Imagine wading into a pool one morning and you forget how to swim. Instantly, you don’t know what to do. The water isn’t inviting, there’s a strange feeling instead, an alien feeling (what am I, here). You grab for the ladder. In some way, without anyone noticing, you’ve been exposed. You had the wrong idea about yourself as a person, someone who could swim, even a good swimmer, someone who survives in this element, and now by scheme or mishap, perversion, you’re a child again, the age before you could swim. You were deceiving yourself the whole time, you were always someone who couldn’t swim and now it’s obvious: for all of your desires, you are not a swimmer.
I’ve lived with imposter syndrome since I was a kid. It never goes away completely. The fear of failure. The need to be special. A denial of ability, an inability to hear praise; a plunging sense of guilt that quickly follows any measure of success. It is, after a long time of living with it, quite an impressive set of feelings, I’ve decided, and beautiful in its own way: a watchful passenger. It coddles the mind late at night. It matches pitch to the tones of Sunday evenings. Sometimes it tells me that whatever I am, I was a long time ago, before I could swim, and everything else is posing.
I read recently “to want something is to be left out of having it.” It felt so true, I put down the magazine I was reading and stared across the kitchen. I know and don’t know who I am and what I want. I say too much, see too little. We all have stories we use to shape our lives, but sometimes the stories turn see-through. A newspaper is opaque until you spill water on it.
This week, catch me in conversation (online) with L.A. honcho Jeff Weiss, sponsored by The LAnd Magazine and Chevalier’s Books, as we discuss my new nonfiction book Everything Now.
Monday, July 19, 7:00 pm PT (registration info here)
Also, my publisher put together a sampling of excerpts from the book with photographs by the incredible Mike Slack, whose work graces the cover. Here’s a few of Mike’s pictures:
We made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for a third week in a row—wow! As ever, if you bought the book, shared the book, rated the book, talked up the book in any way, thank you thank you. I really appreciate everyone’s support.
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now, is available from Amazon, Bookshop, or your local store. Any books mentioned in this newsletter are on a list at Bookshop.