My dad recently reread all my blogs and said, “These are great, except whoever’s reading them is going to think you’re really bad at tennis.”
I’m good at tennis now. The year I wrote Losing the Plot I won zero matches; this year I’ve won 33.
These days I am a monster on the court. I love tennis like nothing else in my life; on the tennis court, for two hours I think about nothing else but tennis, and being great, and winning. I am meant to play tennis, I am made to hit backhands. Nothing, not even writing, feels as good, as perfect, as slamming an approach into the back corner. My body and mind connect along every neuron. The universe of my nervous system lights up like Hong Kong at night.
I cannot overstate how much I love the fight, I cannot love tennis more than I do. It is the only part of the week where I know one hundred percent who I am, why I am here, what I am supposed to be doing and how I can do it.
But loyal readers, you know something my new teammates don’t. I used to be bad at tennis.
At the end of We Write With Regret last year, I shared a bunch of rejections from my inbox. By that time, I’d amassed 59 rejections, and zero acceptances. An inbox full of Dear Emily,
Thank you for sending your work. Unfortunately, I will have to pass on this manuscript.
Instead of quitting, losing, I wrote more. I played more. I submitted more. Last year, I finished four stories and one novel. This year: 21 stories, three novels.
This year, I have new emails to share with you. Hi Emily,
Thank you for sending your pieces. We'd like to feature Lungs in the first send.
Thank you for sending us "There's Never A Good Reason To Stop On The Tracks". We loved it, and we're writing to ask your permission to publish it in Pfeilstorch Fiction.
Thank you so much for your creative nonfiction submission. We would like to publish your piece, "Should I Enforce That?" on our Substack!
And most essentially, the Bennington acceptance: Dear Emily,
On behalf of the faculty and staff, it is my pleasure to offer you deferred admission to the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Three publications and an MFA acceptance. Oh, and the thirty-three tennis matches. You can only lose them all if you quit.
But the job’s not finished.
Still, I lose. I fail myself, I lose control. I am not perfect; I am not even good enough.
(Cue Lit - My Own Worst Enemy)
Two weeks ago, a Tuesday night match: I’m up 5-3 in the first set, playing out of my mind. My opponent asks me if I played in high school. I can hear a man at the bar asking Nick if I’ll get double-bumped when we change sides.
But my hands are sweaty. I forgot my wristbands, and I keep having to go wipe my hands on a towel I’ve shoved through the wire fence. It makes me nervous, and I try to play a little safer. Take some pace off my stroke so my palms don’t slip.
Playing less aggressive gives my opponent an opening. I start to lose, I get angry, I play worse, I call myself terrible names and I double fault, I keep wiping my face on my shirt and it’s soaked with sweat, and she learns to hit it to my forehand.
She wins four games, two of them to love. It’s 5-7.
The second set is a disaster. I have completely lost my shit; I lose 2-6 because I can’t control my balls because I can’t control my feelings. I spend the entire time berating myself, under my breath and out loud.
I hit the ball out and lose the match. I shake her hand.
I cannot explain this anger. There aren’t words for it, I can only tell you the facts: I am so angry I cannot speak. I don’t have thoughts, only images of myself breaking things—my racket, my toes against the fence. It’s been said that if I ever encountered my opponent in the parking lot after a loss, I would hit her with my car. (I wouldn’t, okay? I wouldn’t.)
I crush a Miller Lite. When I begin to think again, my thoughts are unspeakable.
Why?
Why am I like this?
Anger is not the real emotion, my therapist says. Anger is not a root emotion. It’s the expression of other, deeper things.
Why am I so angry? What is it, really?
Helpless, embarrassed. But those are such soft-sounding things.
I am angry because I am afraid. Because constantly people express shock and consternation at my rating, because they have seen me play and they know I can be great.
But I am not great all the time, because I so easily fall apart. And when they ask, the simple curiosity of humans who want to make sense of the world, why I am a 3.0 playing 3.5 when I hit like a 4.0, I have to say “I have emotional problems.”
