This was an older essay, rewritten and pushed further, and the first essay in a collection that recently died on submission. Am I supposed to tell you when things fail? No. Am I going to? Yes. I feel good about this rejection. It makes sense, it’s not personal even when it is. I did my best work and I am proud of myself. Time will only give me more chance to work harder, go deeper, and make better art. And say suck my dick to the people who didn’t believe in me. I am proud of the artist I am, and I don’t need publishing to validate it with a price tag.
“Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.”
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Dirty bathrooms are my ticket to freedom, but god I hate cleaning them. I am holding the toilet brush as if it’s a weapon. My cut-offs are short. Sunglasses on, even when I’m scrubbing the back corner of the shower walls. I am constantly having to turn back for an extra paper towel or spray bottle or a forgotten trash can liner, and my flip-flops scratch a sandy rhythm across the tile floor. I’ve slipped throbbing metal music into my ears to distract me while I work, but my fury and frustration are still louder. I am so grateful and so over it.
Since leaving my husband of twelve years, (after spending a year in the liminal purgatory of “we’re separated but he won’t move out and I can’t afford to”), I now live in a lopsided fishing cottage at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. I still can’t afford rent, so I work this second job. This work of cleaning the marina bathrooms, twice a week, means the difference between survival and not, between trapped and free.
I’ve been up since four, working. First at my day job building roof trusses and now these bathrooms. The sun sinks below the marsh grass and the bugs swarm the buzzing outside lights. I will let myself have one cigarette, nursing the tobacco like a prayer, and then I will shower and fall into bed, exhausted. I haven’t eaten a full meal all week, trying to save every bit of my meager food budget for my three kids. I pull on plastic gloves and watch myself in the bathroom mirror.
This, this exhausting life that permanently smells of sawdust and sweat and bleach, is all that I fought so hard for. My eyes in the mirror are sharp and glistening, brightly colored rings of blue and orange like a prismatic spring. Maybe some would find them twinkling, but they are simply whetted with appetite. Appetite for food and a life I can’t afford. Anger knots in my chest, and without it I don’t think I’ll have the energy to keep going, but I am also afraid it will burn me up inside and leave nothing but cinders and ash for a soul.
Turning my music up, I drop the mop against the bucket and peel off one sweaty plastic glove to fish my phone out of my back pocket. I take a few pictures to see if maybe something glamorous or artistic will suddenly appear out of the toilet bowl and my flip-flops. Something that captures that appetite in my eyes and the longing that waters my mouth. Some kind of art that communicates the inherent conflict in this moment—that it is miserable and also beautiful. I am free. These are the actions of freedom, of having agency and power. This is real. Authentic. This is the experience my peers might write about it and sell first to publishers and then to Netflix, but here I am, truly living it and everyone has turned away from me. No one wants to see this.
It’s impossible to capture how freedom comes in the form of toilet bowls. Nothing I’m doing makes good content, so I put it my phone away.
***
It is a mistake to blame social media and algorithms. It is also my first impulse. I am an author, twice published by an American publisher. I have been stopped on the street by fans for my autograph. I have eaten at Michelin-starred restaurants. I have met famous people. I have been offered jobs to write about things you already know. I have had plenty of Instagram worthy, glamorous and beautiful moments, that fulfilled my own longing for a beautiful life.
Those beautiful moments were authentic and real, and me inside them. Or at least, I felt like they were those things. I was praised for those elements in my work. Those moments were not angry, like I am now. But they were filled with suffocating desperation I did not share. When making those beautiful moments, I did not feel as if I had a “good life” even though I was grateful and sometimes overjoyed, and most often sort of floating around in half-shock that I had even managed to conjure myself there in the first place. I had built that beautiful life like a bad spell. It climbed high, but at any moment it would collapse and take me into the void with it. It fed on what? My authenticity, my “realness”, even my confessional posts of pain and suffering were done in the collective belief that a good life is a beautiful life is a worthy life, therefore if I used the right words, the right light, the right romantic image, the right filter, I too could spin straw into gold. (And if I couldn’t make it beautiful, there was a bevy of products and classes and social media content strategies to make it so.) I was constantly preforming, desperate to match the rhythm of a market that had already determined what authentic and good looked like.
