On selling an unsellable thing short.

A ramble on taking a long time to dream and realizing your dream isn't the norm.

I didn’t dream that much as child. Not in the classic sense. It felt nearly impossible, considering I believed my life would end with The Rapture. By age 12, I believed there was no way I would see 16 with Jesus reportedly coming back and all. The urgency prompted me to make absolutely no plans (that I took seriously, at least). So my grandparents’ comments about marriage, kids, and jobs were sort of laughable to me. I quietly shrugged them off. I would be dead by then, I thought. Hopefully, somewhere up there in the sky if God deemed me good enough when His son came back to rally up all His faithful servants. I didn’t dream much at all because there was no point. Therefore, at first my dream was to be good. To be a good girl. Good enough to be found worthy when this wretched earth passed away.

Zendaya and Labrinth, Euphoria Season 2

I didn’t know it yet, but that was the catalyst for me becoming an artist:

*Not* having a dream.

But your youth is supposed to be for dreaming, no? That’s when you’re supposed to spend your time lazing around, limbs spread out on open grass or running around scraping your knees at the playground, playing house with your friends at slumber parties, or spending your weekends sitting on rooftops or in a friend’s basement smoking and drinking as you boldly proclaimed what you’d be doing in 10 years. There you’d be imagining yourself as some major business mogul or somebody’s forever person, making forever spawn, working a forever job that you got because of all your hard work and garnered success or power. Right? That wasn’t where my head was at. If I dreamt of anything outside of The Rapture, it was having something I could call my own. As I got older and grew out and through the various stages of my religious beliefs, the dream became being and having my own thing. What was meant to train me up as a child in the Way that [I] Should Go actually turned into a burning desire to be free. But my concept of freedom was still limited. So by the time I’d started forming that realization, being free simply looked like landing my own apartment by age 30. That was it. That was the whole dream. Living alone by 30. Maybe now you can see my early dilemma: around my late 20s I somehow had achieved that dream (while living in New York City) and then it was like, what else?

While so many others around me had been figuring out how to be “adult,” brand themselves, get licenses for things, buy actual homes, prepare that home for children, and make definitive decisions about their corporate careers, I was already sort of content . Isn’t that good? I mean, when you’re not thinking about money, retirement plans, having a family, or taking over the next big thing. I was content in the sense that while others seemed to be grossly enthusiastic about conquering and notoriety, I was still fixated on something much more important to me: personal selfhood. An underdeveloped aspect of my personality and also something a lot of people seem to rush through. And I discovered it’s an extremely hard thing to reach in a capitalist, success-driven society. So, given how much work it was to just focus on true selfhood, this fixation eventually turned into a dream of being paid to be myself. Sounds unrealistic right? Welcome to my brain. In my opinion an artist’s job is to be unrealistic. Daring to create (and thusly live a curious, interrogative life) amid the day to day pressures to constantly be producing some product for consumption is very unrealistic. And, yet, I hadn’t even fully claimed the identity of “artist” yet.

But I’ve skipped a lot of information that people who know me are probably waiting for me to admit:

I have two degrees and I have been a writer since I was 19 years old. So, technically, it seems I’ve always had dreams. Wrong. What I’ve always had were benchmarks for worthiness and qualifications for jobs that would pay me enough money to survive with the skills I’ve almost always had. Most of the jobs I’ve ever had were teaching and most of those jobs were teaching writing. Paid to be me. I didn’t know it then but that’s what I was doing. Finding jobs that would pay me to do something I was already sort of doing for myself and others around me. If you know me personally, you know I love to tell somebody what to do. I love to be obeyed (feel free to research this kink on your own, 👀). Then there’s the fact that it’s important to me to hold space for our kids while having a lot to say. So, boom teaching. And boom, writing. And boom, teaching young people creative writing.

Three of my high school students who were apart of a creative writing class I taught in Soho performing at The Apollo in Harlem.

It all kind of started coming into focus on it’s own. The teaching artist gigs. The workshops. The residencies. And then, upon meeting someone close in age who was getting paid just to write, it became clearer to me that all of this was my new dream. The dream I couldn’t name all along until I saw the dream being lived with my own eyes.

But none of what I’ve said so far is the actual point of this letter (annoying, right? Relax, here it is)….

