Sorry for bothering, but have I made myself clear?

On people pleasing, the productivity of anger, and how our jobs shape our personalities

The main thing I remember from my college fiction workshop was that you had to give every adult character a job. It didn’t matter if the job was mentioned in the short story or not. The point was that you as author had to know it, because it would exert a gravitational force on the character. 

“By the time you are 40, the things you have done to make money will shape how you move through the world,” the professor said. Some of us tried to prick holes in the claim, but what could we say? We were, at most, 22.  “You’ll find out soon enough,” she said.

I was studying abroad that semester. After enrolling in the class, I learned it was taught by an American. She looked about 40, with a wisp-free brunette bob and an unsmiling severity that counterbalanced her Yankee accent. It had not taken me long to learn that this accent came loaded with a presumption of happy-go-luckiness. As a person who already smiled too much, I squinted at her. Had she always been this clipped and cool? How had her years in the classroom affected her life outside of it? 

I thought of her recently because a friend and I were talking about how our jobs affected our social lives. Not the places we went or the people we encountered, but the internal scripts we brought into those interactions. My friend, an editor, admitted she often wants to correct people. She is quick to see a persons’ flaws, but it’s generative—she wants to help them better themselves. As a writer, I do the opposite. 

Rather than imagine what might be corrected in someone else, I fixate on my own communication. I remember joking with peers about our shared habit during the MFA: how often someone would leave a social event, replay the reel of evening conversations, then send a fraught text to clarify a point, or apologize for a line that did not need apologizing for. So often we wanted our social presence, like our prose, to be sharper. We thrilled in revision. Spend enough time moving words around on a page, trying to figure out how to make yourself clear, and was it any surprise the habit carried over into dinner parties? 

There is likely a chicken-and-egg thing here—self-conscious people prone to replaying their own lives are in turn probably more drawn to narrating it on the page—but I still think the professor’s rule applies. The muscles we spend our days honing—the things that help us make money—will grow stronger than the muscles that don’t. I think of a writer-friend telling me about her time on a dating app, when a guy said he had fallen in love with their text banter before they had even met. I thought, ‘Gosh, I hope so,’ she told me, laughing. My rent payments depend on if I can get people to fall in love with my dumb jokes. The realization made her uncomfortable. She did not want to admit that her brain had conflated him—a man she wanted to seduce—with her readers. 

My friend says this, but she, like most of the writers I love, does not pander. Sure, she outstretches a hand and guides the reader through the pages, but her goal is not to please them. People-pleasing rarely works on the page, because we, the readers, can see right through it. I relish it sometimes, the way I marvel when being sold shoes by a really good salesperson, but generally, I do not want to feel like an easy mark. I want to be challenged; I want to feel surprised. 

A postcard unrelated to anything except for August: the oyster-strewn saltwater bliss of the Hood Canal .

Off the page, I people-please in basic ways. I say yes to socializing when I am too busy. I avoid cutting off conversations even if it means I will be late to something else. Recently, while racing across town on a designated bike path, a guy playing Serbian death metal on his standing electric scooter began chatting with me as he clipped along beside me. I’d pass him, then he’d catch me at a red light and keep talking. This went on for three miles in the afternoon heat. Part of my people-pleasing is avoidance of conflict, but part is just laziness. It’s nice to feel like a dog being patted on the head. Easy to steer according to another’s wants rather than taking the time to articulate and enact my own desire. 

How have my jobs affected this part of self? I’ve often professionalized the habit, working in hospitality or as a personal assistant. Writing, in contrast, has been my refuge. The only place I am slow to contort myself for anybody else. Sure, I have sometimes written to sound cooler and wiser than I am—hehe my 2015 Didion phase—but it feels harder, not easier, than just writing in my own voice. If my subliminal goal in a room is, too often, to make the people around me comfortable, my goal on the page is first to please myself. Not because I am my own audience, but because I love the feeling of pinning down a previously floating thought. 