Kant calls the joy at beauty “being pleased”. In the German, it’s the word gefallen. In English, this is the verb “to like”. As a millennial, a public figure with a social media accounts as a primary means of communication with an audience, I think of “to like” in terms of all my relationships. To garner likes. To cultivate likes. To curate for likes. In all areas of my life, I have, too much, reduced myself to gefallen. Von Hildebrand, a German Catholic philosopher, in his Aesthetics, Volume I, says “”it pleases me”, includes a relationship to my own self, on the one hand, and a judgement about the object ascribing a positive significance to it, on the other.” . . . the typical being pleased is related to the positive value of the object.”
In Aristotelian terms, the form of Good Content is the substance of positive aesthetic value. Positive aesthetic value, is “a combination of integrity, harmony, purity, and fittingness, which all comes together to provide pleasure and satisfaction.”[1] In on all our worlds and lives, not just the internet, we curate our lives according to our understanding of goodness and beauty. When it is not good, when it is not beautiful. . . when we are not good, or we are not beautiful. . . it is because we are failing in form or integrity or purity or some other element of value. This is why healing our societal and generational wounds of slavery and inequity are often nothing more than performative posts and stances. The process of healing feels bad. It has no value. We cannot fathom anything good beyond “to like”.
Standing in the buzzing bathroom light and the circling moths, it is not my lack of photography or caption writing skills that doesn’t deliver good content. It’s not a trick of lighting or composition. I cannot make good content out of cleaning toilets for money. There is no positive aesthetic value in this kind of moment.
And without positive aesthetic value, it is also not authentic.
* * *
I arrive at the truss plant for Saturday morning overtime under a bright moon, in a bad mood because I could not make a good Instagram post (and all the existential crisis that entails). The only thing worse than an existential crisis is an existential crisis on an empty stomach, and I am relieved that Jason, a white, winter-weight teddy bear of a jig leader and one of the few men here I truly trust, has made a habit of feeding both me and the stray cat. Today he’s brought coffee and a sandwich for me, and a tin of tuna for the one-eyed, orange cat. Me and Mikey eat and eye each other like the strays we are.
I handstand and dance and sing to Dolly Parton while I assemble the attic trusses for the same big-box suburban mansions people build when they want a beautiful life and granite counter tops. I’m playing, making my own games, and enjoying myself, wrenching what pleasure and validation from the humid air around me I can.
Some of the men make fun of my playing, comparing it to an awkward Flashdance, but their teasing is just a feeble attempt to make connection with me. I break a broom on their ass, and keep going, reveling with teeth bared joy that I have come so far from the shell of a woman I was inside my past. I take a picture of the broken broom, but it doesn’t tell the story and it doesn’t look beautiful or interesting. I take a picture of the hazy sky above the eaves of the pole barn, but it doesn’t show the sensuality and sharpness of the heat. I’m left wondering, again, if this progress is all in my head.
* * *
In Charles Taylor’s 1991 book “The Ethics of Authenticity”, he defines authenticity as “an idea of freedom; it involves my finding the design of my life myself, against the demands of external conformity.” There is also an inherent conflict here—authenticity is often in “opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality”, but the danger in authenticity is forgetting “it’s dialogical setting, which binds us to others.” (emphasis mine).
When we seek validation for our art, our words, our lives, we are not simply thirsty for the algorithm, we are self-determining in dialogue with others—that’s the way authenticity is supposed to work. At best our individualistic, capitalistic culture exploits this, and at worst it corrupts it.
In their book Post-Colonial Astrology, Alice Sparkly Kat points out that “Liberal authenticity is a strategic centering of power.” Quoting Isabelle Graw, they write “Artists that produce work in a mechanical age, engineer feelings of authenticity and originality around their work. . . by positioning themselves as antagonistic to the market. These engineered feelings of authenticity help art retain its position as a luxury object.”