In that match, when I began to lose, I should’ve taken off some pace and hit the ball in the court. You can’t lose if you keep hitting the ball in the court.
But I cannot control myself. I cannot stop wanting perfect. So I kept hitting the ball as hard as I could, kept hitting shots with the lowest margin for error, because I wanted so badly to win by being perfect that I couldn’t be good.
I know the saying good enough is good enough. In how to keep house while drowning, KC Davis says, “Good enough is perfect.”
I know, I know, I know. All this knowing does not stop me.
I breathed deeply, I slowed down. I planned to watch the ball and hit it in, to rally, to play good tennis.
But I am a monster on the court. An animal. Afraid of losing and out of control.
I am a monster who wins, who loses. Same beast.
If I were not so wild, so angry, would I be able to hit those backhands that whistle, that fly off the tape, that spray clay? That have men turn to Nick and say holy shit, I just saw Emily hit the best backhand I’ve seen in my entire life?
Some people take a tennis lesson every day and are still not good. They pay thousands of dollars to have a losing record.
Is it because they are not monsters? They aren’t scary, out of control?
When I was twenty-two, my thesis short story collection, Ugly Good, won A Studio in the Woods Residency Award—four stories illustrating the balance of light and dark. You know the saying, every cloud has a silver lining. You also know, nothing good comes free. There are no one-sided coins. Anything illuminated must have light and dark, and in this world, nothing is all good or all bad; it must be both. The greatest pains and joys of life are married, no less than light and dark, and all the deepest passions of humans bring them both.
When I stop being angry about losing, I feel new. I am clear and bright. Like a forest after a fire. I am focused—I know what I want, and I want it more than ever.
The day before I lost that match, The New Yorker published Nick Paumgarten’s wonderful personal history piece Ice Ages, where he wrote,
I was, in many ways, a sensitive kid, a good boy. Yet there was something ornery in me, some cussed streak. I’m not sure where it came from, but it was hockey that touched it off, starting around the age of ten. Nothing else made me so assertive, combative, or self-righteous, or brought me so much animal joy. It was an altered state, a kind of goblin mode.
I read this the next day, after all that anger, and wondered: the altered state, the goblin mode—do we need it? Are we able to win without it? I have been asking myself these questions about the Ugly Good, about cost, balance, entropy. About the laws of thermodynamics.
First: if energy cannot be created or destroyed, I must be full of this power constantly, whether I am writing or playing, winning or losing. And second: if the possibility of disorder is so much greater than order, and all power tends toward chaos… well then what, really, are my chances of success? Doesn’t it seem much more likely that I will misfire, and the monster will end up more ugly than good?
Obviously, I am not a physicist, and I only use thermodynamics for metaphor.
But consider the way C.S. Lewis discusses free will in Mere Christianity. Comparing a human and a dog, you know that only a human can be evil. A dog has no free will—therefore its capacity for evil is low. But so, then, is its capacity for good. A human, alternatively, has great capacity for both. Or, as Stan Lee put it: with great power comes great responsibility.
So. Back to the goblin, the monster, the nightmare. Ought I to play like Buddha? Never enter the altered state? No. Before last night’s match, my tennis coach sent me How to Become A Nightmare to Play Tennis Against. “Talent wins rallies,” it said. “Being a nightmare wins matches.” I must be the monster, even though it seems, sometimes, that the monster trends more drastically toward ugly than good.
In Losing the Plot, I discussed the question: Haven’t you ever felt okay after losing?
That was two years ago, when I lost all the time. Now, I barely lose. Nicholas, who has been dominating for a while now, commiserated that when you win too much in a team sport, winning becomes an expectation instead of a celebration. Losing becomes incomprehensible. If your captain gambles the line-up knowing you always win, and then you lose, who is to blame?
