This title is not searchable
Or evading birdness
When my first son was young and we still spent weekend mornings digging in the sandbox at the local playground, I found myself captivated one day by the most thwap-thwopping of helicopter moms I had yet to witness.
“Hart,” she would call her son’s name out, barely above an audible whisper—for of course she didn’t shout—whenever Hart seemed about to get into trouble or to bother another child or after an interaction where he may indeed have bothered another child. She would noiselessly pull him aside—so as not to draw undue attention to her child’s inevitable flaws—in such an exaggeratedly gentle and quiet manner that her manner became the most conspicuous thing at the park. I could not take my eyes off of them, mostly off of her.
I felt a strange mixture of awe, respect, and bemusement towards her. She clearly had good intentions, but the intensity of her need to direct every moment of her child’s experience bordered on the comic…and the tragic. Perhaps it was out of a sense of embarrassment. He was not a very well-behaved child. He didn’t take direction well. He was older than most of the other children at the playground and yet interacted with far less maturity. There could be a million reasons why, not the least of which could have been the dynamic she created with him. Mostly, I felt for him. Poor kiddo, I thought. This cannot be fun. Yes, somehow this mom had turned this site of childhood relaxation and release into an instructional deadyard.
Finally, there came a moment when Hart had been set free from his mother by her engagement in conversation with me. I don’t recall what we talked about, but she sits distinctly in my memory as very unlike most of the self-righteous, preeny moms in the elitist town where I live. To my surprise, I was rather enjoying talking to her. And, as these things happen, as we laughed about some parenting farce or another, there appeared Hart by her side, tugging at her arm and pleading with her to come watch him climb the side of the play structure behind us.
She got up, watched, congratulated him enthusiastically, then came back and re-engaged where we had left off. The positive attention wasn’t enough though, and Hart cried out for her from the top of the structure. She tried to ignore him, something I imagine was especially hard for her, and yet he cried out louder. “Watch me, Mommy, watch!”
At this point, the mom had either reached an internal crescendo of patience or had given up on hiding her many, pull-aside conversations which multiple adult eyes had nonetheless followed with fascination, and she yelled out in a booming voice that held neither annoyance nor distress but pure sanguine dismissal of a world structured around external rewards, “Enjoy it for yourself, Hart!”
Enjoy it for yourself, Hart. Enjoy it for yourself, reader. Wherever else she fell short, the playground mom gained my enduring admiration in that moment. Now with three children of my own who are constantly requesting, sometimes demanding, to be watched and witnessed in their every self-anointed achievement, I think of her often. I think of her message. Enjoy it for yourselves, my loves. And I wonder, too, how we adults so often convert the things we love into moments to be witnessed, watched, or shared instead of savored internally, instead of enjoyed just for ourselves, just because. The essence of the thing loses the pure enjoyment through the external demands we place on it.
It’s not completely our fault. The world around us calls for, indeed craves our marketable personalities. In her New Yorker review of Erik Baker’s book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, Anna Weiner explains how Baker’s book traces the historical transition within capitalism from an industrious work ethic to an entrepreneurial work ethic as reflective of a broader social move from a “static moralism” to “a dynamic philosophy of personal development.” In 1997, the McKinsey consultant Tom Peters wrote an essay titled “The Brand Called You” and, whether or not he meant to engage a deeper form of self-development and value propositioning, he tapped into a moment ripe for the idea of personal branding, a moment that coincided with the rise of the exploratory internet which quickly become the exploitative internet which just as quickly became the “Me Inc” internet which echoed the broader capitalist cultural moment in which work became “purely transactional. Each worker is in a company of one,” as Weiner puts it. A moment where the public-facing facet of identity became all-encompassing and self-fashioned, a moment of molding self into commercially sound and yet soundlessly uncomplex identities that makes Ruth’s aching desire to remake Martin Eden, in Jack London’s novel of the same name, into someone she can properly marry perfectly quaint. There is no time for the inter-class refashioning of others when our own brand is forever on the line. When it is, indeed, our lifeline.
This Me Inc approach can extend into our conversational beings. Alison Wood Brooks has coined the term “boomerasking” to describe the phenomenon where one person poses a question in the guise of curiosity but then rapidly turns the conversation back to themselves. In short, they ask a question they want to be asked…and to answer. As Brooks describes it:
Like the looping arc of a boomerang, boomeraskers ask a question, let their counterpart answer and then immediately bring the focus of the conversation back to themselves. They try to achieve two conflicting goals at once: to show interest in their partner and to disclose something about themselves. But they fall short of achieving either goal.
Our shiny personalities shine so brightly as to blind us. But why? Beyond the tendency of human natures towards egocentrism, why do we get caught in the idea of a thing while losing its vitality? Far too many love stories unfold this way. The idea of the person you start dating outsizes who they actually are, this idea becoming who they seem to be, until at some point they inevitably let you down with their flawed humanity.
Other dating stories start with a different idea trap—the notion that if someone hasn’t been partnered up in a while, there must be something wrong with them. This category of undateable people—seemingly so appealing but definitely defective beneath—that we create and impose upon others can also be self-imposed as with journalist Sara Eckel who had been asked “What’s wrong with you?” so many times when people learned she hadn’t had a serious relationship in eight years, she herself began to inhabit that belief. After months of trying “fixes” recommended to her by self-help authors and gurus, she finally shares “my shoddy relationship résumé” with her new boyfriend. And, as she writes,
When I did, he shrugged. “Lucky for me,” he said, “all those other guys were idiots.”
