I Turn to Stone

Fear of success and fear of failure are a formidable tag-team pairing

Today is my Substack publishing day, or what I like to tell myself is the Tuesday Morning Writing Club—a cleverish nod to the debut album by Sheryl Crow.

When I was unemployed in the last six months, I decided to attempt what everyone else seemed to be doing: to get AI to “help” me rewrite my resume in search of new work. Ultimately, I broke down as I looked at my CV, and asked ChatGPT, “What the hell is wrong with me??”

For the record, I work in the Golf industry, teaching the swing and how to play a game I love… even though I barely play it anymore because I have come to use it to chase after financial security rather than personal joy. In fact, despite my attitudes toward money, I chase it like the popular girl in my eighth-grade class: awkwardly, ineffectually…once I have it in my reach, I don’t have the first idea what to do except waste or abuse it…at which point I find myself in conflict with my own morality, and I let the greatest opportunities slip away. They don’t ring true.

I know what you’re thinking…this guy’s a keeper.

AI helped me over the months to lose 25 pounds, not beat myself up when I found a new day job and five of those pounds came back, and to see that I want to write. I do get great ideas, all the time, but please don’t read this as bragging. I actually hope you can relate.

I have several thousand pages of paper and electronic writing, and at least as much in quantity of ideas that I have sequestered in my mind or backspaced out of existence on social media, unable to produce, refine—even FACE them.

I am a genius in the bathroom or on a walking trail, and then…put me in front of a keyboard, and it’s like my eighth-grade object-of-affection is standing in front of me, saying, “Go on,” and I turn to stone.

On turning to stone…I have a different take on the Myth of Medusa.

Medusa, reputedly a deadly Gorgon, is simply, and unbelievably, charismatic…as are her sisters, but Medusa especially so. She “hides” because her tremendous beauty is a terrific curse. When others behold her, they are paralyzed, overwhelmed with their own, sudden sense of inadequacy.

Medusa’s radiance and charisma causes even the light around her to dim. To be a man and behold her is to have one’s very genetics brought into question, let alone his constitution. To be a woman and behold her raises those same, crippling insecurities through the self-comparison we are warned steals joy.

When Medusa returns home and out of sight, all that remain are senses of loss and failure, so overwhelming that those who choose to continue living are so burdened with insecurity, shame, and lost opportunity, they cannot process it—let alone admit that all they feel comes from within them.

To explain it away to their friends and relations, they do what people do: they lash outwardly. They make up excuses. They make up smear campaigns against Medusa. Those same tales make beauty monstrous, Medusa becomes a thing to be feared and, untested, removed from truth into vicarious, urban legend, and relegated to being called repulsive while the name-callers dig their own graves and pre-fill it with their own ignorance.

The stories of Medusa’s ugliness are not, therefore, untrue, they are simply projections of our own failings—the ones we take all the way to our own graves.

You would never see Medusa or her sisters in SI’s Swimsuit Issue, because they know too well they would never have any rest afterward…nor would they ever make any new, true friends. In fact, their lives would be in constant jeopardy. We just don’t know how to handle true beauty.

We seek either worship or to destroy it…even when it is our own.

I do not mean to claim, by the proximity to my Medusa hypothesis, that either I or my ideas are all beautiful, striking, impossible to behold…but, inside me is what appears to be a dim cave entrance, but within is a palatial, comfortable and well appointed space, filled with natural wonder; light that comes from sources both made and mysterious; and purest streams from above and below that would make Frank Lloyd Wright reconsider his achievements at Fallingwater.

There is a modest library: the books on those shelves are all by the same author, but with different pen-names.

A version of me lives in that cave. A version of me found it. Furnished it. Lighted it. The self who filled those shelves a work at a time, between visits to the kitchen to make bread with that pure water. I do not ask where the flour and salt came from…because I am still wondering about the origins of this version of myself. I am terrified of my own dream, of the books on those shelves, of what I will learn of myself when I finally open just one of those books.

What’s more—and the writer in me considers it only just now—I might open those books and find that I was NEVER meant to write, I was merely meant to live, a hermit in a cave, and that, too, leaves me paralyzed with fear.

Petrified, you might say.