declare yourself an optimist

diary entry, december 3

In my last, life-wasting job at the Death Star, I had frequent down-time. I imagine my bosses believed I should be doing things, but they were stupid and pointless things, or often enough I would be in an hour-long zoom call where five minutes might be relevant to me. So I did what many do in that situation. I read up on the Guardians’ free agent prospects (minimal); went down the hall to see how my colleague Michael’s daughter was doing with her college search (she selected University of Rochester rather than University of the Arts, fortunately); went to the mall to pick up a pastry at Panera and check on our Sears store’s decline (gradual, and then sudden).

Occasionally I would make an effort to improve myself. I took up an online statistics course, which demonstrated again that I have no aptitude for statistics. I read blogs and articles about management. I took every training HR offered, and some of them were pretty good. If you ever have the opportunity to see a presentation by Adriana Macias, you absolutely should take it. (You may need to learn Spanish to get the most out of it. It would be worth learning Spanish just to see one of Adriana Macias’s presentations.)

One of the trainings they sent me to was about how to communicate difficult news, like telling someone they were being laid off. As it happened, a training about receiving difficult news would have been more apt.

Somewhere in my self-improvement program I encountered an article called “How to Be an Optimist.” I would not say I have consistently been an optimistic person throughout my life.¹ Perhaps, approaching a dead-end at work, learning how to be optimistic seemed relevant. The article explained the eight or ten steps to becoming an optimist. I don’t remember any of them except the first one: “Declare yourself an optimist.”

That seemed silly at the time. Or at least amusing. As if I was going to introduce myself at meetings, “My name is Chris, and I’m an optimist.” (“Hi, Chris.”)

Then things happened. Molly Knight started an online group working through The Artist’s Way, which is full of setting intentions for oneself.² My therapist, Glenn, asked me to decide on my word for the year. The reductions-in-force that the Evil Empire had been hinting at, and then promising, finally manifested. Free to define myself how I chose, without falling back on a title on an org chart, I started telling people, “I’m a writer.”

That felt - feels - like an audacious thing to declare oneself, if one doesn’t earn a substantial portion of one’s livelihood putting words one after another. People who make incomes get to call themselves writers. Steven King is a writer. Me? My inclination was to say that I was a guy who was unceremoniously handed a box³, and is now finding his way.

But now: I’m a writer. It is a tremendously powerful declaration. An invisible yet perceptible light shines on me when I say it; my back gets a little straighter; I feel a sword and shield in my hands. That’s right, muthafucka - a writer.

And I recall what Stephen King says about this in his book On Writing, one of the two best books about writing out there⁴: If you’ve written something and gotten paid for it, you’re a professional writer.

Anyway, forget me. This is about setting intentions. The first step to being an optimist is to tell yourself you’re an optimist, and as dumb and ineffectual as that may seem, it actually worked. It’s possible that I did some of the other steps and they were the more important factors, but I can’t remember them, and in any case it does strike me as likely that I wouldn’t have gotten to Step 2 if I hadn’t completed Step 1.

Some other article I read, sitting there in my cubicle⁵, said that making your bed in the morning is the most important act of the day. This is, frankly, bullshit, but there are a lot of things that are obvious bullshit that nevertheless make all the difference in the world. Your opinion may vary, of course, but when I go to my brother’s church and see the priest enter swinging a censer, I ponder why in the world people believe this stuff matters. It matters because you believe it matters. There’s not much more to say.

Well, I have one more thing to say, at least, which is that the truth of one’s intentions also matters. The road to hell and all that. You can join a church that believes in making the stranger welcome, or you can go to a church that skips over the inconvenient bits. The world has all manner of social clubs, and some are better than others. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about “Good Orderly Direction” and apart from making a cute acronym, the word “good” seems important.

Another thing to say is: there’s no guarantee of payoff besides the thing itself. I made myself more of an optimist, somehow, despite apparently not paying much attention to Steps 2-10, and spent the summer telling people to ignore the doomsayers, everything was going to work out in November. Eh, not so much. The pessimist may be rewarded more frequently in life, in a way that tests the resolve of a declared optimist. Or, to make it about me yet again, in a way the world is testing mine. What is there to feel optimistic about, hurtling toward this new and more challenging year?

One must not confuse optimism with feeling happy. One must not confuse process with results. I can declare myself a writer, I can even write every day. There’s no guarantee any of it is worth reading. I’m a bit mystified whenever anyone says it’s worth reading.

(I think a writer is not supposed to say this sort of thing to one’s audience. You say it in your Artist’s Way group, and what happens in the meeting stays in the meeting. Saying it here sounds like begging for compliments, which I’m not.)

What I am saying is what Mr. Rogers used to tell us:

We’re nearing the time of year when people set intentions. “Intentions,” Glenn calls them, not “resolutions,” because we’re fallible, and resolutions are hard to keep, and one can easily focus on results instead of practice. It feels good to have made something. It feels good to have done something. It feels good to exercise your optimistic muscle even when the thing you have hoped for doesn’t pan out; to recognize the new landscape and chart a path forward.

I was doing morning pages today - that’s another Artist’s Way tool, three pages a day, longhand, of whatever flows from your brain to your pen. Lately I’ve not been very good at it; the phone keeps ending up in my hand. This morning what came out of my head is, you have a practice so that when you need it, it’s there. Lifeguards don’t save lives every day. They practice saving lives so that on the day they need to, they’re ready.

My favorite baseball player these days is Austin Hedges. Molly was puzzled when I told her a guy who hit .203, whose bat was rated 79% below average last year, was my favorite player.

Despite those results, Hedges has found a way to have a ten-year career - and not just to have a ten-year career, but to be sought after by teams going to the playoffs.⁶

A couple of years ago he was asked about the way the Guardians always seemed to be in position to win, despite unproven and possibly inferior talent. “People say we rise to the occasion,” he answered. “There is no occasion. The occasion is every day.”

I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Probably I should edit this more, which is another thing a writer is probably not supposed to admit. Anyway, if you figure it out, let me know. Or maybe just declare yourself something, practice something as often as you can, walk ten steps farther today than yesterday, make the damn bed if that’s all you can do. See if you can get to Step 2.

1. I have been a fan of Cleveland baseball teams for about 45 years, so I might have developed that muscle a little bit.

2. Molly is worth a subscribe if you like baseball, but more relevantly she’s starting another Artist’s Way workshop next week. Check it out.

3. They don’t even give you a box.

4. The other one is Joseph Williams’s book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. I took a course called “Academic and Professional Writing,” aka “The Little Red Schoolhouse,” from Joe Williams, and it’s probably the single best course I’ve ever taken. The chapters of Style are basically each week’s classes, without Williams teasing you for being adept at obfuscation.

“Are you in the Law School?” he once asked me. “No, Education,” I answered. “Nearly as bad,” he said.

In fairness, I’ve not read every book on writing, of which there plenty. I don’t know if these are the best two. They shame Strunk and White, though, that’s for sure.

5. They don’t have cubicles anymore, either.

6. Hedges might be the worst hitter ever to have won a World Series ring, worse even than Mark Belanger.