A work in progress
2021 Novel: Success Reset
Preface
For the moment let us cast aside the blissful ignorance of “doing for the sake of doing” and go deeper into an analytical measure of what motivates our actions so we can break them down into two groups; action for pleasure and action for commerce. Two forces placed side by side as unhappy co-travelers, like employees and tourists elbowed together on a people mover tram through an amusement park. Looking back on this, I can see that separating one from the other was my obsession; not because I do not know what I like to do or what I want to do, but rather an innate need to inspect motives for all of my actions. The need for this inspection was that I determined that these two things were inevitably mutually exclusive. What you do for love cannot also be done for money.
Can you love what you do? Can you love your job?
Well, of course, love of a trade is essential and elemental to who we are, but we compromise that love when it is intermingled with commerce.
I developed this paradigm and ruled out any possible third motivator, I had reduced life down to two prime numbers.
I grew up as the consummate absorber of my surrounding pop culture, revelling in the great tales of our ages and the legendary accounts of those modest heroes who came before; artists, writers, and poets who were un-corrupted by commerce. Like Tori Amos, a performer and songwriter who forged her own course, success be damned. She wasn’t in it for the money, she was in it for the art. What did that mean to me, an impressionable adolescent suburban girl trying to make sense of the world in the early years of the millennium? The mere act of doing what I loved to do for money was a corruption, it would mar the gift and deem it something untoward. Dirty, I guess. Compromising on our principles was not something we did, I allotted no such expectations of higher cause and nobility on the ubiquitous “others,” which is populated by all those faceless folks who were from “somewhere else,” and notably “older.”
If nothing else, the game developed by other generations of the identification of generation was enough for me to write off the intentions, the motivation, of 90% of those walking the earth. Conversely, that gave me a kinship to that exclusive other 10%.
I remember from before preschool I was always writing stories. I had a vivid imagination and would be able to conjure up pictures and then draw them out. But the pictures I wrote were always inspired by a story I created, I could draw because I had a story to tell and the circle began: the mind tells a story in pictures, my pen then draws the picture and I write the story I see in my drawing. I was the reporter just writing what I saw. It was my creative cycle and it was something I shared wholeheartedly with my father. He would travel for work and he would tell me about where he was when he called mom at night, dependably, from whichever hotel or airport he was in. I would listen to his voice and begin to sketch the description in my mind and write a story about it. These stories were inevitably happy with great successes, metaphorical dragons slain, and most of the time a brave young heroine saving the day or in some cases a damsel in distress being saved by the brave father figure. The stories would be completed in one page with an emotive drawing and under 100 words. Upon his return, my father would read them to me at bedtime and, even better, expand on them, bring to life whatever dreams I had conjured onto the page and make them all seem if not real, at least that it was plausible for the stories to be believed by someone else.
Dad was not a storyteller though - even in the fanciful prism of memory I would be doing a disservice to tell you that. He was the on-site reporter who had trouble even seeing what was in front of his very eyes; too easily distracted. I was maybe all of 6 years old before I came to this undeniable realization and began to write the stories to make them easier to overcome his shortfallings when he came home and read them. Dad was not a writer, he most definitely a dreamer, and he was first and foremost an obsessive. If something fell within his periphery he was laser-focused on it. But he was also a dedicated employee and what everyone considered a solid cog in any organizational wheel. But storywriter: No. As a storyteller he would read to me and my brothers and often be as surprised by a twist in the story as we were, and in time he was often in on the surprise well after our grade school minds had it all figured out. His “oh’s...um, I get it now” following our explanation would have to be considered endearing and a ploy if it was not for the fact that it was genuine. My brothers and I would tell the plot back to him, again a great learning device if he was a teacher, but in this case it was just an outcome of his true personality; both his failings and strengths.
Mom read to us too, but I always got the sense that the story was taking on a matter-of-fact interpretation when read by mom. She enjoyed the images that were spun, but she was also a passive witness, she saw the words dance along as she read but at the end if we came up with the same flight of fantasy she seemed quizzical, like “why would you expand on what the story was?” It was, we experienced it, now on to the rest. An unexamined life? I’d like to think it was that art in this case just served the same purpose as a TV show or any passive art interaction. Mom loves artwork, by the way, and would go all technique and details on a Rembrant, she particularly loves the classic Renaissance frescoes that tell a story. There my parents found some agreement; there was a fresco print that showed the story of Cupid along with a decent reprint of the Sistine Chapel in our house. She had a picture in the bedroom of a farm; where an adolescent boy and girl stood and talked. She loved the story it told, how one way they seemed to be awkward and another they seemed to be assured, she got that. But books were just the words on a page, a transcript of something that once happened.
It is funny, in hindsight, that what was your life’s pivot point was perceived differently in the moment. At the time of that pivot everyone expended copious amounts of energy to make you think everything was remaining unchanged. For me, this pivot is my parents’ divorce, both the emotional impact of the divorce and to me no longer having parental oversight running interference on messages I received daily. The influences of school, my friends, the social media world all became prominent. In that perspective the divorce was important only in the sense that it meant a reduced level of monitoring, which could have happened anyway to a tween leaving the all consuming circle of influence her parents had supplied.
