How to be a writer with social anxiety
“He was self-effacing to a degree rarely encountered in human beings.”
Welcome to the 181st issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Last time, I shared a personal essay on my early confusion about how to fund a life as a writer. This time: part two, with even more confusion! Plus some personal disclosures that I may regret posting but what the heck.
But first: a quick reminder that my next book comes out in two weeks! If you’re in the Los Angeles area, please come to the launch at Skylight Books on Friday, April 3rd, at 7pm. I’ll be in conversation with the brilliant Ross Simonini; find the full details and RSVP here.
A couple years into my employment at the library and the non-writing of my so-called novel, I faced an unexpected decision. Library administration called down to the front desk and asked me to report to the director’s corner office on the second floor. I hustled upstairs in a state of anxious unease. Was I in trouble?
To the contrary: I was being made an offer. The library was running a pilot program in which two of its employees would earn master’s degrees in library science, remotely, while continuing to work full-time in their current positions. These degrees would be fully paid for; afterward, the employees would stay on at the library, in new roles, for a term of three years. I was aware of the program; two young women who worked in admin had already enrolled. But now the director told me that one of them had to drop out for personal reasons. They needed someone to fill her spot. Would I be interested?
The offer was so unexpected that I froze. Avoiding the director’s gaze, I stammered something about how much I appreciated the offer, it was really generous, I was flattered to be considered, and, and, and—could I take a day or two to think about it?
The director considered me for a long moment and then said, no, given my hesitation this was not the right fit and they would find someone else. I could go back to work.
Walking back downstairs to the front desk, I felt a wave self-recrimination wash over me and my ill-fitting business-casual uniform. How foolish could I be? The library wanted to pay me to go to grad school. In two years, I could have a master’s degree in library science, with guaranteed employment afterward. If I wanted to follow my college professor’s advice and secure an undemanding day job that would allow me to write novels in my spare time, wouldn’t this put me in exactly the right circumstance to do so? And wasn’t librarianship pretty much the perfect career for an aspiring writer who couldn’t expect a trust fund or an inheritance and who was, furthermore, of a powerfully bookish, introverted, timid demeanor?
Philip Larkin had discovered as much. He said in a 1979 interview:
Looking back it was an inspired choice. Librarianship suits me—I love the feel of libraries—and it has just the right blend of academic interest and administration that seems to match my particular talents, such as they are. And I’ve always thought that a regular job was no bad thing for a poet. Indeed, Dylan Thomas himself—not that he was noted for regular jobs—said this; you can’t write more than two hours a day and after that what do you do? Probably get into trouble.
Larkin seized the opportunity I had just missed: He got his first library job by chance, shortly after university graduation, then enrolled in correspondence courses to earn professional qualifications as a librarian, all while he continued to work full-time and write in the evenings. If I was seeking a template to follow, I could hardly have asked for a better match.
And yet—the flubbed master’s degree shifted something in me. Finally, I had to admit that I was not actually writing in my spare time. And investing more in the day job—indeed, transforming the day job into a career, in order to continue this arrangement in perpetuity—didn’t seem likely to fix that fundamental problem. I needed a new plan. I drew a line down the middle of a sheet of notebook paper and wrote GRAD SCHOOL at the top of one side and JOURNALISM at the top of the other, and started to map out what steps would be required for each path.
I wasn’t thinking of grad school in library science, however, but in creative writing. If I wanted to be a writer, wasn’t this the obvious path? Weren’t there entire programs dedicated to forging the kind of writer I hoped to be, programs from which one emerged with colleagues, mentors, publishing-world contacts, perhaps even a completed manuscript, perhaps even a book deal, those two most magical words in the English language?
Yes, yes—but after my multi-year debacle in writing fiction (or not writing it), I didn’t exactly have confidence in my abilities. Besides, I asked myself, wouldn’t an MFA in fiction just be an extremely expensive postponement of the situation I already found myself in? After completing an MFA program, I would almost certainly still need to find a job and write in my spare time, an arrangement that I already found enervating.
What I needed, I decided, was some way to meld my writing aspirations and my money-earning work, and the only way I could think to do that was through, gulp, journalism. The problem: Journalism seemed highly likely to require . . . talking to people. Not just people—strangers. Calling them on the phone, perhaps even approaching them on the street.
Earlier, I mentioned my bookish, timid demeanor—in truth, it was more than timidity. Looking back, I can see now that I was socially anxious and avoidant to a degree that significantly impacted my quality of life and profoundly shaped my decision-making around writing.
