Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  Here is what we know for sure: There is no end to want. Want is a vast universe within other vast universes. There is always more, and more again. There are prizes and grants and fellowships and lists and reviews and recognitions that elude us, mysterious invitations to take up residence at a castle in Italy. One can make a life out of focusing on what one does not have, but that’s no way to live. A seat at the table is plenty. (But is it a good seat? At which end of the table? Alongside whom!?) A seat at the table means we are free to do our work. What a fantastic privilege.

  Feeling like one does not have “enough” of something (money, status, power, fame, recognition, shoes, name it): that’s where every kind of terrible shit starts. And the benchmarks of success constantly shift. Ambition is a fool’s game, and its rewards fool’s gold. Who is happy, asks the Talmud? She who is happy with what she has.

  Fine, okay, but I’ve been publishing for a decade now. When my first book came out, I was a wreck. I smoothed my dress and crossed my legs and waited smugly for my whole life to change. I looked obsessively at rankings, reviews. Social media wasn’t yet a thing, but I made it my business to pay very close attention to reception. I was hyperaware of everything said, everything not said. The positive stuff puffed me right up, and I lay awake at night in a grip of fury about the negative. You see this a lot with first timers. It’s kind of cute, from afar. Do I matter? Do I matter? Do I matter? Rookie mistakes. What’s sad is when you see it with second, third, fourth timers. Because that hunger for validation, for hearts and likes and blings and blongs, is supposed to be shed like skin.

  Ambition: an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment. Note: We are not speaking here about trying to pay our bills, have a decent place to live, buy decent food, access decent health care, get a decent education. For the purposes of this particular discussion, those fundamentals are assumed. And there’s nothing in there about spiritual betterment, social service, love, or happiness. The entire concept can therefore be seen as anti-feminist. I believe an ideal matriarchy would concern itself exclusively with the quality of our days. Wither the collective desire to make life better for everyone? Ambition is egotistical, because it is by definition about being in service of the self, which has never, not once in the history of humanity (can you tell I’ve not bothered to read Ayn Rand?), made anyone anywhere “happy.”

  Anyway, haven’t we collectively imbibed sufficient narrative about the perils of success and fame, already? Haven’t we seen how fame can destroy and corrupt, how ambition and greed are twins? How recognition can pervert and compromise? We’re all struggling with our own unique little demon conglomerate, and we all have some good luck and some bad luck. Nobody can tell you how to be happy because being happy is one of those things you figure out by figuring it out, no shortcuts. Or maybe you don’t figure it out, maybe you never figure it out, but that’s on you. Everything worthwhile is a sort of secret, anyway, not to be bought or sold, just rooted out painstakingly, one little life at a time.

  I’m searching the old notebooks for one quote in particular, though. It came flooding back soon after I accepted this hellacious assignment. (I mean, women and ambition!? Too vast and complex. What the hell can possibly be said? Women: Be more like men! Lean this way! Lean that way! Lean sideways! Pick a direction and contort yourselves heroically toward it at any cost! Never give in, never surrender! You are entitled to dominate! You owe it to all women! Don’t tell us what to do! Hear us roar! I dunno, you guys. I do not know.)

  It’s a line from an essay by Christine Doza in an anthology called Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation: “When I was little I wanted to be the president, a firewoman, a teacher, a cheerleader, and a writer. Now all I want is to be happy. And left alone. And I want to know who I am in the context of a world full of hate and domination.”

  I find Doza online and message her: “Are you the same Christine Doza who wrote ‘Bloodlines’ in Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation?”

  I want to include her in this narrative. I want to let her know how much her essay continues to mean to me, twenty years later. She’s not a “famous writer.” I can find nothing she’s published since that essay. But I want to tell her how forcefully she (still!) resonates when I am asked to formally consider the topic of women and ambition. She managed to articulate something difficult, profound, and specific (which is hard and rare), and in so doing, she gave me a gift. A jumping-off point. Affirmation. Recognition. A clear-eyed dispatch from further on up the road. Fate brought my eyeballs and her words together, the end.

