Going Cognito

A writer-in-hiding steps out

I turned 40 a month ago, and it happened just as suddenly as the wise older women have always predicted: I ran out of fucks to give.

As an infant I was born with an infinite number of fucks. I think all infants are born that way. We can’t help giving a fuck to everyone in our orbit, because our survival depends on the giving and receiving of fucks. Ideally, we get quite a lot of fucks sent back our way, and that helps us progress through all the Winnicottian developmental stages of infancy and childhood, getting fucks back for all the fucks we give. It’s nice. The fucks we get are our first friends. We cut our teeth on them, sharpen them too. The fucks we get are also our first weapons. Eventually we make real friends and enemies, humans or animals or even fictional or fantasied (who are real as fuck, let me tell you), and we stop needing to give or get quite so many fucks as when we were helpless infants. We acquire better substitutes. We upgrade.

But a lot of us live non-ideal lives, and so many of us, especially those of us who are from marginalized groups or unlucky homes, we go through infancy and childhood giving a lot of fucks without getting an adequate number in return. It breaks the developmental cycle in a characteristic way: we keep giving out fucks long past the time that luckier people have learned to give up the fuckery and rely on other resources to make their way through life. No, we who have been denied fucks in early life become compulsive fuck givers, chucking our fucks around in hopes of shaking a return-fuck free somehow. As we get older our chances only decrease. Nobody gives a fuck anymore. Except us. And one day, hopefully, we realize we must stop giving fucks, get over the fucks we never got in return, and get on with the task of upgrading our operating system.

This lesson takes a long time coming to most of us. 40 years, say our foremothers, and 40 years it was with me, almost to the day.

My particular fuck of choice, the one I seemed to have an infinite supply of, was the “holy shit what if people see my writing” fuck. I can never put my finger on why being seen is so terrifying to me, even though I’ve tried for years in therapy. In my personal life I’m not shy; I’m a fabulous public speaker and a confirmed ambivert who throws parties and clings to alone time with equal ardor. I don’t lack for confidence or self esteem. No easy explanations here. To be a writer in hiding was my favorite fuck to give, that’s all. Does it even matter why?

Since I was a teenager I’ve sent out stories I’ve written into the world, like test balloons, at the rate of approximately 2 stories per decade. Most of them have been published for money. Every single publication has sent me scurrying back into hiding. It was truly vexing. I love writing, I’m pretty competent at it? Enough to be paid good money as a technical writer, at least. And for some reason it was terrifying to put my own fiction or nonfiction or poetry out there for others to read. Embarrassing, almost. If I’d ever told anyone I want to Write, not just tech writing but Real Writing, I’m sure I would have mumbled it and shuffled my feet and politely excused myself from the conversation immediately and never spoken to that person again. I was so averse to letting anyone know I was a writer that when time came to pick my college major, I picked computer science because that would, I thought, be excellent misdirection. A dastardly plan indeed. You might be able to guess what happened. Nobody I’ve ever known has not laughed at me when I told them what I tried to get a degree in. It was a hilarious and totally predictable catastrophe. Four years later I failed to graduate, and went forth into the world screaming silently behind my shining, smiling eyes. If I had not stumbled into the world of technical writing, I would probably have spent my life getting fired from a long series of entry-level IT jobs. That particular parallel universe is still close enough to whisper in my ear.

Anyway, last month I turned 40 and I looked into my purse of fucks and I checked all my pockets (the plural is misleading, I had but one pocket in my yoga pants I wore for pajamas that night) and there was no fuck there. Whelp.

And that’s what brings me here: my own substack newsletter with zero (0) subscribers but a real commitment to an online writing seminar by one of my favorite writers… But that’s a story for the next entry.