Two weeks ago, I published a NYT essay about why I think we should normalize conversations about global warming in intimate relationships. It had not occurred to me that it would be particularly provocative to suggest we talk about scary weather with our loved ones, but the trolls got riled up. Many people told me they pitied me for feeling anxious about a fake thing (climate change). Others told me I was the problem with women and should be hospitalized. 

This author emailed me the link and introduced herself as a “REAL” woman : )

I wrote a few months ago about how a challenge of both writing and life is knowing you will be misunderstood. Another challenge, though, is knowing that when we articulate our convictions, either on or off the page, some people will understand us completely. It can be terrifying to be seen like this. To be known—recognized for who you are, living according to your own desires—means that when people disagree, it’s with the real you, not some sham of self. 

Some people interpreted my essay differently than I intended, but others understood and just did not like what they saw. Their voices reminded me of how many people still frame global warming as an issue of belief. I find this morally negligent. Global warming is not a story, like Santa Claus, that we can accept or reject. Our options are to either face the world outside our windows, or to deny it.

Naturally, I disagree with the deniers and they disagree with me. I will neither convince nor please them. This last week, I’ve been thinking about how surprised I am that, in the face of such vitriol, the people-pleaser in me is okay. These comments would have shaken me when I was a young writer. But I take less pleasure now in external validation—the thing I cannot control—than from the sense of internal ‘click’. The joy of writing is not in its reception, but in the feeling that I have said what I wanted to say. Insofar as the emails I have received have made me furious, that fury is generative. 

A Norwegian study found that climate activists are seven times more likely to be compelled by anger than by hope. “Rather than climate anxiety, we should be calling it politician anxiety or people anxiety, because it’s the people in power who are failing to do the right thing…that is causing the terror,” said the lead author of the 2021 study. Emails telling me to shut the fuck up about that climate hoax make me want to talk more. 

I think again of my former professor. If being a writer has, in some moments, made me too preoccupied with how and what I am saying, it has also, through the years, helped me become better at stating my convictions aloud. One thing rejection teaches us, whether we are submitting a story to a publication or a profile on a dating app, is that we are not for everyone. Sometimes people are wrong about us—of course they are, haters—but other times they are right. Who would we be if everyone liked us? We’d be Yeti coolers! So chill! So boring!

I will never forget my first meals at college on the east coast. All the New Yorkers with their big opinions. I was in awe. I studied them, wondering how their convictions could rub off on wishy-washy Libra me, my hot takes as gray-area as Oregon skies. Recently, though, I came across a poem I wrote that first fall. That was the year I was trying to figure out how to carry my body into seminar rooms and basement parties. My memory is that I was wobbly and uncertain. But the poem told me something else. The poem said I knew who I was and what I wanted. 

It would be years before I could appreciate what was happening. That in typing myself onto the page, I was learning to articulate myself in the room. 

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One last postcard, from the Elwha River, site of the largest dam removal project in American history, now being reclaimed by salmon. We love to see it!

Thank you, as always, for reading my sporadic dispatches. Those of you who pay for these newsletters make it possible for them to remain free for others. I’m very grateful. A few last mentions:

1. Wolfish

   ….has been out six months! Surreal. If it were a baby, it would now start growing teeth. Every note I receive from a reader is an absolute gift. Thank you. If you read it and enjoyed it, or were provoked in positive ways, I will gently remind you that leaving a positive review on Amazon/Goodreads really supports authors and helps other readers find it.

2. Teaching

   Two of the in-person workshops I am leading this fall in Portland are now open for sign-ups: ‘Writing About Animals,’ at Literary Arts the mornings of Oct 31 and Nov 1, and the ‘Braided Essay Intensive,’ at the Attic Institute over the mornings of December 2-3. Let me know if you have questions!

3. Events

   A few exciting upcoming readings that you can read more about on my website: Sept 24th in Astoria, Oregon, Sept 28th at Bishop and Wilde in Portland, Sept 30th at the Rose City Book Pub in Portland, and Oct 16th-19th at Vermont State University-Castleton.

4. It was a joy to be interviewed about citations and omnivorous research for

   Nancy Reddy
   ’s excellent newsletter about writing and craft. Subscribe!

What else? Drop me a line. Enjoy the weekend,

xxE