On jealousy

or, inspiration

sitting in the Victoria International Airport this past weekend, i had some time to kill. i pulled Elisa Gabbert’s Any Person is the Only Self out of my bag to pass the time ‘til my delayed flight. as i read through the first few essays (covering subjects such as book clubs, Sylvia Plath, Frankenstein, Gossip Girl, and Proust) i felt that buzzing in my head. do you know the feeling? when you’re reading a Really Good Book and your synapses just start firing, the dopamine bouncing off the walls of your skull?

i think Gabbert would be pleased that i bought The Bell Jar along with her book

i experience the same feeling when i listen to a great album or see a captivating piece of art- and while i love this feeling, it also comes with a little voice in my head that whispers, “i wish i had done this.”

i wish i had written this book. why didn’t i write this book? i wish i wrote this album, why am i not on stage with a band like this?

i’m usually able to silence this voice while i’m reading, but it comes back to me when i’m idle (which is most of the time, if i’m being honest). but the next essay i came to, i had to immediately pull out my highlighter and show my partner, because holy shit was it exactly what i was thinking.

Gabbert’s essay “On Jealousy” begins with a brief analysis of Sylvia Plath’s famous poem “Daddy” and her relationship with her father (which was not actually as tumultuous as the poem makes it seem). as Gabbert gets into the analysis, she takes a hard turn and confesses that while she was writing this analysis for another publication, she’d discovered an essay written by another writer in a different publication who’d written exactly what she’d wanted to say…but better.

“I was mad it was so good,” she confessed.

i then started highlighting like crazy:

There’s a double bind in the work of writing…If you don’t write about things people are interested in, nobody is going to read you. But if you write about things people are interested in, other people are writing about them too…What can I possibly add?

Susan Sontag seems to have already had all my worthwhile thoughts, the thoughts I thought were mine. Reading writers I admire writing about things I want to write about, obsessions I’m protective of, makes me feel less special.

So what need of me, what need for me?

what need, indeed? Gabbert is like my Susan Sontag, because i had already had these exact thoughts, and i’d thought they were my own. several of Gabbert’s essays revolved around Sylvia Plath; i would also like to write about Plath one day, but what else could i add to the conversation? what else could i say that’s not in Heather Clark’s massive biography on Plath, Red Comet? i’ve also been tinkering with the idea of writing an essay on Clarice Lispector, another one of my favorite authors. but what could i say that hasn’t already been said by the brilliant Benjamin Moser, who’s responsible for getting her works re-translated into english and author of her biography and other essays on Lispector’s brilliance?

i’ll tell you. your own unique voice.

while we’re all humans in society and will inevitably come up with the same ideas as other humans also living in the same society, your writing voice, your artistry, is unique to you only.

seinfeld (1991)

how we write our ideas is unique to each of us. looking around a bookstore, it’s amazing to see all the different kinds of books that people have written, each in a voice unique to that writer alone. even if books or essays are similar, there is some fundamental difference in tone, word choice, etc that makes a piece of writing worth reading.

each writer has their own readers- if you write an essay on Plath, your readers will not all have also read that other writer’s essay on Plath, they’ll have read yours. there are just too many things to read for a reader to have read it all.

if you are itching to write something, write it. if you’re thinking it’s just going to look like i’m copying this other person’s idea, know that this work screams you and you can make it your own. if you’re reading a book, or listening to a record, or looking at a great piece of art and your brain starts buzzing, don’t let that voice whisper jealousy. let it declare, “inspiration!”

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this marina & the diamonds song was stuck in my head the entire time i wrote this.

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