What happens when you start beliveing your own bullshit?
When you’re still trying to write under the guise of who you were, of who others think you were, instead of who you are?
This is a champagne problem, I know, but something I’ve been thinking about a lot here at middle age/mid-career.
Having 30+ years of work under your belt should be a positive. You’ve taken your hits. Learned your craft. Somehow survived the slings and arrows of literally outrageous fortunes and outrageous times. But there’s a reason that in today’s corporate work world, offering up a resume with more than ten years of work history on it is seen as a negative, not a positive. You are seen as too set in your ways. Too used to the “old” way of doing things. People assume you can’t pivot. You can’t adapt. You are plodding along a course set in another world.
There’s a reason I think of the world prior to 2016 as a different world. A more naive world, for me. The pace and presence of digital propaganda was known, and had been experimented with for a decade, but it was 2016 when it honed itself to a fine point. I remember telling a group of folks at Bookcon that watching Russia rear up out of the sea like a forgotten dragon was a surreal experience. But it was of course much more complicated than that. What a nice, tidy narrative that would have been! No, digital marketing had now matured, and been effectively weaponized by all sorts of actors for all sorts of reasons, and the only way back was to heavily regulate it.
That wasn’t going to happen for a long time. It made too many people rich and powerful.
The rise of LLMs was similarly devastating to my own worldview. There was a world, and my place in it. And then there… wasn’t.
I remember learning that a direct report had been secretly recording our calls with an LLM notetaker, and the feeling of sorrow and betrayal and – worse! – the feeling of being such an ancient relic that this had never even occured to me. It was overwhelming, this feeling of being a naive fossil.
The world was moving. I was working like I lived in the old world.
We were all being recorded. All being manipulated by social platforms. All being watched by Ring cameras. I had a moment when I realized all those 80s dystopia films and books I’d read had prepared me for this, of course. This was the future predicted back then, the glaring warning: stop this, or you’ll get that.
I am living in that.
Which takes me back to thinking about who I was, and the story of who I was, and how that doesn’t work anymore.
I’ve had readers revisit Geek Feminist Revolution, or read it for the first time, and what first strikes them, looking back, is how naive and hopeful it is.
“They are angry because we’re winning! This is the last gasp of a dying world! We are going to WIN!!!”
And while that’s true, and I stand by it – there is always a better future for someone, somewhere – I neglected to realize just how bad that backlash would get before we came through to the other side.
The world does not change without horror and bloodshed and madness, no matter what it’s turning into.
I thought a lot about this while writing These Savage Stars. About living in that precarious and uncertain place, between the old world and the new world. For years I had this quote from Antonio Gramsci in there on the page right after the title: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
There are periods of unheaval between one world and the next. These are usually world or civil wars; certainly in the US we’re enduring a soft civil war, getting hotter by the day, and it’s brought all the horror and madness that those times bring.
There was a writer I was before all of this. I wouldn’t say I was more hopeful. If you read the God’s War books, written during the Bush years immediately after 9/11, you can feel the anger and rage and dark humor of trying to survive in a world gone mad, one out of your control. Maybe that was just me growing up and growing into an acknowlegement that the world’s problems were much bigger than kid-me understood, and realizing that to continue surviving would require an incredible act of dark humor and endurance (I started writing that book at 24, afterall!).
If anything, I have gotten more hopeful over time. The original ending of The Worldbreaker Saga books was full-on genocide. It wasn’t until someone asked me, at a convention in Sweden, if I worried that by showing an abused and mistreated person making a terrible choice I was saying that it was expected for abused and mistreated people to make terrible choices that I rethought the entire point of the fucking trilogy.
Genocide is easy.
Living with your choices is much harder.
Dying is easy.
Living is much harder.
And that, there, is the choice I had to make in the early 2020s, and the one I’m realizing I’ve struggled with going forward. There was a person in me that died during those years. There was a person who gave up. Who looked at all the horror and terror and was so disappointed and heartbroken at having her entire worldview and belief system savaged that she gave up and drank herself to death.
How glorious, to have a mental and physical breakdown and just give up.
Giving up feels so wonderfully good.
You can cease striving and just be. Complain about the hopelessness of others’ actions. Complain about the art and media other people are making. You can lie in bed and complain and complain and not doing a fucking thing with your life but eat nachos and drink, and it’s wonderful.
It was wonderful.
I kept thinking, you know, I have a chronic illness, and I’m drinking a lot, and you know, maybe I’ll have a heart attack and die, and frankly, that would be fine, because fuck all of this, fuck all of these people, these fucking idiots who stole the world from me, who disappointed me, who savaged the future.
My dad died in there, at some point, and while the details of that story have to wait for some other people to die, I’ll say that the realization that with my long-lived family genetics I could, in fact, not simply die, but linger on for twenty or thirty years enduring a life that was only this and just this – drinking and watching tv and hating the world and how it had disappointed me – that I realized that maybe that wasn’t the way I wanted to spend those decades.
No, I wanted to write books.
But the writer of books who came out of that period was a very different person than the one who hunkered down in March of 2020 pleased to finally have some time to herself to do some writing. I came out the other side of that having endured a lot more than even “just” the pandemic mania that all of us who survived that period carry with us.
Life, in many ways, stopped.
And then it started again.
And I’m still wondering where all those days went. Who that person was who went in, and who it was that came out.
Here in this new world, what I’ve realized is that I’m not a shit-poster on the internet anymore as much as I am a bareknuckled survivor. I am a person always asking, “Ok, what do I need to say or do in order to survive?”
I don’t know who that person is yet, but she’s not the same person who lived in that old world.
I guess we’re going to find it all out together.
