my argument with reality

“Impatience,” says record producer Rick Rubin, “is an argument with reality.” If so, I have been arguing with reality for most of my life. It began with the reality that, no matter what I did, I would always be the youngest in my family by far, the baby. I don’t remember anyone ever saying anything to trigger this. It is just how my heart and mind responded to the sheer physical fact that everyone else in my household was full-size and I was not. 

As a child, I insisted on being included in whatever my older siblings did. Once, when I was around seven or eight, my oldest brother, probably around 17, was babysitting me while my parents were out. He poured himself a tall glass of milk and a small glass for me. I insisted he pour me a tall glass. He explained that it would be too much for me. I persisted, and when he resisted, I threw a tantrum until he finally relented. An hour later, I was moaning in my bed with a terrible stomach ache. That’s a pretty good emblem of how I made decisions as I moved into adulthood as well.

After college, though I’d loved working my various part-time jobs and writing poetry and short stories, I rushed myself onto an academic career path. I had little understanding of what it meant to be a professor and had never felt the slightest inclination to become one. But my older siblings had careers, and it was intolerable to me that I did not. I raced through it. Four years later, I had a PhD and a tenure-track job. Four years after that, I had tenure. 

Personally, as well, I sprinted ahead. My siblings were married, so two years out of college, I married for the first time. My brothers started having children, so a year after that, I had my first child, and a year and a half later, my second. By the time I was 30, I had published a well-received scholarly book, gotten tenure at a prestigious institution, and was married with two small children. 

But none of this ended my argument with reality. On the contrary, I still felt dissatisfied and impatient despite achieving what I had set out to achieve. It was as though I’d been on a treadmill and didn’t like where it took me. Then, instead of getting off, I just turned it to face in a different direction and, for good measure, turned up the pace, foolishly imagining that would get me somewhere else. Divorce, a hasty second marriage, another divorce. Recurrent dissatisfaction with my professional work manifested in either petulant complaints about academia or manic efforts to reinvent it—sometimes both at the same time. 

For three decades, I kept up my argument with reality, ever more desperately fucking with the treadmill, furious that no matter what I did, I never got anywhere different. Finally, the treadmill threw me off. Reality, one might say, grew tired of my childish arguments. I lost the job and career I’d always complained about and lost the (third) marriage that had been troubled already before it started. When the life I’d hastily constructed began to collapse, I reported this to a friend who’d known me for most of those thirty years. 

“Ever since I’ve known you, man,” he said, “you’ve been running from something. I don’t know what it was. But it looks like you’re out of running room. Maybe now you can figure out what you’ve been running from.” 

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