American culture has always been obsessed with the cultivation of authenticity. But especially the kind of authenticity that preforms as antagonistic to the market in order to hide its close alignment with dominant power. Taylor, in a prescient warning, uses the example of how the Neo-Nazi fascination with violence and love of power is a self-defining authenticity that even in “milder” forms “generate a sense of radical freedom.” White men with a dwindling sense of relevance, authenticity and power, in the vacuum of American Individuality, are extremely susceptible to this kind of authenticity, not in spite of, but because it masquerades as disruptive and radical, as positive aesthetic value, while affirming and aligning with historically dominant power.
I am guilty of the same violence. I have gone through this entire chapter without even bothering to define “good”, because it’s a cultural definition we all understand. Even if we tell ourselves we don’t buy into it, even if we see ourselves as radical, and our tastes run off-beat, or even if our existence is in conflict with it, we have all been shaped and molded by it. We can blame the algorithms, but algorithms are just the physical manifestation of our values, codes written by us and modified by our gefallen. If I instructed you to write down what the social media feed of “a good life” or “good content” looked like, we’d all roughly come up with the same ideas of what that looked like. We are always positioning our own content, consciously or unconsciously, against or in alignment with this idea.
My life before I razed it was, by all measurable standards, good. I performed against that idea on all feeds, strategizing and planning my content to keep myself always in relevant dialogue with our collective expectations. I had a partner who provided. I had three smart, fun kids. I was a member of a church and had a home in suburban D.C. I was progressive and antiracist. I was, at certain points, thin and beautiful and white and dressed in couture. All of that was so important to me that I sacrificed and lied and bled for it. This gave me visibility. It gave me authenticity. It gave me power. When I spoke about how poverty and my Appalachian culture had influenced my art, it felt authentic, not in spite of, but because, anything that masqueraded as disruptive and radical, was balanced as I continued to affirm and align with the algorithms. That balance is what any “other” must do.
The balance is precarious. The less power we have, the harder this becomes. It should have been easier for me than it was. I spent my early years in publishing gnawing my teeth and smoking in dark alleys, furious to watch my peers who were wealthier, whiter, wholesale middle and upper class or just simply male, gain more clout from my culture without any connection or experience or understanding of it. JD Vance (who changed his name from Jimmy Bowman to JD Vance, precisely for this kind of aesthetic value) will always be more successful than me, or people like me, because he feels right, not in spite of, but because he masquerades as disruptive and radical, while aligning with historically dominant power. My anger then made me double down. I surveilled myself constantly to stay in alignment with this power, this definition of good content, even while hating the chafe of it. Despite never meeting him or knowing him or having any connection of any kind, I was always in dialogue with fucking Jimmy Bowman.
Despite what we might tell ourselves, when I took off my couture and put on my steel-toed boots, I became less authentic. When I made choices that aligned me away from the white, upper class aspirational center of our culture, I gave up hard-earned visibility and power. I’m angry in the mirror, and it’s a mixture of the resentment of being forgotten and the fierceness of doing it anyway. It is a kind of life-force that makes me feel courageous and beautiful, as well as ashamed and alone. I have the door propped open while I clean, and the sun always comes over the marsh and shines, bleached white against the painted concrete, and it is searing and hot and lovely, and always out of the corner of my eye is the wavering grass and the cry of gulls that circle in a washed summer sky. There’s nostalgia and ritual in the scent of bleach and the way my body relaxes into the work. It’s fitting that my life has circled back to the menial job of cleaning bathrooms for freedom, because it was my first job when I was looking for freedom from my oppressive home at twelve. I can see the beauty here. I can feel it.
But authenticity is still made in dialogue. I desperately crave the validation. The community. The recognition of power. The dialogue. That is when I stop work and stare at my phone. That is when I try to post something on Instagram. That is when I write an essay. That is when I text a man. If culture refuses to see me, I will find some other way.
* * *
I am not sure I am beautiful, but I am sure people want to fuck me. In this moment, I am the least visible in every aspect but sex.
The evening before, when I’m almost finished cleaning, wringing out the mop for the laundry room, a truck of middle-aged white boat guys drive through the marina. They stare at me, and I stare back. I know what they are seeing. I’ve spent most of my life looking down and away from that white male gaze, pretending I don’t see and preform to it, but now I’m thirty-two and I have the ruins of several lives still smoking behind me and I know, moving forward, I cannot ever again look down and away. I have always exchanged my body for money, but in that moment, I am still ashamed that I would rather exchange the last two and half hours of “honorable” disgusting work for ten minutes on my knees.