  She never responds. I wonder what her deal is. Whatever.

  Maybe my great ambition, such as it is, is to refrain from engagement with systems that purport to tell me what I’m worth compared to anyone else. Maybe my great ambition is to steer clear of systems. Any systems. All systems. (Please like and share this essay if you agree!) What I would like to say is Lean In my hairy Jewish ass.

  My mother was one of eight women in the UCLA Law School class of 1965. A lot of professors and students treated them horribly, those eight women, because they were “taking up a space a man could have had.” Appalling, right? Except, uh, it’s true: My mother did not actually want to be a lawyer. Her parents wanted her to be a lawyer. It was fairly radical of her to become a lawyer. She is badass by nature. But she didn’t really want to be a lawyer.

  Upon graduation, those eight got together and decided to just ask interviewing firms outright: Do you hire women? Legend has it one honcho stroked his chin thoughtfully and replied, with no apparent maliciousness, “Well, we hired a cripple last year.”

  She practiced law for a total of about one year before she got married and had kids and settled into the kind of furious soul-eating misery that is the hallmark of thwarted women everywhere, from kitchens and gardens to boardrooms and private jets and absolutely everywhere in between. To this day, if a stranger at a party asks her what she does, she’ll lift her chin in a gesture I intimately recognize as Don’t Fuck With Me, and say, with cement grit and dirt and bone shard in her voice: “I’m an attorney.”

  And isn’t everything we do, everything we reach for, everything we grab at, each of us in turn, a way of struggling onto that ledge, that mythical resting place on which no one can fuck with us? Don’t Fuck With Me seems as good a feminist anthem for the twenty-first century as any.

  But the mythical resting place is . . . mythical. And trying to generalize about ambition is like comparing apples and oranges and bananas and flowers and weeds and dirt and compost and kiwi and kumquat and squash blossoms and tomatoes and annuals and perennials and sunshine and worms. Wanting to be first in your class is and is not like wanting a Ferrari is and is not like being the first in your family to go to college is and is not like wanting to get into Harvard/Iowa/Yaddo is and is not like wanting to summer on Martha’s Vineyard is and is not like wanting to rub elbows with fancy folk is and is not like wanting to shatter a glass ceiling is and is not like wanting to write a lasting work of genius with which no one can quibble. Our contexts are not the same, our struggles are not the same, and so our rebellions and complacencies and conformities and compromises cannot be compared. But the fact remains: Whatever impresses you illuminates your ambition.

  Some ambition is banal: Rich spouse. Thigh gap. Gold-buckle shoes. Quilted Chanel. Penthouse. Windowed office. Address. Notoriety. Ten thousand followers. One hundred thousand followers. Bestseller list. Editor in chief. Face on billboard. One million dollars. One million followers. There are ways of working toward these things, clear examples of how it can be done. Programs, degrees, seminars, diets, schemes, connections, conferences. Hands to shake, ladders to climb. If you are smart, if you are savvy, who’s to stop you? Godspeed and good luck. I hope you get what you want, and when you do, I hope you aren’t disappointed. Remember the famous curse? May you get absolutely everything you want.


  Here’s what impresses me: Sangfroid. Good health. The ability to float softly with an iron core through Ashtanga primary series. Eye contact. Self-possession. Loyalty. Boundaries. Good posture. Moderation. Restraint. Laugh lines. Gardening. Activism. Originality. Kindness. Self-awareness. Simple food, prepared with love. Style. Hope. Grace. Aging. Humility. Nurturance. Learning from mistakes. Moving on. Letting go. Forms of practice, in other words. Constant, ongoing work. No end point to be found. Not goal-oriented, not gendered. Idiosyncratic and pretty much impossible to monetize.

