In Praise of Losing
Losing sucks. Then the good stuff starts.
I recently attended a panel discussion organized by the WGA, which is a professional union comprised of people who get paid to make stuff up and cause emotions in strangers. I am a member of this union, and it continues to befuddle some of my friends that, though I have a union card, I do not engage in work that requires the purchase of workboots. (I still purchase workboots because I enjoy a sturdy ensemble above all else and also I never got over the strategic use of Doc Martens in “My So-Called Life,” a show so excellent that its single season is celebrated on hilltops ‘round the world as a beacon for women and queer people and teenagers in television.)
Anyway, it was very fun and also the sensual and alluring Writers Guild Foundation was involved and my date was my friend Wynter Mitchell, who co-hosts a very popular pop culture podcast called Pop Rocket. It was a lovely panel moderated by Bob Odenkirk, who is great at all of the things he does professionally. This is a sound strategy and appears to be working very well for him. There were writer-producers from “Veep,” “The Simpsons,” “The Americans,” “UnREAL,” “Key and Peele,” and “The People Vs. OJ Simpson.” We knew some of these people and we didn’t know some of these people and they were all very smart and good at stuff. I had a lot of fun and left feeling very inspired.
It didn’t occur to me until just now, on the eve of the Emmy Awards, that some of the people who spoke will go home with trophies tomorrow night and some will not. In my mind they’ve all won because they’ve got fabulous WGA health insurance. Oh, and also they’ve got shows on television, shows that are critically acclaimed and beloved, as well as the respect of their peers based on a lifetime of hard work and excellence in craft.
Also that.
And this leads me to the topic of losing, and how great it can be to lose something you want very, very much.
It can also be terrible! In fact, it’s usually terrible at first. But sometimes in the long run it works out great. Not always. But sometimes. Or it still sucks and it still hurts, always and forever, but you can take that hurt and you can help somebody else and that heals you, a bit, somehow.
I have won a lot of things in my life and I have lost more things. I was just sitting here ruminating on some of the things I’ve lost. Some are deeply painful and personal and others are, in retrospect, funny. I shall now make a mixed list.
Some Things I Have Lost (1980-present)
- My glasses (a lot)
- Several online auction bids
- Scholarships of various kinds
- The title to my car
- Romantic relationships
- The 4th grade spelling bee
- A pregnancy (read about my friend Ashley Williams’s experience with this)
- Prescription drugs
- Friendships
- My passport (a lot)
- Jobs I had
- A Webby Award for Best Performance (Isabella Rossellini won because she is a perfect performer in all things including but not limited to “Death Becomes Her” and “Green Porno”)
- Some skin, to a very easily operable and very very early stage of skin cancer (scars are metal AF particularly when you’re a teen, which I was at the time)
- My virginity (JK this is a bullshit concept and sexuality is a spectrum of activity and you’re not suddenly pure or not pure because there’s a wang or a tongue or a carrot or whatever up in your business for the first time)
- A car (I lose a car in parking lots all the time and I wander until I find it)
I’ve also been rejected a lot. Like, countless times. I made a short list to cover just a few of these instances.
Stuff From/For Which I’ve Been Rejected
- Every single MFA program to which I’ve ever applied except for one (and they wouldn’t give me any scholarship money so I couldn’t go anyway)
- Jobs for which I was overqualified
- Jobs for which I was underqualified
- Jobs for which I was exactly qualified
- Auditions
- Dates and/or romantic relationships I wanted with people I liked, who turned out to be assholes
- Dates and/or romantic relationships I wanted with people I liked, who turned out to be awesome (this is more frustrating than the former example)
- Every single film festival to which I submitted a short film that I wrote and that I’m in and that my friend Heather Fink directed. I released it online and it went viral anyway (and it’s still actually in consideration at a few festivals, but I’m happy it’s reached so many people in other ways.) Here it is! NSFW!
Some of these losses and rejections were physically or emotionally painful (or both). But some led me to greater things. And I’m sharing this so you know, if you’ve just lost something or you lost something awhile ago and you’re in pain, that sometimes it’s a great thing
For example, all those MFA programs. I must’ve applied to 15 over the years. I wanted to be a college professor, because I love teaching writing. The MFA is the terminal degree in creative writing. It’s usually thought of as the tool you need to become a professor. But these programs are often expensive, and they typically take very few students.
I think MFA programs can be a great thing. They can provide time and space to be a writer. Some are just a ripoff and a chance to squeeze money out of people who think they need the approval of gatekeepers to be “real” artists. But if you do your art, you’re a real artist. Doesn’t matter what your day job is. Real artists have day jobs. And night jobs. And unpaid jobs like being a mom or a dad or taking care of an elder. If you do your art, you’re still an artist.