And that was it. To Mark, I was not a problem to solve, a puzzle that needed working out. I was the girl he was falling in love with, just as I was falling in love with him.
The personal branding we do, even the self-definition we engage in, becomes who we are, regardless of our continued choice in the matter. The once superficial ‘commercial us’ or the inner critic that we know is wrong is slowly built, brick by self-defined brick, until it is the house we live in.
I’ve been thinking about my writing as a “puzzle needing working out.” Or rather, I’ve been resisting that whole school of thought. The truth is I’ve been thinking about my lack of interest in thinking about my writing as “a puzzle needing working out” or as myself in the guise of an SEO wizard, working to alter my thoughts, form, and writing “to align with what people might search for.” In her Substack article on how to increase your writing audience and thus revenue, Maryan Pelland explains how:
Search engines favor well-structured, easy-to-read content, too. As I've said in other posts, break up long paragraphs (but avoid making every sentence a paragraph), use bullet points effectively, and incorporate subheadings (H2, H3) to improve readability. Use bold and italic text to emphasize important points, and include call-to-action statements like “Subscribe to be sure you never miss a single ____________.”
Pelland advocates for focusing on, even perhaps starting with, the external category—the searchable terms or optimized titles. The Me Inc writing genre requires learning how to stylize your writing and craft titles so that people search for and thus find your work. The other searching for you comes before the you searching for the thought as the cart comes before the horse.
There is nothing wrong with making money by writing and using proven strategies to achieve that goal. But for me, for the kind of writing I do, and for the kind of writing I love, these tips and tricks get caught in “birdness” while forgetting or ignoring that the net, or worse, will follow. The things we choose to inhabit can quickly and insidiously become us, removing our original choice in the matter. In her poem, “The Bird Net,” Jane Hirshfield explores this very human tendency:
The Bird Net
by Jane Hirshfield
I once decided to pretend to be angry.
Then I was.
As a bird is caught in its birdness before it is caught in the bird net.
The bird might be counted, tagged, released.
The bird might be eaten.
It took hours for the shaking to leave my body.
Body of air, body of branch, what earth’s yellow & nectars were
made for.
The consequences of choosing a category, a role, a belief for yourself could be immaterial, or even beneficial for others of your kind. The bird in its “birdness” might just be “counted, tagged, released” as birds are in scientific projects whose aims are most often to understand or protect the subjects of their studies. But the consequences could also be far more serious, lethal even: “The bird might be eaten.”
Emotions typically move through us within minutes, but here the anger that the narrator pretends—the anger that she then experiences in a real way and, in fact, comes to embody—stays with her for hours. She gets so caught in the pretense of anger that it overwhelms her until she must wait for it to leave. Where she once pretended anger, she now is not only embodying it, but is controlled by its whims and timetable. And though the bird may get caught in the bird net because it embodies “birdness,” there is something unique about the human ability to pretend, to conceptualize, to trap ourselves in ideas that makes us uniquely susceptible to getting caught in nets of our own making. While a bird might be caught in "birdness" through external categorization, we humans actively participate in creating and maintaining our own categorical prisons.
And so the idea of crafting searchable titles felt decidedly icky to me. Like a scratchy sweater that I am supposed to wear and would learn to tolerate over time, if I gave it such time. If I allowed myself to be the woman in that sweater. If I keep putting on that uncomfortable sweater, I gradually stop noticing its itchiness, gradually stop noticing I’m wearing it even, maybe even gradually forget I could take it off. It felt antithetical to the process of writing, the expression, the searching, the "body of branch," the reaching and striving and growing and not the coming into it with pretense, with external categories pre-formed. To be sure, categories that could benefit me. Or categories that could irritate like an itchy sweater. Or perhaps categories that could lead to my being eaten alive.
When we trap ourselves in static siloed categories, we might be more searchable, more dateable, more politically popular, more influential, or more sense-making to others. But we lose “what earth’s yellow & nectars were made for.” We lose the connection to sustenance that comes from what we don’t anticipate, that comes through struggle and difficulty understanding, that comes from interconnections with other beings—or even other beliefs, categories, or roles—as the bird cannot sustain itself without the nectars in the flowers or the branches on which it builds its nests. And in those connected, life-sustaining, indivisible wholes—where breath moves through the body and the branch grows, reaches, and sometimes winters—the birdness is irrelevant. Just as whatever I say this piece is about is irrelevant. For I, like you, am a body of air. For this piece of writing, too, is a body of air—breathed into being and then released out with no agenda, intention, or presumed discovery to be made.
Do I want my writing to be a birdness? To be defined by “Katie-ness” and then reify into something static and separate? I want you to enjoy it for itself. I want to write it into a body of air. I want you, dear reader, to think through it for yourself. I want my writing to be a discovery that maybe you alight upon, a yellow attracting petal or a pollinating nectar that helps to make the body of a branch which can extend out, which can deepen through its trunk and roots into earth, which is what my thoughts and words and breath are made for.
Body of air,
Katie