White Whale: Part I

December 11, 2017

This past year, like every year in my life, has been another year of failure. That’s OK by me, though. I aim to fail. I pick targets way above my head and shoot straight up at them. I’m expecting the arrows to fall back down and hit me.

But 2017 has been a hell of a year. A hell of a year. I think anyone who’s plugged into the world on the simplest terms has paused once or twice to look around and inward. The heftiest pieces of our identities are up for reexamination: our races, our genders, our faiths, our politics. It feels to me like the beginning of a metamorphosis, the shedding of who we once were on the promise (or threat) that we may become something better (or worse) or otherwise different. And it’s happening quickly.

As a writer, I aimed throughout the year to contribute to the frenetic conversation around this metamorphosis. I wanted to determine what I was obliged to do in performing my own reexamination and discover my personal culpability in this moment’s upheaval. But at the same time, I often felt too small to write about things so massive. I tried to manufacture clever contrivances for myself so that if I couldn’t muster the perfect, most incisive take, I could at least be clever. But each time I sent my arrows up, they fell back down, and I’d wasted a lot of time being an overambitious archer, inadequately suited for the impossible target I set up for myself: to fix the world.

This is all to say that I’ve had a number of false starts on writing projects in 2017. What I’m left with is a menagerie of unusable fragments that are still too interesting to me to let go of. Before this month is out, I’d like to share those fragments—just to show that I’ve been thinking about you and trying to make myself better for you. I take that responsibility very personally. On Wednesday, I’ll share the first of these fragments along with an incomplete sense of what it means. I’m sorry I haven’t figured out how to fix you, but I want you to know that I’m trying as hard as anyone can. I know we can do better, you and I.