Friction is evidence
Let me convince you that it's working
Something utterly chic about letting hard work destroy you.
Finding something you love and making sure it flattens you into the ground. It’s a delicious, disruptive, devoted death rehearsal. The more ungratefully slow and complicated, making you question why breaking your heart at labor’s hands is something you signed up for, the better. Fasten your belt en route to success or failure! Not that the destination matters more than input, it’s too late to turn back either way.
When you’re good at something, you’re going to want to offer it to the world. You’re going to want the world to listen. But its readiness to respond is not under your control or growing in parallel to your efforts. This readiness to engage with what you have to offer is alchemical, uncontrollable. Stars have to align, things have to fall into place, cosmic treaties have to be written and signed behind your back. Your offering needs to make sense at the right time to the right people with the right frequency. And sometimes, in the early stages of a process, things make sense exclusively to you.
Work in progress. It’s in this state I find myself reeling, hands on knees, knees to floor. Ecstatic humiliation. What day is it today? Building a universe around elements that so far only exist in my satellite view, its vitality kneeling at the mercy of some vague self-promise, is madness. In the complete succumbing to the unknown and allowing hard work to touch me, slaving away at something on coffee, shaky potential, and wishful thinking, I find the most misery and joy available. As the weight of it grows, I try to sell the effort to myself under the guise of trusting the process, pretending to detach, and whatever else. I lied, okay? I’m bitter, tired, overdressed for the occasion. There are easier ways of interacting with the world, why the stab wounds? Annie Dillard in The Writing Life compares the process to taming an animal: “A work in progress quickly becomes feral.… It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room."
Friction. Turbulence. Hesitation pointing cold metal at your temple as you get pestered with questions that seem to lay out a quicker path to giving up than they incentivize you to keep going. It works and then it doesn’t again. Damn, thought I’d cracked it. The drawing board knows your face better than your own family. Frustration-weighty setbacks and timeline delays, obstacles that prevent you from walking straight and force you to dig sideways, becoming oppressed by your own ambition and allergic to the success of others, all feel like evidence that you’re more of a bitter, backwards bitch than a forward prodigy. ‘Success’ is, of course, fluid rather than a strictly defined structure (What does it look like? Finite or infinite? Will it run out? Do we have the right to keep it? Is it sustainable?), but it feels spitefully quantifiable through comparison. The wins of another cease to be a moment of proof and celebration but expose your naked skin to broken mirror glass.
The jealousy subjection isn’t personal, of course, plus we’re all adults, so it’s a dirty secret you keep to yourself. We’re better off not pretending we’re always loving the journey, head held high. Sometimes we’re screaming and kicking and begging for relief and willing to rip our skin off just to not engage with someone excelling. Relief, perhaps, can come with knowledge that everyone you hate or admire probably experienced suffering of the same caliber. They won’t disclose it – you won’t either. Most times nothing is readily ‘offered’ to anyone – it starts with begging for it, carving it out of sand, finding small pieces where you can to build a ship that somewhat sails. It takes a year, it takes a lifetime. Some have just mastered the art of begging subtly. You’ll get there, too.
And then, of course, the friction. My oldest enemy. I’d best describe it as an imbalance of input and output: so much of you goes into something and not enough comes back. At times, it’ll drive you up the wall. But our relationship with effort has to be challenged, friction reframed. It is a testament to caring: I give it my all because I care – because I deserve to care – because the world deserves to watch me care about it. The friction is not a gravel road to shiny pavements of merit, ease, talent. It’s not to be overcome. Difficulty is a consequence of serious work, its essential engine. Hard work and friction aren’t just necessary conditions for output, they’re the mechanism by which the work develops integrity, a coherence with itself. As you iterate and scratch your head in distress and look for pathways that send you into panic and resentment, you just so happen to oil up the very wheels that steer you into the right direction, flowers, palatial accolades, everything you want. To try and smooth the friction away means smoothing away the thing that makes the work worth receiving – one that calls for the surroundings to embrace what you’ve crafted in their big and ready arms.
Could we get humble enough to allow the friction to convert into something essential? Would I treat it gently if I knew it was the very flame to the world’s readiness, slowly heating up the fuel to the boiling point of reciprocity? Let’s say that friction is not some brute force provocation. Let’s say friction is evidence it’s going your way. Let’s say without it, you should be concerned. The lightness in the doing we’re seeking has to be found within the friction itself, not through it. Beyond existing with the friction there won’t be much of a reward. And through this, the worth of having something is measured in the difficulty of its attainment.
And friction is an honest friend, too. As it undresses you to the very underlying instincts and bare intentions, bruises and lingerie, it doesn’t shy away from asking you the hardest questions: all of this doing, this labor, is it for yourself, for others, or attention? If it’s for others, nothing but misery’s in store. If it’s for attention, you won’t retain the energy to sustain it. You’re safe and golden, but only if it’s for yourself.
It stings, man! It hurts to stay up late, to not be lucky, to run short on breath and unaccomplished, to bite your nails over the emerald greener grass. But you know better than anyone why this path, why now, why you. Because it would hurt more to turn your back to the one thing you wanted most, however safe everything else. Let’s not pretend it’s some heavenly punishment. Everything is a product of your agency and sacrifice – we pick our battles and befriend them. You chose not to lay a graveyard route to a life full of what if’s and envy for the reckless minds who had it in them to bet on their big clumsy dream. You couldn’t have it any other way, so now you’re here, paying with dedication.
Recounting her experience of meeting Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag writes in Pilgrimage: “The zealot of seriousness in me, because it was already full-grown in the child, continues to think of reality as yet-to-be. Still sees a big space ahead, a far horizon. Is this the real world?”. Much like your life’s work without friction is never an arrival point to reach. The fantasy of it can stabilize you for a moment, sanitize your worries, but it is just that: a fantasy, something to softly moan to under the covers and put your head back down. Is success an arrival, really, or just a brief exhale of alignment before the next challenge grows tall in front of us?
Assume that friction will never leave. A relic that rolls over into every new chapter. Sit with the weight of that. It’s not hard until it’s easy, it’s always hard because you love it enough. Still, a life spent picking at something you know deserves every tear of your devotion is worth the blind path. You’ll do it slow, you’ll dig at it from every angle, you’ll be humiliated. Sometimes, you’ll be awake and sparkly, lungs full, heart pumping with momentum. But those nights are rare. Not just for you, for anyone that lets hard work ruin their life a little. Take all this pleasure and the fantasy, the sublime, luck and glory, the endless, the important, the sleepless. What else is there to get ruined by?
An essential READ/WATCH LIST (for paid subscribers) on working hard, doing it chic, dying for it. Essays, interviews, journals, movies, internet gems that moved me enough to inspire this essay & helped its structure and formation: