I’m not a Jesus person—but lately I’ve been going to this Jesuit college down the road and working in their library, where there are crucifixes nailed to every wall.
It’s getting to me.
The only other time I’ve been around so many dead jesuses was when I took a driver’s ed class at a Catholic high school. I thought a lot about death that summer.
I mean, I guess I think about death a lot. Probably more than the average person. But lately, when I look up from my laptop of emails and mundane work, I see messages scrawled on whiteboards like JESUS LOVES YOU. And then I look around the library walls and see more reminders that the symbol for Jesus’s entire life is the last few hours of it.
Like, imagine if your eternal symbol—the way people saw you—was a representation of how you died. If you choked on a chicken wing, people would hang drumsticks in your honor. If you were hit by a car, a sticker of a Chevy Silverado would be passed out at your funeral. It’s so macabre.
If a story is three parts, it’s mind-numbing to me that Christians chose their messiah’s ending as the symbol for his entire plotline. Then, over the years, that symbol (particularly for Catholics) became one of suffering and guilt. We were told that Jesus died for our sins—which, if you’re a kid who takes things very seriously, is the sort of thing that can fuck you up. But I refuse to believe that Jesus’s dying for our sins—if indeed that happened—was the sort of mathematical exchange that clergy decided it was.
I think—if indeed it happened—Jesus died knowing that people were imperfect and chose to love them anyway. That’s the great symbol of the cross. Not that he suffered. Not that we’re sinners. But that it’s possible to keep loving even when nails are boring through your palms.
Unlike Jesus, I’m not very good at endings.
It’s only in hindsight that I see how stories resolved. This is probably because I rarely take action to wrap up things myself. I let the plots of my life peter out and hope for the best until one day, I look around and realize that things have changed; I’m not in that situation anymore.
Progressing through life—as good a life as any of us can get, I think—is a basic matter of swapping out one problem for another. And now that I’ve moved beyond, well, the human shame that’s been hounding me for years (longtime subscribers should be well familiar with this!), the new thing plaguing me is doubt (which I suspect is a rebranding of anxiety for people who say they “don’t have anxiety.”)
I doubt whether or not I want to keep writing.
TV shows and movies about writers often focus on “sophomore slump”—the writer’s block that emerges after a great success. But what about the writer’s block that emerges after a failure? When you were in meetings about a manuscript and it seemed likely to sell—you were so certain that you’d be signing the contracts next week that you looked around town for the closest restaurant with specials on oysters and champagne. But the deal never materialized. The light never turned green.
It’s harder to get over a dream than reality. So as I think about writing another book, I think: do I love this enough to try again? Do I love this enough to carve out time and dig into my heart—despite the very real possibility that nobody will read a word I write?
And I don’t know. I don’t know if I genuinely love this enough to keep going. But the other problem is: I can’t think of anything else to do with my life. Do I even know what else to do? Do I know who else to be?
Doubts feel so real in a head. Sharp. More real than a dream. (Unless you’re a limerent escaping your life, then your fantasies feel more real than your realities.) Doubt feels so real that I can convince myself it’s truth. Guidance from the future. I begin to ask myself questions that feel more honest in their new, unconscious re-wrapping. Wouldn’t it be more spiritual to just fade away into obscurity? To not chase notoriety or produce art? Aren’t those just ego trips?
But then I remember the Jonah Complex.
Developed by Abraham Maslow—yeah, that Maslow—the Jonah Complex is defined as a fear of “grandiosity, arrogance, sinful pride, hubris” or fear of “doing what one is capable of doing.” Others may define it as a fear of meeting one’s fate. (It’s named after the Jonah of the Bible, btw.)
And this fear of “doing what one is capable of doing” seldom—if ever—manifests in direct ways. We’re not like, “Oh, I have so much potential but I’m ever-so-scared of fulfilling it!” Nah, it’s almost always more like, “Can I really do that?” or “Who would even buy that?”
The Jonah Complex is what makes our doubts louder than our dreams. It highlights our faults and tells us it’s humility. It sets our bars a little lower, claiming that’s the only realistic thing to do. But what a waste to succumb to that. How small you would become if you let one failure stop you from reaching.
I looked at my boyfriend’s cat the other day—how he cuddles up against me on the couch and reaches out, pushes his paw into my arm and nuzzles his way closer—and I started to cry.
How natural for this animal to seek out contact and how unnatural it is for me. How I feel I’ll never quite know what I’m doing. How I offer imperfect and shaky love and beat myself up for not doing the thing with as much presence or warmth as I feel I could.
But people can only love you the only way they know how. And part of being happy is learning to accept love without needing it to be better or different or anything other than what or how it is. Your family who is afraid of your dreams. Your friend who physically can’t go five minutes without looking at her phone. These imperfect loves make up our world—and how unfortunate it is that so many of us go around confusing imperfect love for something toxic. To demand that love never hurts you is to misunderstand life itself. It’s to forget that Jesus died for our sins.
Importantly, this also applies to the love we lend ourselves. I tend to forget that the quickest route to Jesus-level enlightenment is to die for my own sins—to not just accept but love my faults and doubts. And that means to love the possibility that I don’t actually love writing at all—but I love the attention it brings. But perhaps that’s alright. Perhaps it’s this idea that we’re supposed to be selfless altruists who neither need nor desire that keeps us anxious and small. Perhaps it’s the Jonah Complex manifesting as humility. Fighting our base wants—living inauthentically—is the dream-killer.
I’m an ordinary person. I fuck up often. And I’m probably self-involved. I would love to be less anxious, less doubtful, more open, more loving, all of it.
But I’m not.
But at least that’s not the end of my story.
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