And it was for whatever the impetus, I saw the clear signal coming from Planet Adult: Poets starve - but editors get paid. Write a technical manual, write a proposal, and the world lay at your feet, you showed that you had a marketable skill which could be leveraged for some decent coin. Conjure up a wild flower in a garden and draw it to tell a story of the young girl tending to the plants and you experienced the death blow of a boredom where even the crickets would remain silent. No future in it. Do you remember the death cycle of blog writers some time after the start of the Millenium? First step was reading a blog and seeing the active interaction from a group of readers. Then jumping from reader to a blog contributor and then the leap to creating their own blog. The next step was starry eyed; they come up with a clever name that they feel only “their audience” would fully appreciate, along with an appropriately witty yet subversive image. Then the first entry, maybe another one or two, and then the telltale bombs dropped in there as they decide to also comment. “You guys need to speak up.”.... “I was expecting more push back on my last post…”
What in the name of Buck Henry is happening, when the blogger realized that just being on the internet did not mean anyone was paying any attention. The last couple spins in the death spiral are a blur, but include a harangue of their audience and then someone clicking on a bookmark a few years later and getting “404 page no longer exists.”
Still, I had the desire, I had the knack to do things that the world considered unacceptable. I learned of this dichotomy in the living room of my house. A flash of creativity displayed to my mother would be greeted with a “that’s nice” half-smile and a question about finishing my homework. Stories were checked for grammar and run on sentences, and but not for any of the stories within them. Word counts were what the English teachers wanted and you got no credit for drawing pictures. So I stopped. As I moved into high school and prepared for my life work training in a four year college, my mother became the overseer of my college prep stage; and worked to mold me accordingly; into a position where I could maximize my earning potential at some point. Maximize might be an overstatement; Let’s go with I worked to ensure I would be hirable in an office world, and I worked to dull any of my sharp edges.
I would write my stories and be aware that they were not being encouraged for their own sake which was fine with me. Creativity has a tough-to-stifle rebellious streak, and knew underneath the sheen there was value in my state of individuality and I would fuel a dual existence. I previously would break from a theme template and explain to my mother that the subject material called out for flipping the template; I wrote the conclusion upfront and buried the mission at the end. That was in the spirit of Catcher in the Rye! But it was sent back for a rewrite. “Joy, you need to learn the rules.”
I learned to write within the rules but bury my own Easter eggs in the text. If you paid close enough attention you might catch it, but if you scanned the page like everyone in the adult world did, then you would see what you want; I’d get a pat on the head and a chance to do it all over again.
But what did stick in my craw was an outgrowth of this rebellion's conformity that it needed to be done in the first place. Dad would still read my stuff; and it seemed as I grew into a more conformist his questions dried up as well. No future in it.
As dad hopscotched through obsessions, he had a streak for a while there where we seemingly overnight went from playing Clue and Monopoly to odd European board games shipped to our house. Do you know the game Ticket to Ride? Do you know there’s also about a dozen different maps and versions of the game? Including fan made versions? My dad even made a version which had us bouncing around the USA between another of his obsessions, amusement parks. When younger we would play basic abstract games like checkers, Othello, and Quoridor, but I would name my pieces and give a little story about what was happening. He called me “Flavor Text” as I would color in the black and white pictures of these themeless games. As I got older, I stopped conjuring the drawings in my mind and they stopped appearing as vivid.
Occasionally, for fun on a boring trip I could still pull something into existence with my imagination, but nothing was ever sketched out. For either the sake of being prudent or through a reaction to the rejection that first came from my parents desire not to encourage me in the face of the ‘real world’ I stopped drawing anything. What existed in my mind, stayed there as my little secret
I succeeded in college sleepwalking to an Economics degree based on my decent ability to do math and write papers. I gained employment at an investment firm outside Philadelphia, near my hometown, which allowed me to start at a junior level, earn a decent income on a junior level, and dream that if I plugged away then annual promotions and raises would make me one day a 40 year old with a great salary a decent job title. By then, with retirement within eye reach, I could sit back and do what I really wanted to do. Once I achieved the commerce side, I could then kick back and wake up my inner artist and do whatever it was I needed to do.
The dichotomy seeped into my own personal life. I was named Joy by my parents but at some step along the way my alternative heart felt the name went from corny to unacceptable. “Who is Joy in a dirty world!” It didn’t even work ironically so I went about getting people to call me by another name. It was Donna, or Angelica, or Christine, depending on what show I was watching. Eventually I settled on my professional doppelganger being “Olivia.” That was the name of someone who was important. Serious. I stole it from Olivia Benson, the tough as nails lead detective on Special Victim Unit New York. I found my name, an “Olivia” was tough, she was able to handle the dirty world, unlike a “Joy.” Even better, she knew the distinction between art and commerce.
I didn’t worry about awakening the sleeping artist either; because of another dirty little secret of the family personality. I am 24 years old and it is in focus for me in ways that make me lethal for discovering it at such a young age. I am an obsessive. I obsess on things; it can be a band, it can be a book, a diet, a favorite restaurant. In the parlance of my generation; I am a binger. I lock on something and it can consume me for months. I learned harmonica in three months and was playing parts in a college friend’s band. I have had four steady boyfriends and three of them were in some form an obsession. I lost 20 pounds in 40 days once, all on obsession. I listened to the complete works of Ani DiFranco one time during Lent; instead of giving something up; I took on Ani for Lent. When I am focused, it is laser driven and all consuming. The problem from this is two fold; I really can only be laser focused on one thing at a time; and I cannot make it happen; I cannot will myself to care to write a book, or learn a song, or cut out carbs; it kicks in when it can and then can disappear just as surely. After learning harmonica I haven’t played one in three years. It comes, it goes.
In the end this story is an outgrowth of all the impacts made upon my life and the raw materials I was dealing with from the start. The world can appear to be a pretty nasty and worse, random, place if you are not looking at it close enough. Look closer, know your history, see what is really happening around you and not what is just present in the moment and you’ll see patterns, you’ll see, dare I say, the hand of God? Not ready to go there yet? Well, okay, you see that there is often a pattern in what you see as randomness, and whether that is the almighty or just a really really good mathematical problem, it is there, if you look.