrong. It’s that I can see, so clearly, how it should sound instead — and some old, stupid part of me believes that if I just find the right words, they’ll see it too.
We can’t control the things we’re drawn to. And what frustrates us reveals our taste. I think finding that frustrating thing, that thing we can’t let go, is the only really good piece of career advice.
I’m not talking about what you’re good at, but rather, what you can’t leave alone. Follow the irritation and it will take you somewhere no algorithm will ever bother going, because it doesn’t get irritated. It doesn’t lie awake trying to articulate a feeling so precisely that someone else cannot fail to recognize it in themselves.
It’s not a skill. It’s a condition. And as far as I can tell, it’s incurable, and it’s mine.
You have it too, of course. Maybe it’s for words. Maybe it’s visual—about light. Or sound. Music. A bugbear. A fascination. A need to tweak. To improve. To explain. To make right.
You’ll rarely be thanked for it. You’ll mostly just be annoyed, for decades, for free, unsure if there’s a point to what you’re doing, unsure if you’re even getting better at doing it.
Then once in a while—rarely, unfairly, and on no schedule at all—someone will notice. They will hand you a small piece of proof that you have improved. A yes where before there was a no.
And $40, say.
It’ll make you tap-dance around the living room like an idiot.
For an hour. Because then you’ll be back at it. Wanting the world to think differently. Wanting to explain something. Wanting to fix something. Creating. Polishing. Thoroughly irritated, throughout, that it’s not quite right. That it’s not good enough yet.
I think there is a lot to recommend about it.
Stay irritated, and you’ll stay useful.
Stay curious, and you’ll stay human.
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If you’d like to read the McSweeney’s story, it’s here.