The point is that it’s 2022 and there is so much telling me what I’m doing isn’t enough. To be more specific: I’m hearing that writing well isn’t enough. I must be able to do many other things. I have be great at Tik-Tok. I have to conquer the Instagram algorithm. I have be marketable to Nike. Or Jack Daniels. Or Target. I gotta be a content creator, a spokesperson, an influencer, an event planner, an entertainer (you can’t tell me performing and presenting on Zoom isn’t a whole ass TV production each and every time), the list goes on. It’s honestly giving big high school popularity contest energy and I was a loner as a teen. Being cool and liked by everybody wasn’t my superpower and it never will be.

Jalaiah Harmon, Creator of the Renegade Tik Tok Dance Phenom

But maybe I’m just feeling a little bitter right now, you know? All January I found myself venting about what I felt was supposed to be happening with the roll out of my second novel Break This House, what I haven’t gotten to experience as a soon-to-be-second time published pandemic author who’s never toured in physical spaces (think: classrooms, bookstores), how I feel about not making enough money. All month I was in my feelings and, to be honest, at moments I still am. Because I work hard and on the wrong day I subjected myself to a negative early book review (the vulgar text message trail about that reviewer is wild; god bless the safe space that is my friends).

But let’s rewind again before that wretched day when I found myself on Goodreads looking at something that was none of my business. One day I got on Facetime with a homie the way her and I had done multiple times. To catch up. To share about projects. To vent and sometimes brainstorm ideas. Out of all those things that day, for me, it was about the venting. Anyway, we get on the phone and she asks me what’s been going on and I tell her. We’re both multi-tasking as she asks me this. Her, on some marketing stuff. Me, on a PowerPoint for a lecture presentation. And when I’m done sharing my debut author frustrations, citing how a number of the things I’m being pressured to do to be “seen” take me away from the actual writing she looks into the screen and says:

“I mean…I just feel like you’re selling yourself short.”

I didn’t want to hear that shit and I still don’t. Not because I’m in denial but because I’m not for sale. I may not have known what my dream was for a good while but, a long time ago I’d subconsciously made the decision to be paid to be me—not paid to perform me. There is a difference. A big part of this writing thing for me is keeping the work itself at the top of my list of priorities. Writing is a practice that engages your whole body, your whole life and constantly switching gears to sell myself while I could be perfecting a story so that the book can actually be worth reading doesn’t make much sense to me. No shade to the authors that do, though. I have respect for those who find ease in playing up that aspect of their personality. But I have no desire to start spending unduly large chunks of my time advertising the lifestyle of being a writer while I’m still clamoring for time to actually be one. I want readers to find me, doing things as I am. I don’t wanna get caught up in convincing people of how cool it is to be a writer while so much of the work of it isn’t cool at all. It’s work that I have to actually do if I’m ever going to have a chance.

The Brainstorm Wall in my apartment while I was writing Break This House

The following week, my best friend Facetimed me because the black cloud hadn’t lifted and I’d just gotten through with a week of teaching for the Tin House YA Winter Workshop (ONE OF MY MORE RECENT DREAMS COME TRUE!) while battling a knarly episode of depression. Few things can make you feel even more like a piece of shit while you’re down like teaching because imposter syndrome is at the top of the self loathing scale when you’re teaching adults for an important institution. At least that’s what it’s like me. You’ve been teaching forever, someone had said. I knew what I was doing but it didn’t feel like it. Something about being asked to do a thing I’d only seen some of my idols do that made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be there.

Anyway my best friend put into words what I was struggling with amid all this author-turned-influencer pressure stuff:

“I came up in a time when you were in the room because you were nice,” he said shrugging his shoulders. “You were in the room because you were good at what you do. Couldn’t nobody fuck with you.”

But not because you were a bully. Or the most popular kid in school. It was because you were a truly undeniable artist who offered something nobody else could. Your talent spoke for itself.

This is it. I come from a legacy of artists who had earned their acclaim by putting in the work. They didn’t spend so much of their time exalting themselves. Their work did that. Their community did that. The spirit in which they approached the page did that. And all the other promotional shit? That came after. Yes, it’s important to network and know people and make people aware of what you’re doing. And hell yes I’m open to all of the sponsorship and funds and opportunities to back my art that the universe has for me. I can rock anything that aligns with the work that I’m creating and believe in. Send it on. My hands are wide open. But is that the actual work? Is that the point of it all?

You tell me.