If I’d gotten into one of those MFA programs, my writing might be better. It might be more formulaic and shitty. Who can say? I don’t know. What I do know is it would’ve likely delayed me writing my first book, “Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom,” which got me my first WGA contract, which is how I got into the union, which is how I ended up at that panel the other night.
I took my rejections and I went and wrote books anyway. Five in four years, actually. Nuts, right? They’re all here. One of them is even called Real Artists Have Day Jobs. I spent a lot of my life being afraid to be alive or feeling suicidal or what have you, so once I finally felt better, I hit the ground running and was like, “Ooh, no time to waste here, let’s gooooo.” It cost me some leisure time and probably a wider social life but it was a productive period in my life and I am proud of all the books, though I like some better than others.
I still hope to teach creative writing in a university one day (get at me, universities!) and I’m not shitting on all MFA programs by any means. Especially not the low residency one at my undergraduate alma mater, Warren Wilson College. Also, the Michener Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin sounds AMAZING. And they pay you! Damn! That’s awesome. I’m just saying, hearing “no” from folks who are fancy in your mind…well, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Sometimes a no can open up the space for a million yeses.
And if I hadn’t been dumped by a very nice dude who is an even better dude today — and still my friend, many years later, with a great family! — I wouldn’t have accepted a spot in a graduate program in education at Teachers College at Columbia University and moved from the desert (where I was doing the AmeriCorps program) to New York City where one night a friend in night school classes (after a day of student teaching at Bronx Science) said to me, “You know, you should try stand-up” and I was like, “What, like with shoulder pads and I talk about how women be shopping?” and she was like, “I mean, no” and then she took me down to Rififi and made me watch a show hosted by two cantankerous old men with a fondness for Katz’s Deli and I was like, “Wait, this is great, I didn’t know you could be weird in this way and do comedy” and now here we are. I have heard rumors these elders are now on Broadway. Unconfirmed! How can we ever know for sure?
I would also say further that if my friend Caroline had not schlepped me downtown to “where the numbers stop and it gets confusing” (I was 25 and have never been good with directions and this is how I referred to AN ENTIRE SWATH OF THE GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD) I would not have had the opportunity to drink dranks slung by one David Crabb, who would become my friend later and who is a fantastic memoirist who writes about rejection, loss, and gay gothness quite beautifully in his book Bad Kid. Nor would I have seen Gabe Liedman and Jenny Slate’s show, of which I have hazy memories due to alcohol slung by David but which I really liked a lot. I recall Jenny hiding in a curtain for some reason — I think it was for a confab with Gabe that went awry — and I remember laughing so hard at them my stomach hurt but not as bad as it could’ve, again due to alcohol probably provided by David Crabb.
Anyway, if not for all that, I wouldn’t have started doing stand-up. Which is what led to writing and friendship and dating and more rejection and more money and more winning and more losing and more everything for me. I write more than anything else now but when I get to do shows here and there it often reminds me of where I started and how I had no idea of how much better things could get.
Anyway, that’s a lot about me. And the above stuff is pretty lighthearted — it’s about career stuff and doesn’t get to the core of what it means to be human or anything like that.
But the point is this: did you lose something you wanted a lot? Did you lose the love or respect of somebody who meant everything to you? Did you lose a marriage or a friend or a person?
I cannot tell you how you feel. No one can or should. However, I do think that some good can come out of grief in a strange and perhaps unexpected way. I have found this to be true in my own life.
I’m not here to pretend everything is okay, or to say that everything ends well, or that the loss of someone or something you love or want deeply is ultimately just a stepping stone on your personal journey. No fucking way. Sometimes loss is violent and terrible. Nobody gets to take your feelings away from you. Ever. At all. Full stop.
But.
Losing something or someone doesn’t mean the end of you. It can be the beginning. I don’t have any better or deeper answers than that, but I know it to be true.
Go have a cup of tea or a glass of water and cry if you need to. Whether you’re upset about losing some shiny gold trophy that looks like a sex toy, or losing your car keys, or losing a relationship, or not getting on an improv team (my background is in stand-up and I have no idea how the improv team thing works but it is important to people), or losing a bid on a house, or finding out the girl you like doesn’t want to date you, or getting rejected for any reason at all, or figuring out yet again that your mom favors your older brother and it’s never going to change no matter how hard you try to be whatever kind of perfect she wants, you get to mourn. You do. In tiny ways and big ways, in proportion to the loss, in the way that is right to you.
And then keep going.
You may have plans and hopes and dreams. You may believe in yourself 100% and know you’re gonna go on to kick ass. But I promise you have no idea of the extent of the wonderful and powerful things you are about to do. And I am very, very proud of you for sticking around and doing what you can with what you have.