The distance between good and great is not measurable. If I am going to win because I am a monster, I am also going to lose.
I am not okay with that. But isn’t that the point?
I cannot stop. I cannot slow down. I cannot accept good enough when there is still open road between me and perfect; I will drive down that road until my car breaks down, and then still, I will crawl.
Is this what’s wrong with me? And also, what’s right with me?
I am never satisfied. It feels good and terrible all at once. Maybe I would feel better if I were different, if I could calm down. But this is who I am. And because I am crazy, monstrous, out of control, I will win.
Maybe it would better to reach out for the doorhandle, slide in the key and unlock the bolt, turn the knob and swing open the door. But also, if you throw yourself against the door until you break through it, you will still be in the house.
My way—it’s probably not the best way. But it’s the way I am.
If I were not so monstrous, so out of control, I might have revised my first book a sixth time, done that total rewrite it needs, and queried it two hundred times, and maybe I would be published. Instead, this summer, I finished my fifth novel.
Photographer Jerry Uelsmann divided his University of Florida students into two groups on the first day of class: half to be graded on quality, half on quantity. When Ted Orland retold this story in Art & Fear, he said “that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection…”
Ha! Here I am, theorizing about perfection. But also, I am working hard. Remember Ray Bradbury’s famous advice, “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” Write ugly, get rejected, lose. You are not good enough? Perfect. That means you get to learn.
I know that I cannot be perfect. But as C.S. Lewis said, “The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.” I don’t even want to be perfect, not really—I get called a bitch to my face and behind my back, and I laugh. I only want to pursue perfection so that I can fight in the narrow margins between between good and great. I only want to be perfect insofar as perfect at this thing. Hit a perfect ball. Write a perfect ending. If I were actually a perfect tennis player, it would not be fun. I love the 7-6, 7-6 matches, not the 6-0, 6-0 ones. In my atoms I am competitive, and it’s the fight against myself, the climb, that gives winning its taste: euphoria and champagne.
In my Critical Theory class at Tulane, Dr. Molly Rothenberg explained Lacan’s cycle of desire so fantastically that I still picture the wheel she drew on the whiteboard as I hurtle through my life.
Desire, she taught us, is inescapable. Our human drive is to chase, not possess. We set a goal, a dream, and when it’s achieved we do not sit back and rest. We set another. You want to buy a car, then an Audi, a Porsche, a McLaren, a Bugatti.
Let us enter the weeds of psychoanalysis for a moment.
Simply put, Lacan viewed life in two stages: pre-language, the Imaginary Order, and post-language, the Symbolic Order. A child in the Imaginary Order feels complete union with its mother and the world; but when it acquires language, the world becomes imbued with meaning. Entrance into the Symbolic Order creates a barrier between self and world, as language itself is symbolic (i.e. the word ball is only a symbol of the physical object, and therefore lacking).
Think, in this framework, of labels: how often we are dissatisfied with language’s ability to contain our multidimensional complexities! Woman, wife, mother, teacher, etc… these are just symbols of self, and therefore dissatisfying.
The difference between the Imaginary and Symbolic orders is also, to Lacan, the difference between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The human condition is, therefore, inescapable desire; a lifetime of dissatisfaction. (Note: Deleuze, Girard, and all the saints consider this cycle of lack breakable, so don’t give Lacan too much credit. C.S. Lewis concludes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”)
Lois Tyson summarizes Lacan’s cycle of desire in critical theory today:
We will spend our lives unconsciously pursuing it in the Symbolic Order—maybe I’ll recapture that feeling of union if I find the perfect mate; if I acquire more money; if I convert to a different religion; if I become better looking; if I become more popular; or if I buy a flashier car, a bigger house, or whatever the Symbolic Order tells me I should want—but we will never be able to sustain a feeling of complete fulfillment.