  I mean: What kind of person are you? What kind of craft have you honed? What is my experience of looking into your eyes, of being around you? Are you at home in your body? Can you sit still? Do you make me laugh? Can you give and receive affection? Do you know yourself? How sophisticated is your sense of humor, how finely tuned your understanding of life’s absurdities? How thoughtfully do you interact with others? How honest are you with yourself? How do you deal with your various addictive tendencies? How do you face your darkness? How broad and deep is your perspective? How willing are you to be quiet? How do you care for yourself? How do you treat people you deem unimportant?

  So you’re a CEO. So you made a million dollars. So your name is in the paper. So your face is in a magazine. So your song is on the radio. So your book is number one. So you got what you wanted and now you want something else. You probably worked really hard; I salute you. I mean, good, good, good, great, great, great. But if you have ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people, you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time with basics like breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.

  I get that my foremothers and sisters fought long and hard so that my relationship to ambition could be so . . . careless. I get that some foremothers and sisters might read me as ungrateful because I don’t want to fight their battles, because I don’t want to claw my way anywhere. My apologies, foremothers: I don’t want to fight. Oh, is there still sexism in the world? Sigh. Huh. Well. Knock me over with a feather. Now: How do I transplant the peonies to a sunnier spot so they yield more flowers next year or the year after? How do I conquer chapter three of this new novel? I’ve rewritten it and rewritten it for months. I need to do my asana practice, and then I need to sit in silence for a while. Then some laundry. And the vacuum cleaner needs a new filter. Then respond to some emails from an expectant woman for whom I’m serving as doula. And it’s actually my anniversary, so I’m gonna write my spouse a love letter. Then pick up the young’un from school. And I need to figure out what I’m making for dinner. Something with lentils, probably, and butter. Then text my friends a stupid photo and talk smack with them for a while. Taking care of myself and my loved ones feels like meaningful work to me, see? I care about care. And I don’t care if I’m socialized to feel this way, because in fact I do feel this way. So! I am unavailable for striving today. I’m suuuuuper busy.

  Yes, oppression is systemic, I get it, I feel it, I live it, I struggle, I do. Women are not equal, we’re not fairly represented, the pie charts are clear as day, thank you gender police, thank you privilege police, thank you, we know, truly we do: nothing’s fair, nothing at all, it’s maddening, it’s saddening, it’s not at all gladdening. We all suffer private and public indignities big and small. Tell the gatekeepers to shove it, don’t play by their rules, and get back to work on whatever it is you hold dear. Nothing’s ever been fair. Nothing will ever be fair. But there is ever so much to be done. Pretty please can I go back to my silly sweet secret sacred novel now? Take care.

  My little boy is beside me. He is designing cars on BMW’s website. (Cars are a fleeting obsession.) He’d like a BMW someday. His dad and I hide our smirks. Sure, kid, whatever floats your boat. Yesterday it was a Porsche. Tomorrow a Maserati. Apparently he’s in an id phase.

  “Why don’t you guys like fancy cars?” he wonders.

  “They’re a little show-off-y,” I say.

  “I like fancy cars,” he says. “When I grow up I’m going to get a Tesla and a Bentley and a Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce.”

  I smile. “Can I have a ride?”

  “Of course!”

  Wait, though, there are plenty of material goods I covet. I have a shameful thing for clothes. There’s this pair of Rachel Comey high-waisted pants, oh my god. I own like six pairs of clogs. I fill my walls with art by friends. I live beautifully. Nice textiles, what have you. There’s a Kenzo sweater I might be saving up for. I so enjoy the darkest of chocolate and juice extracted in the most exceptionally newfangled way, I really do.

  What I would like to say (so that I might be forced to align myself) is that there is nothing material or finite that I will allow myself to rest on wanting. Okay, so dresses and clogs and art and peonies float my boat. But fool myself into thinking that these things constitute an end point, or that their acquisition will make me whole, or that people who are impressed by these things are my friends? Nope. No way. Not for a minute. (Well, FINE, maybe for a minute. But certainly not for two.)