At work, it is constant negotiations of myself as a person who everyone wants to fuck.
When I go for a walk at home to distract myself from hunger and despair, a man hollers hello from above me. Then another from his boat. “Are you lost, because I found you!”
I keep walking straight on in the dark.
I am so very vulnerable this way. I know they can see my life and freedom and appetite that lights my eyes and cuts me curved in dangerous edges. Most men call it something different than I do. I am a thing to be subdued for a moment, tits out and eyes whetted. I check my phone.
Rian is an artist throwing lumber at a sawmill all day, with dark hair he keeps gelled back and bright green eyes that are always watery. He’s the kind of white, Mexican, Spanish mix that grows up hungry and Byronic under an inland California sun with tattoos he’s done himself. By the time our paths briefly cross, I’m in this bleach-tinged moment and he’s haunted by ghosts, waking up in cold sweat and drinking too much while he cautiously experiences safety for the first time.
I’m playing a game in my own mind about him, afraid to allow myself to want. I am still inexperienced enough to think young, hot men don’t want to fuck women older than them. I haven’t slept with anyone other than my ex. I haven’t kissed any other men except for my ex. Rian’s smart, and he recognizes that I’m smart, and it’s clear we won’t be long in each other’s paths. For whatever reason, this combination makes me feel like I am on equal footing with him. I feel seen, but in a more whole light than the two-dimensional one of just sex or the internet. This isn’t anything real, but it is genuine. We are supposed to meetup that night.
After overtime finishes, with time to burn, I clean up and head to the dock bar to meet Matt, one of my best friends. We have big sibling energy and our friendship consists of hyping each other up, telling each other we are crying from a panic attack and goofing off like kids. He looks happy and relaxed, his black skin tanned dark from the summer marking underground electric lines in suburban housing developments. After I hug him hello, he turns and slyly introduces me to his best friend.
Drew is single, white, the kind of man who wears Sperry’s and keeps his Porsche parked while he drives a Toyota. He golfs, has a relaxed charm, and will absolutely make up for any financial hardship in my life. He’s also, by all accounts, a great person. He reflexively hits on me.
It almost doesn’t matter whether I find Drew attractive or not, because his attention is all I’m looking for. He is attractive though, and he tells me I look younger than I am and asks me about my favorite Indian food. He’s well-mannered and easy-going, getting water from a distracted bartender while I inhale the first real food I’ve had all week (Matt is paying). We have the kind of flow that isn’t too much work to stay inside. The conversation lulls and he turns back to Matt. On their phones they look at pictures of women they know, posing on their Instagram feed and Snapchats, and say they are “whores.” It’s toothless and typical and doesn’t frighten me. But I
look past him, over the railing, at the boats and the water and I feel a panic rise in my throat.
I thought all I wanted was to be seen as beautiful and that to be fucked was close enough, but I’m here and his interest feels like a trap. I slip from my seat and go to the bathroom, salt wind whipping my hair as I pull the door shut.
In the small bathroom similar to ones I have cleaned, I can still smell the bleach on my fingers. If I pull my fingers through his hair, I will worry he can smell it on me. I look at myself in the mirror—the tank top hugging the curves I have no matter how much I starve myself and the way my hair has dried, wild and loose in the wind. I find that I hate how skinny I am right now, because I know am more valuable because of it. I am veering on trophy wife material, and there’s something equally thrilling and devastating about knowing I could do it that way. The same lies I’d already fallen for. I grip the sink. This time I could get it right.
It doesn’t feel like a choice of pleasure, but of value. My pleasure and capital are so twisted up inside each other, I cannot tell them apart. If my value is attached to others seeing a beautiful life, can I ever make the hard choices about building a life that is truly beautiful? Do I even know how to answer “what do I like?” for real? I go back to the nachos and force myself to eat slower. When Matt leaves, Drew asks me to stay at the bar with him.
I don’t.
When I get home, I am sick because I haven’t eaten so much food in one day in months.