There were a few areas, in particular, where I struggled. One was the telephone: I could answer the phone without too much difficulty, but for some reason initiating calls, especially to strangers, filled me with irrational dread, and I would go out of my way to avoid doing so. More problematically, and more embarrassingly, I had a sort of phobia around public restrooms: a social anxiety disorder that I now know is called paruresis but that at the time I regarded as an inexplicable and deeply shameful personal flaw that I tried to keep carefully hidden, even as it introduced a constant background worry into virtually all social situations—and even as it no doubt contributed to the several excruciating bouts of kidney stones that I endured, starting when I was twenty (a result of never drinking enough water, because I was always trying to avoid the dreaded situation, oh dear).
So—traditional journalism was out. (Undoubtedly a job for someone who can place phone calls and use public restrooms!) But what about working as a magazine editor? Here was a job where you got paid to write, at least to some extent. And I had by this time come to worship the New Yorker, ever since my stepmother gifted me a subscription one Christmas while I was in college. As it has for generations of readers, the New Yorker represented to me the height of urban sophistication, indeed seemed to emanate from an unreal fantasyland of high culture, high cuisine, and highbrow opinion about it all, about as far from my adolescence of Blockbuster VHS rentals and Papa John’s pizza deliveries as I could imagine. I was so enamored with the magazine that, at some point, as I was considering my non-novelist options, I picked up a book about the New Yorker, published in 2000.
Ben Yagoda’s About Town: The History of the New Yorker and the World It Made had a profound impact on me, chiefly by excavating the personalities behind the venerable publication. These turned out not to be paragons of Manhattan sophistication but a rogue’s gallery of misfits, outcasts, and oddballs.
Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder and its editor in chief for its first twenty-six years, was a Colorado native who grew up in Salt Lake City, dropped out of school at thirteen, and worked as a newspaper reporter in Sacramento, Panama, New Orleans, and Atlanta before arriving in New York at age twenty-one. Even after launching the city’s most self-consciously urbane magazine, he struck the writer Janet Flanner as “a big-boned westerner” who “wore his butternut-colored thick hair in a high-stiff pompadour, like some wild gamecock’s crest.” When E. B. White first spoke to Ross about his early contributions to the magazine, he recalled, “I had never heard such a loud voice on the telephone.”
White was another apparent mismatch with the magazine’s public image—a shy, self-effacing Westchesterite who soon retreated to Maine and found his voice writing about the natural world and its inhabitants (and famously once declined an invitation “for secret reasons”). His one-time office-mate, James Thurber, was initially hired to be the magazine’s managing editor but proved far too disorganized for the role; instead of firing him, the magazine found a different role for him (on the rewrite desk), and nurtured him into one of the great comic writer–cartoonists of his generation. Later, the magazine would continue to provide an office and a generous salary to the writer Joseph Mitchell even after Mitchell had developed such a bad case of writer’s block that he didn’t produce a single piece for the magazine for thirty-two years.
These New Yorker editors and contributors felt not just comprehensible to me but like kindred spirits. And, in a funny way, everything I’ve written since then has been a continuation of this early impulse: to find kindred spirits in the world of writing and the arts, and to use their examples as inspiration, validation, and a kind of psychic ballast as I have tried to drag my own anxious, avoidant self into some of the same spaces.
This is also one of the fundamental impulses behind my new book! I have always wondered how anyone summoned the nerve, the tenacity, and the perseverance to be a writer or an artist, especially when they didn’t have an obvious way to pay for all the time, trial and error, and experimentation it takes to do ambitious creative work.
If you’re struggling to write or make art while working a day job, and wondering how anyone ever managed to do both things, and what other options there might be, and no doubt also navigating your own special idiosyncrasies and stumbling blocks—I’ve distilled years of research into a book that will make you feel less weird and alone in this struggle.
Making Art and Making a Living comes out March 31st, and you can pre-order it now as a hardcover, e-book, or audiobook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, or your local bookstore.
Returning to Ben Yagoda’s history of the New Yorker: the section that had the biggest impact on me came about halfway through the book, when Yagoda recounts the arrival at the magazine of one William Shawn, Harold Ross’s eventual successor as editor in chief, though at first he did not seem a likely candidate for the role.
