In the playground of Fair Grove Elementary (Rural District 10) sat what we called the Bell Tower.

It was hardly a tower, standing about as tall as I do now. Its Depression-era bell was long gone. It sat awkwardly among swing sets and monkey bars. But something ancient in all that WPA solidity drew us. It proved a formidable forward base for my imagined Star Trek missions. It also holds my earliest memory of self-creation.

One day, when I was seven or eight, I was standing beside the tower when the cutest girl in my class began walking along a path that would carry her and her friends right past me. Seconds to draw her attention. My big break.

What could I do? She barely knew me, childhood social divisions being what they are. I was the nerdy kid who slipped bits of secondhand Shakespeare into class assignments. She was A.B., all side ponies and neon jackets, as beautiful and fashionable as any.

I weighed my options, chose my gambit, assumed a nonchalance, and waited.

They arrived. I stepped away from the Bell Tower, drew up my hand in a circling, absent-minded motion and said: "E=mc², to the power of three, carry the one…"

And then she was gone.

I threw my arms up in victory. Now they'd know who I was. Now she'd begin to care.

Of course, she hadn't seen me at all.

All my life, I've lived to impress. Every action judged to exceed someone's expectations. No plan undertaken without the promise of showing that I was better than someone else.

I learned early on that I impressed others in my little Missouri farm town for two reasons: I was devout, and I sounded clever.

Devotion naturally sets you apart. I hadn't seen the same movies as friends; I didn't understand their music or cultural memes. This was the mandate, after all—believers were called to be sanctified. In practice, this often meant sanctimony.

Words, like guilt, come quickly to the preacher's son. Linguistic facility has long hidden my sloppy thinking; in writing as in life, a strong voice covers a multitude of sins. Smart words made others think that I was smarter across domains. I began believing this too.

Perhaps there's nothing yet unusual to this story—a small-town, book-bred kid reifies parts of his identity. We all choose something. But something happened when these two traits uncoupled, some slow subduction, worth interrogating. The further that I withdrew from superstition in college, the stronger my need for intellectual distinction. The currency of the church was piety, but the wider world cared nothing for holiness. My old status was worthless. And on arriving in grad school I found that everyone was smart, and that preeminence would demand real effort. It was not enough to simply enjoy my studies, to luxuriate in long seminars on Montaigne or Thucydides. No. Only striving would do. The Pauline way was now closed to me. I would need another route. No longer the saint, I'd play genius instead.

An undiscovered genius, of course, because the world of academia was utterly foreign. This made distinction difficult. The University of Chicago had been unknown to me before my senior year of college. I'd heard of Brown exactly twice before matriculating there: once while watching Iron Man, and once in learning that philosopher Charles Larmore had moved there. A PhD from Brown carries nearly all of the status one could want. But because the aim had become not scholarship but greatness, I was more focused on my rejections.

Soon I began casting around for new distinctions, eventually hitting on the idea of a dual JD/PhD. Again, I got welcomed admissions offers from the name-brand schools. But because I was merely waitlisted at the right school, I dismissed the idea altogether.

It was around this time, circa 2011, when all the threads began coming loose.

By now, I had been weaned on reading the greats, and I wanted to write like they wrote, work on the big problems just like them.[1] I couldn't understand why my powers weren't up to the task, and why my committee wanted me to write boring academic prose like everyone else.

Couldn't they see what I was attempting? Couldn't they see I was different?

The anguish of these questions soon became a full-bore depression that made work impossible. The worst of it—beyond torpor and the bags of chocolate—was watching my old interests fall away. At first you have no willpower to work; soon you wonder why you tried. I wanted to think about anything but political theory. I stayed enrolled in hopes that I'd snap out of it, and because I hadn't seriously considered any other path. By now I'd convinced myself that I was born for this work. It had become my secular calling. What else could I do?

The answer: not much. I left Brown with mountains of debt and that singularly marketable most-of-a-PhD-in-political-theory. In Missouri, I alternated between joblessness and odd jobs and caring for my grandmother. Healing came slowly. Friends were few. All I could see was failure.

But failure at what, exactly? What standard of success was this? Unparallelled erudition? A career that would redefine disciplines?

It wasn't until 2020 that I finally saw how that kid in the playground had gotten lost in thinking that he was his intellect. How his entire self-worth became wrapped up in his ability to become ever more impressive.

2020 had been my best year. I fell in love, moved to the woods, gained some mastery at work. COVID spared me and my loved ones. I could see all this—psychologists would have rated me high in "life satisfaction"—but still I was miserable.

I was adrift in comparisons. First, most obviously, I'd compare myself to other academics, especially the cohort from grad school who'd moved from success to success. Each was doing better work and more work than I'd ever managed. (Never mind that most were unhappy too: unplaced in towns they hated, with colleagues they could mostly tolerate. I couldn't see this at the time.) Yet whatever envy I felt was overwhelmed by regret. I could have had that life. But I'd failed.

The second comparison, a far subtler kind, we might call self-collation. All my adult life I've compared my actual self to the counterfactual man who'd made better choices, or had parents who'd given him Latin, or had been given an even more privileged pedigree. I'd tracked this self from the start of grad school. They split sharply in 2011. By 2021, my better self was all but assured his Nobel.

All this while ignoring that my life wasn't far from the one that I'd said I always wanted: simplicity, decency, quietude. But this had always felt like cornpone Stoicism. Too easy, too low. And besides, it carried none of the status markers on which I'd based my happiness. For what good are comforts if one is not also producing? Should I not be suffering for my art?

Some time-smoothed instinct wants me to leave you with the sense that I've figured it all out: 40 years of ego and then the pure actualization of my true self.

How tidy! How very impressive.

But I haven't figured out much, of course, except that my need for a "true self" was the torment. I kept trying to bend experience around some-or-other narrative, and experience kept snapping back. There is no cosmic self to divine. There's just this clusterfuck of mind and memories and matter. Buddhism's core insight suggests that the mind can't tolerate such a jumble for long, and is always already arranging it into something cohesive that feels like me. Escaping that cycle is the work of a lifetime. But short of that, we can get to the place where we learn to accept the jumble as... pretty okay. To learn that there can be happiness without praise or status. Perhaps even freedom.

This includes freedom to work. For years I'd wonder: if you say you're a writer, why aren't you writing? And the answer, which escaped me until now, was obvious—I'd been held back by a need to be The Writer. Identity killed the activity. It was the same with every pastime; though I thrilled at making images, I abandoned photography because my photos weren't Art. I would be the best or I'd become something else entirely.

You're reading these words because that need for recognition has begun slackening. Not fully disappeared; do even saints manage as much? But loosen. You would be astonished, dear reader, at the amount of puffery I’ve removed from this very essay on being astonishing.[2] I'm sure that much more remains. But progress is progress, and it's enough right now to keep laying down more and more of those playground weights that I've been carrying ever since.

First drafted January 2022
Last revised January 2026

  1. Proust: "My grandmother, as I learned afterwards, had at first chosen Musset's poems, a volume of Rousseau, and Indiana... she did not reflect that the strong breath of genius must have upon the very soul of a child an influence at once more dangerous and less quickening than those of fresh air and country breezes upon his body." ↩︎

  2. The hinge of the problem sits at that single point where playful performance crosses into performative superiority, where the joy of creating lovely little things gets subsumed in the need for recognition and appreciation. The hard thing is that the damned point won't hold still. ↩︎