A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Read Free Page A

camera. One man cornered me and told me about his plans for an evangelical book set on another planet where everyone had more than five senses.
    They had glanced over my application form and decided, for some reason, that I belonged with the Vocalists. I saw myself as more of an all-around threat, i.e., Russia rather than North Korea, but I dutifully joined the line.
    When I got into the audition room, I gave it my worst. I sang. I twitched. I shouted. I turned in what would have been the performance of Gloria Nichols’ lifetime.
    I didn’t stand a chance.
    As I flailed and gyrated—“I dreamed a dream in time gone byeeee . . . Aaron Burr Aaron Burr”—I caught the woman judge looking at me. We made eye contact, and I could tell she knew.
    •   •   •
    So
that
was what actual rejection felt like.
    My worst wasn’t bad enough.
    All this time, working hard to be terrible, and—nothing.
    “If there is one thing I’ve learned from this afternoon,” I typed on my phone, after Melon-headed Spit-Singer asked for my number and offered to pray over me, “it’s that no amount of concerted effort can make you seem weirder than people who are just being themselves.”
    I’d been overlooking one thing, I realized. The best bad movies aren’t the ones that try to be bad. They’re the ones that try to be good.
    If I really wanted to fail spectacularly, I should have been trying to succeed. For the most spectacular rejections of all, you have tobelieve. You have to go out there and give the performance of your life.
    Only then does the ax really fall.
    Failing, it turns out, is easy. You don’t have to be
trying
to fail. It’s a part of life. It sucks. It will come and find you whether you seek it out or not, like women who want to talk to you on long airplane flights.
    I’d always thought I’d be all right because I was a writer. Words were a bright thread that could lead me out of any labyrinth; I just had to keep them pinched carefully in my fingers as I walked. Nothing could hurt me as long as I kept hold of the thread. I could seek out anything—awkward, odd, novel, even a little dangerous—and cage it up in sentences, put it on display, its teeth still sharp, maybe, but the bars too thick to bite through. But in trying not to be hurt, I was missing the real story. I was still afraid of jumping. I didn’t want to fail for real. I wanted to be a secret success.
    All this time I thought I was becoming a master of flops, I’d been safe inside my turret. Where was the adventure in that?
    I knew rejection was supposed to be a part of life. Failure, rejection, flopping, embarrassment, all of this.
    So why was it so frightening?
    Easy.
    Historically speaking, I have no problems. We have no problems. We live long lives surrounded by indoor toilets, penicillin, air-conditioning, birth control, smartphones. Everyone has great teeth. Consider that everything that George Washington accomplished in his life, he accomplished while experiencing horrible tooth decay. I have had toothaches once or twice in my life and they left me completely incapacitated for
days
. I could barely do laundry. Meanwhile George lost all his teeth and managed to win a war and start a country.
    You would think that this lack of actual complaints would make us happier and more confident. But no. Instead, we have become allergic to things that didn’t used to bother us at all. We’re acutely focused on minor inconveniences. We’re terrified of commitment the way our ancestors used to be terrified of mammoths. I have never seen commitment spear anyone on a tusk and leave him to bleed out slowly in a corner of the cave while wind howls around him. No matter. It scares us just the same. Embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers is literally one of the worst things that can happen to us. It’s in the slot where polio used to be. Awkwardness, rejection, missing out. We’ve conquered everything else and these constants of human life are