may notes
being sincere, watching TV, dancing, all at the same time
oh, okay (on anxiety, on sincerity)
I went to my last dance class early this month. For weeks I thought I was slaying until I watched the class video recording back and felt embarrassed by my sloped shoulders. After we performed our final choreography in groups, one of my classmates, a kind woman probably in her fifties, told me she could sense that I still felt uncomfortable, that I needed to free myself and just dance. I nodded in unsentimental agreement with everything she said. Watching the video, she kind of ate me up. Her confidence sold the performance.
It’s amazing that I have received essentially the same feedback about myself and my demeanor for the past twenty years and have done very little to respond to it. The only difference is that when I was younger, I probably would have quit the class or hid in a bathroom stall. Now, I just keep showing up. I tell people that my intense social anxiety disappeared randomly sometime in the middle of 2021. This doesn’t mean that a gregarious and outgoing person, even a slightly-less-offputting person, emerged in my previously anxious self’s place. Instead of improving my demeanor, I’ve accepted it. I can sit through the awkwardness. I can observe a social interaction even while I am actively inside of it and deduce when I am blowing it. When I am blowing it (saying the wrong thing, saying nothing, just generally emitting an unplaceable vibe), I don’t really feel mortification or self-hatred anymore. I feel like a curious driver passing by a car wreck, thinking: Damn, looks bad. Hope everyone makes it out okay. Except I am most likely the wreck’s liable party.
For this reason, although I know that Nathan Fielder is playing an exaggerated character, I feel a bit of kinship towards Fielder’s droll caricature, in his relentless pursuit of the most uncomfortable and therefore most human forms of communication. He delivers a self-aware monologue at the end of The Rehearsal Season 2, episode 2:
“Some people are born great performers. They have the talent to effortlessly convince others they’re more than just a number. But for the rest of us, no matter how sincere we are inside, it will always be a struggle.”
(note: I am still trying to figure out whether I think there’s something unethical about The Rehearsal, and I think my opinion varies from episode to episode. Episode 2 is ethically fine.)
I have been thinking about sincerity a lot lately. It’s a quality I really value, especially in art. I love musical theater, Jeremy Strong, Cynthia Erivo holding space, I love animal rehabilitation videos, inspiring sports stories, underdogs, and emotional speeches. And yet I have always struggled to verbally perform sincerity. I suffer from an always-sounds-sarcastic voice, so my genuine elation is often mistaken as derision. Physically, I could not even commit to a vulnerable, uninhibited performance of my dance routine. Sometimes I think that writing is the only way for me to show up as sincerely as I feel inside. Even then, it’s easy to be self-deprecating, to hide behind disclaimers and not really try. Maybe that’s the joy of fiction: the chance to shift the burdens of sincerity onto a character outside oneself.
I think it is possible for something to be sincere and a joke at the same time, and I think this state of paradoxical earnestness is where I would like to conduct most of my creative life.
may notes:
Tried out the wash and fold by my house for the first time, since my laundromat recently raised prices. My clothes were returned to me in the form of this compact and lovely creature. I put off the task of dismantling his body for days, keeping the lump in the middle of my room like a pet. I miss him.
I know that it is time for me to go to sleep when I start looking up Glee covers on Youtube.
And Just Like That (HBO’s Sex and the City sequel) owns my ass. I literally cannot look away from this show for a moment. Sometimes the pure, compulsive watchability convinces me that what I am seeing is actually a good show and not the result of what would happen if you google translated the premise of the original show to a different language, google translated that back to English, did that four more times and then fed that result into chatGPT. The world was so busy hating Che Diaz that no one had any time to consider that Che Diaz is a once-in-a-lifetime bizarre writers room swing that we should have appreciated while we had the chance.
For my mother’s 66th birthday party, my dad threw a party that involved poolside karaoke. All night, my mother was surrounded by five friends from high school. They giggled together and drank prebiotic soda and danced in my parents’ backyard. They have known each other for 50+ years now. My Mom and I sang a duet of Phoebe Snow’s version of Teach Me Tonight. She kind of ate me up. Her confidence sold the performance
during the party my parents’ dog could not stop acting awkward as hell…like what is this… thank you as always for reading <3
recommended reading:
Pavements (2024) by Alex Ross Perry - a movie that really grapples with (or in some ways, evades?) the sincerity question. An exploration of what happens when you transpose ironic slacker music onto the most sincere, try-hard genres of art — musical theater and the biopic. Watched with Josh at the Roxie this month.
This was such a great read! Smiled a lot.