  When asked for writing advice, Grace Paley once offered this: “Keep a low overhead.”

  So becoming a lawyer was more or less an exercise in Don’t Fuck With Me, but what did my mother want? In her seventies now, she’s studying Joyce and Dickens. She spends her summers at Oxford, studying Shakespeare. She is delighted and enlivened and occupied, and I wonder why she doesn’t go ahead and get herself a graduate degree in literature. She would make a formidable English professor.

  “I’m too old,” she says.

  “Bullshit,” I say.

  “I’m stupid,” she says. I squint at her.

  “I’m lazy,” she amends, and my heart breaks for both of us.

  She used to tell me I was lazy, back when I was refusing to care about my GPA, refusing to run the college admissions race, refusing to duly starve myself like all the good lil’ girls, refusing to wax my asshole or get manicures or chemically straighten my hair, refusing to do much of anything other than consume books and music and movies and books, then scrawl my favorite bits all over the damn place. She was talking to herself all along. She was talking to herself! Remember: Our most haunting, manipulative ghosts always, always, always are.

  I wrote a magazine piece a while back, and it’s been shared online some sixty thousand times. It’s a fine piece, but is it the best thing I’ve ever written? I don’t think so. Is it the most original thing I’ve ever written? Nah. Is it the most challenging, bold thing I’ve ever written? Nope. Sixty thousand shares is not a win, see; it’s a random, synchronistic event. The number of eyeballs on a given piece of writing does not confer nobility or excellence upon said piece of writing. If the number of eyeballs on a piece of writing excites and impresses people around me, that’s cool, in that it makes possible more of the work I want to do. But it doesn’t make said work any easier! And I’m going to do said work regardless, so . . . what?

  So What? Let’s add it to our list of proposed feminist anthems: So the Fuck What?

  You should write for a larger audience, my friend Josh told me a year before he died. He had read my first novel and written to congratulate me. I was on the road, touring, short-tempered. I am not writing for an audience at all, I snapped. I have no control over audience and zero interest in thinking about it. I could look up our exchange, but I don’t want to because I’m sad he’s dead and I’m sorry I snapped at him, and I want to transcend physics to tell him I love him, and he may have been right, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Josh, and here’s a dumb cameo in this dumb essay about dumb ambition.

  But I don’t want to write for a large audience, silly! The masses are by definition kind of mindless as a matter of course, are they not? I mean, no offense, masses, but Donald Trump’s memoir sold better than all my past and future work combined. (He didn’t write it, but still.) The media star of the moment could take a dump on a square of Astr
oturf and there’d be a line around the block to sniff it. What makes a work of art special and meaningful is your private relationship with it, the magic of finding it amidst the noise and distraction, the magic of letting it speak to you directly. You found it, it’s yours. (This, however, requires the awesome skill of being able to think for yourself in the first place; hardly a given.) Art can change you; it can move and validate and shift and bait and wreck and kindle you in the best way. And others who feel similarly about said work can be your kin. It is not a more-is-better equation.

  (I repeat: more is not better.)

  Josh, darling, I don’t write because I “want to be a writer.” I don’t want to be famous, and I don’t need my ego inflated. I write to make sense of things, to make order from chaos, to make something from nothing. Because what I have found in the writing of others sustains me. Because while I am struggling to live, the writing—a kind of parallel life—helps me along. Because language is my jam. Because I never learned to play the guitar and no one ever asked me to sing in a band.

  I mean, writing is liberation! Or so I tell my students, over and over and over again. Flex your muscles, I say. Feel the sun on your face, the wind in your hair! Struggle with your shortcomings. Leave everything out on the field! Do it again tomorrow! What rigor. What joy. What privilege. Say whatever the hell you want to say, however you most accurately can! Complete and utter freedom.