Phew. From all that, I take away: we must, as a consequence of our structured world, our position in a society, have goals. We chase our desires. But we must also acknowledge that we will never be satisfied with these things. Whether you desire “good” things (art, nature, fellowship) or “bad” things (money, power, fame), they are all substitutes for the ultimate desire of completeness, or as some might call it: perfection.
It’s the wanting.
We must want perfection, but not have it. Louis C.K. told Stephen Colbert nine years ago, “If you went back and fixed all the mistakes you’ve made, you’d erase yourself.”
Perfection would be a curse. Who would you be? What would you desire, chase, pursue? Why would you fight? We all know hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
Without the pain of failure, would I ever work hard enough for success?
After I lost, Nick told me how beautiful my strokes were. A lot of people say that—that I play a beautiful game. But beautiful stroke still send balls out and in the net. I barely had control of my vocal cords. I choked out, “Beautiful gets you nothing!”
Sometimes I write something beautiful; it is not enough. Beautiful does not mean published.
Hunched over, squinting at my computer, permanent frown lines developing, reading open magazine calls, filling out forms, updating spreadsheets—that’s who’s published.
It’s costs more than it pays, which is nothing. It’s not for money or fame or anything the world keeps telling me I should want.
It’s for me. The monster. If I weren’t like this, I would’ve quit a long time ago.
Remember when I wrote, in We Write With Regret about my lost matches and my manuscript rejections—
sure, I can’t win them all, but surely I can’t lose them all, either. But wait, I do lose them all—
remember, two years ago, when I wrote in Losing the Plot—
Maybe I should quit. I wouldn’t have to play. I wouldn’t have to lose.
But – if I quit, this would be it.
Losing.
Loyal reader: without that story, this one does not exist. It is possible to lose them all. But. Only. If. You. Quit.
Ironically, Lacan’s theory of desire as lack also provides a framework with which to understand why tennis and writing feel so satisfying.
We do not lose the Imaginary Order when we acquire language; it simply enters the background of consciousness, while the Symbolic Order structures society and culture. An athlete is freed from language, operating and communicating with the body, and feels—when it goes well—fulfilled. An artist is freed from the societal norms and expectations of the Symbolic Order, rewriting reality without consequences in a constructed world.
Tyson agrees, calling the Imaginary Order “a fertile source of creativity without which we probably wouldn’t recognize ourselves as fully human.” She continues,
One might even argue that the profound value of the Imaginary Order lies in the very fact of its not controlling our lives the way the Symbolic Order does. Ironically, it is this “lack” of control that probably offers us the only resistance we have to the ideological systems that constitute the Symbolic Order.
The Symbolic Order tries to convince us that this lover, fortune, church, surgery, friendship, car, house—this will be enough. But it won’t. In Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a story of unquenchable desire, Sabine says, “Strange isn’t it? . . . The more you taste, the more you want.”
So we resist. By accepting desire as lack, embracing the Ugly Good of dissatisfaction, you release control. And on that path, you taste satisfaction. I’m reading Lucy Foley’s The Guest List now, and she writes, “Life is messy. We all know this. . . . But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them.”
Sometimes, you get to play tennis, make art, or whatever brings you fulfillment. You peek behind the curtain of the Symbolic Order’s ideological systems, and it is glorious. But you cannot stay there. Tyson says that “to remain solely in the Imaginary Order is to render oneself incapable of functioning in society.” You cannot be perfect, be satisfied, but for a moment. Then you get back to paying your bills, folding your laundry, and hitting the ball into the net.
Let us return to the question of entropy: yes, it is likely that I will misfire. That I will lose. That there will be 91 rejections to my four successes.
But that taste, that “Joy”, as C.S. Lewis puts it in Surprised by Joy, lets us live on. Lewis calls the peek behind the curtain, “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” In The Problem of Pain, he writes a gorgeous passage about the absolute necessity of our earthly dissatisfaction:
It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
I could almost cry reading it. What Lacan sees as suffering, Lewis sees as Joy. To me, it is power. It is Ugly Good.