Shawn was a twenty-five-year-old college dropout who had tinkered with writing fiction, spent time as a newspaper reporter in Las Vegas, and had been hoping to establish himself in New York as a composer before he got hired at the magazine—where he was initially assigned to do reporting legwork on potential subjects for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section.
In About Town, Yagoda homes in on a report that Shawn produced in 1935: a fanatically detailed description of an organization called the Hauptmann Defense Fund. Shawn’s report lays out in precise, careful sentences the fund’s location on East 86th Street; the other businesses that share its address; the corridor leading to the building’s elevator; the unfriendly elevator operator, who tries to shoo Shawn away; the stairway, the door to the fund’s office, its interior, and the chilly reception Shawn receives upon entering; and on and on. In Yagoda’s words, the document “displayed a remarkable eye for detail and ultimately an almost startling eloquence.”
But what interested me was the personal torment that this piece of writing cost Shawn, which Yagoda next describes:
One can only imagine what this assignment took out of Shawn. He had not yet accumulated all the phobias and eccentricities for which he would become known throughout the world of letters (the most famous being a fear of automatic elevators—and note the prominence of the elevator in his report), but he was shy and withdrawn even at twenty-seven, and certainly not one to relish confrontations with antagonistic interview subjects. Moreover, far from having a desire for fame or even recognition, he was self-effacing to a degree rarely encountered in human beings. In his fifty-four years at the New Yorker, his name would never appear in its pages. The natural place for Shawn was behind an editor’s desk, and within weeks if not days after his Hauptmann labors, Ross gave him a job as “idea man,” coming up with and coordinating possible subjects for Talk and longer fact pieces. Brendan Gill, who came on the staff in this period as a Talk reporter, later described his first glimpse of Shawn: “Seated at a desk heaped with newspapers and armed with scissors for cutting out likely items and a typewriter for working the items into ‘Talk’ suggestion form, he was as safe from the real and imaginary perils of the outside world as a monk in a cell.”
Ever since first reading this passage, around age twenty-three, I have carried around this image of William Shawn and the elevator. I wasn’t afraid of elevators but I knew this kind of fear—this feeling of the everyday world being loaded with traps that are, apparently, invisible to everyone else. And I knew how resistant this fear was to rational thinking, how it almost seemed to grow in response to rational thinking. So to take that fearful, anxious, avoidant energy and use it to galvanize a piece of writing, even if the reader had no idea about that subterranean process—this suddenly seemed to me a project with almost existential stakes, a way of validating my timid existence while also collecting a regular paycheck.
These revelations coincided with a stroke of extreme luck, like something out of a Dickens novel. My mom’s best friend, whose kids I had grown up alongside in rural Pennsylvania, had by this time relocated to Riverdale, New York, on the outskirts of the city, and she had heard about a summer program on the publishing industry at Columbia University. This friend of my mom’s had some idea of my writing ambitions and, I think, must have guessed that I was floundering in Nashville. She asked my mom: Why didn’t I apply for this program, with the goal of working in New York publishing? And then stay with her for a while afterward, to save money while I got on my feet?
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this offer was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me until that point. New York! I had many times dreamed of living there but had never thought that I could actually make the move. (How? With what money?) But with the summer course as a more-or-less surefire route to employment—the promotional materials aggressively touted its near-one-hundred-percent job-placement rate—and with a place to stay while I found a job and saved money for an apartment, well, the path was now just sitting there waiting for me to step onto it.
Thank you for reading about my continuing early struggles as a young writer and soon-to-be-former library employee! I so appreciated all your comments last time, and I’d love to hear if you can relate to this second installment. What anxieties or phobias have shaped your path as an artist? What kindred spirits have you found as you made your way forward?
Oh, and it’s your last chance to take advantage of the pre-order offer for my new book, which comes with a three-month paid subscription to this newsletter, with access to Worm Zoom, the book club, the group chat, and the full archive.
To claim your subscription, just reply to this email (or email me directly) with the name of the retailer you pre-ordered from, the date of your pre-order, and your order number. I will reply to your email confirming that you’re all set, and you’ll have immediate access to everything behind the paywall. (Offer expires 3/30.)
Thank you for the kind mention of my book. It’s really gratifying to know that it was read and appreciated in such a sympathetic way.
That library official was a fucking garbage can. Thank God you didn’t select that program. Imagine working with somebody who wouldn’t even let someone have 24 hours to contemplate a major life change. Also, thank you for writing about your anxieties and phobias, it is deeply relatable to a lot of us.