Rian texts me ten minutes before I am supposed to pick him up, saying he just got home from working all day and can’t come.
I sit on my porch and laugh. I laugh and laugh. I laugh to cover my shame and humiliation and exhaustion and then I take myself to the movies. On the way home, I cry. I have been so desperate to be seen, to be found beautiful in this moment of agony and the smell of bleach, to have it feel equitable and real, that fucking someone like him felt similar. It felt like the dialogue I could have. It felt like a choice of pleasure, not value, and I feel foolish for thinking I could have it.
* * *
Some people connect with my stories, but most of my followers on social media platforms are women who like my beautiful writing. Letting people forget my beauty is bad for my career, so I sit on my bedroom floor and begin to apply makeup.
It’s markedly different from my men’s clothes, safety vest, and unbound hair at work. It’s also different from my cut-offs, wild hair, and tank tops. But of course, it’s all the same thing, a spell cast for different audiences. At the end of the day, I keep casting the same tired illusions as everyone else. I want to do something different, but I don’t know any other kind.
As I mix foundation, I study myself in the mirror with an artist’s eye. I like what I see. I don’t think of myself in terms like “pretty” or “not pretty,” but alone in my room I am interesting and alive, and I look at myself the way I want others to look at me. I just can’t seem to communicate it in a way that other people can see, and it’s that gap I cannot figure out how to bridge. In public, I long for the same things as in private. Instead, I’ve recreated the shadow of one life in another. Is it any less shameful when I am drawing on eyeliner to remind the women who buy my books that I am beautiful than it is to catch the watery green gaze of a man? When I’m done with my makeup, I look through my recent photos — all the ones I’ve taken of my real life, my raw life, the broken broom and the toilet.
I long to post all the pictures, especially the raw and wretched ones. I long to be less careful, less afraid of inequity. Like maybe if I grip onto Rian’s neck while fucking him and he tastes the sweat on my skin and holds fistfuls of my hair and my hips, it would feel close to the same thing as being visible in the middle of the work that makes it possible for me to be this woman he wants to fuck in the first place. This is the life-force Audre Lorde talks about in her essay, Uses of the Erotic. This is “the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” But I am so conditioned by our dominant ideas of goodness and aesthetics that I do not see myself in her writing. I feel alone.
I can’t post any of them. Instead, I spend an hour taking a bunch of new ones where I look like I could be a trophy wife, or those “whores” (their words) Matt and Drew look at on their phones. I take photos where I look tired, old, angry, or silly. I lean into the “whore” and pose in my mirror, on my knees, and call it irony, but mostly I’m trying to see if I will wither under that light I am always running from. Finally, when I pose just right, in the right cast of summer sun coming in through my windows, I look like a beautiful woman who lives a beautiful life and writes beautiful books. That’s the photo I post.
* * *
Real healing is an ass-backwards crawl against the flow of evolution. It is powerful, sublime and erotic. But it is also negative aesthetic value, inauthentic and invisible. As a society, we are collectively stuck in a world where we must look as if we are good, at all costs, because to actually become good means we will be rejected. We must look as if we live beautiful lives, because to truly consider what it means and whether we are living one means we will not be beautiful. Even for those of us who know we will never measure up, it doesn’t stop us from trying. I thought leaving abuse behind would naturally leave my life good. But it has not. It is the most shameful, wretched thing I have ever done. It makes me doubt it’s value. My value. In some ways, it is hard to believe I even still exist until I see myself reflected in the bathroom mirror, the smell of bleach and toilet bowl cleaner all around me.
I scroll my Instagram and Twitter and text messages looking for answers, but of course I don’t find them, and I eventually put down the phone and go back to sitting on my porch, in the quiet summer heat and the steady drone of low, curling waves on the beach.
I don’t want to feel this pressure to make gold out of straw to save myself. I don’t want to feel so wretched and alone. I want to know that I am making progress, that I will succeed in leaving this time, that healing is possible, even if it does not look at all like I imagined. Most of all, I long to accept myself and my life, letting go of whether the sum of my life is of any aesthetic value, so that I can see myself as I truly am—a mind and a body in the midst of savage, raw creation.
[1] Oxford English dictionary