Preemptive Retaliation

As of late, I’ve been thinking a lot of who I am, and who I want to be. This is par for the course for the time surrounding my birthday, as I lament the Many Lives of Joe That Have Not Come To Pass, but has been invigorated with a few separate conversations about how people perceive me, both personally and professionally.

Occasionally I think of The Matrix (who doesn’t?) and the scene where Neo is plugged back in for the first time. On the ship he is a skinny, malnourished man – hairless, covered in mechanical scars, limping under the weight of his bones – but in the matrix he is how he was – strong, normal, great hair, etc. Morpheus calls this his “residual self image”, and he recreates himself in this image because that is how he sees himself. That is how he knows himself, and how he identifies himself. I think about this occasionally, because my residual self image is not who I am.

This has come up in a number of different ways – my weight for one. I still consider myself the same way I did as a seventeen year old boy, long and lanky, stretching and hunching over people as a wraith of hormones and straightened hair. So when I look down today I’m surprised to see my swollen belly, thick chest and broad shoulders. At work it baffles me when colleagues call me confident and smooth, easy in any situation and able to hold the room.

What am I trying to get at here? I had a thread, but I seem to have lost it.

I think it’s related to the post I made at the end of December, celebrating that I had written almost every day last year. I’m keeping up the streak this year. Right this moment, in fact, and for some reason I’m not calling myself a writer yet. Last weekend I was at a wedding where I only knew two people. At the dinner my wife and I were placed with others who may not know others, and in that mashed up social situation the same old conversations came up and, of course, someone asked me what I did. What do you do, Joe?

What can you answer with that? Well I answered with my job, the thing that I do every day and get paid for. Isn’t that what they mean by that question? What do you do that generates a living? How do you fund your experience? I can’t blame someone for asking a question like that, as it’s tradition. We value this knowledge. It tells us a lot about someone, I guess. But doesn’t it say more about me that I consider myself a writer, despite the fact I don’t earn a living from it?

Now that I’m delving into it, it comes down to a level of success. It doesn’t matter that I write every day, or that I’ve almost completed my third novel – what matters is how many people have read them, have considered them of good quality, who have spent their time and money dedicated to something I have created. And, if I’m honest, that level of success is very low for me. My young, ill-spelled first novel did not take the world by storm as I hoped it would, my second is facing the never ending silence of rejection, and my third is no where near a state for human consumption.

I suppose this is the part where I rally myself and make a pledge for the coming year. I’ve already spent more days than not exercising, trying to shed this belly and readjust my residual self image, so why not pledge to do more with writing? Because, dear reader, it is my birthday month, and I am always strange and maudlin around this month, and I think I will prefer to sit and moan about things rather than do anything about them

Yes, that will do nicely.