V.

The train was coming on—slowly, it was a local, not the express I’d wanted it to be—and I was lying there thinking about the doctor’s admonition to “go home” . . . and it occurred to me that, while there had been a number of contributing factors to my recent demise (an incensed judo master, dangerous liver damage, Japan in general, honestly), one thing I hadn’t addressed was my inability to write ever since I’d managed to get my first book accepted for publication, the genuine terror I felt when considering the prospect that I wasn’t as good at what I wanted to be great at as I wanted to be, that actually I was as much of a fraud as I’d been before the “success”—that, now that I’d finally cleared this hurdle, I’d be exposed, there’d be no more disguising of my limitations, that by getting what I’d believed for over a decade was what I truly wanted I’d laid myself bare to the much deeper-cutting pain of clear-eyed apprehension of my limits. . . . 

And this might well be true! As noted, one interesting aspect of the 2012 Finals was the number of times I saw LeBron James have his shot blocked: five years ago, this didn’t happen. The inhuman James actually didn’t seem vincible . . . and yet I found myself enjoying him now more when it seemed that he had to do the work—but joyful work!—to do the thing that he was born to do. I couldn’t write for a long time, because I was afraid that anything I wrote would somehow let somebody down, most critically myself, of course, reveal my limitations, expose me to critique . . . but the thing is . . . this is what I’ve chosen to do with my life. I started doing this because I liked it; I wasn’t the best, wasn’t even all that good, but felt, from the first time I closed and set down a book that in reading had felt like a numinous gift somebody’d written—for me, it almost felt—that this was good.

Somewhere at some point after the myriad setbacks, rejections, failures to get the words right, to make good on intentions that at least had their genesis in real generosity and joy, writing was reduced to the zero-sum of Publish or die, get glory and acclaim or cave to envy and the listless bitterness of dream-renunciation. But I’ve tried and failed at enough things to know that I’m lucky to have language as a court on which I actually feel comfortable: words are where I feel at home—I’m grateful that I get to do this thing where I get to suit up and try to make something happen with them, if I want to try, if I’m willing to work, for as long as I’m willing to limber up, get out on the page and play. . . .