Author: Graeme McMillan

I was talking to Chloe earlier about what we described as our shared inability to accept compliments, but the more we talked, the more it dawned on both of us that the problem was, perhaps, that neither of us were particularly good at even recognizing when we were being complimented in the first place.

The conversation started upon seeing mutual friends take credit for comments that weren’t, necessarily, compliments aimed in their direction, all the while taking great pains to ensure that everyone knew just how humble they really were, of course. It was something that amused both of us, not only in how obvious their egos were, but in the fact that both of us realized quickly that we lacked whatever DNA we needed to do the same thing.

Instead, both of us have something that could, at best, be described as an anti-ego: something that hears a comment about us and immediately assumes, if not the worst, then at least the most bland and generic. We could both receive compliments that seemed on the face of them to be sincere and wholehearted, and instead either hear them as half-hearted attempts in the name of being polite, or else subtle sarcasm intended to suggest that we’re actually the very opposite of whatever was actually being said.

Such an anti-ego can be both a blessing and a curse — although mostly the latter. There is the upside of it preventing either of us from getting a big head, which is always a preferred outcome… but then there’s the fact that neither of us are particularly gracious in the face of people who genuinely are trying to compliment us, because we simply don’t quite believe what they’re saying. Instead, we both just have developed the impulse to mumble semi-gracious thanks before desperately trying to change the subject as quickly as possible.

Thinking about it, it’s good that neither of us have won any kind of award. Just imagine how bad the acceptance speech would be.

I miss eating out.

That’s not a euphemism; with one single exception, I haven’t eaten at a restaurant or cafe or coffee shop or, basically, anywhere that isn’t in the same place where I’ve been sleeping since lockdown started in March 2020, and it’s been long enough that I can admit to feeling really kind of strange about that now.

It’s not that I’ve not eaten food prepared by anyone outside of my immediate family in all that time; I’ve ordered more than my fair share of takeout in that time — what can I say? I really like both fancy American fusion food and McDonalds, and see no real reason to deny myself either as long as I can afford it and don’t overindulge — and eaten some pre-packaged snacks and frozen meals across the past 24 months, as well. But I haven’t actually eaten a meal anywhere that isn’t my house.

(Oddly enough, as I’m writing this, I’m wracking my brain to imagine if I’ve even eaten anything as much as a candy bar outside the house in all that time, and I don’t think I have. That can’t be right, and yet, I have the horrible feeling that it is.)

We’re at the post-lockdown point now where everyone seems to have just… accepted the pandemic as a fact of life and an acceptable risk, with seemingly everyone around me wandering around without masks and the various restaurants allowing sit-in custom again. I have to confess, I’m tempted to just throw caution to the wind and eat out for the first time in two years, just for the thrill of it. Imagine the decadence you’d be feeling!

Except… except, as I said before, there’s one exception to all of this: a birthday meal for a family member at a restaurant, last summer. For the entire meal, I felt anxious and nervous, as if this was the moment when COVID would get me once and for all. I could barely enjoy the food, or the company, the entire time.

Maybe I’ll stay in the house for now. But maybe I’ll order some food in, and pretend I’m being fancy, at the same time.

For the majority of my professional writing career, I’ve prided myself on the speed at which I work — an ability to basically sit down, start writing and get to the end of the piece in a surprisingly speedy time, with minimal need to re-read or re-work as much as possible. It’s been something that’s been remarked upon by editors and other writers, with no small amount of jealousy and admiration; hence my lack of modesty about it.

Something has happened in the last couple of months to change that, however. I suspect the change happened earlier than that — I have a feeling it’s closely related to the period of extended writing I did for a couple of long term projects last year, only one of which has come to any kind of fruition as yet — but whatever the timing and whatever the reason, I’ve become a fan of writing things ahead of deadline and leaving them alone overnight, before re-reading them the next day and making whatever changes necessary.

It’s not that I make that many changes the next day; more often than not, I change a couple of words in a vain attempt to get the word count down, or perhaps shift the order of a couple of sentences around. Instead, it’s become a confidence thing, where I find myself feeling far more comfortable just being able to re-approach the piece fresh and see where I’ve gone wrong. It’s a safety net, perhaps, but one I’ve come to rely upon with almost everything I’m writing, these days. (Blog posts aside, of course.)

It’s this safety net that’s had me rework pieces from scratch, knowing exactly what to do to fix them in next-to-no time; it’s the safety net that’s made me more confident in working for larger companies paying me larger amounts of money to write for them. Sure, it’s slowed me down some, but I’m nearing 50. Writing automatic prose is a young person’s game — and it’s not as if waiting one day is going to make a significant change in anyone’s run time, anyway.

It’s been a long winter, and no mistake. Even as I write this, the sky outside is still overcast and looking as if it’s going to piss down absolutely freezing rain any minute; that’s basically what it’s felt like since… the heatwave of August last year, perhaps…? That’s likely an overstatement, but almost certainly since early October, we’ve been gripped by some consistently terrible, cold weather. When it’s not been overcast, that’s almost certainly because it’s been downright stormy with apocalyptic rain. Things have, to say the least, been far from sunny and wonderful.

I’m telling you all this in an attempt to set up the shocking nature of what happened last night. At some point in the middle of the night — at a time when, when I woke up, I knew better than to look at what time it was because it was clearly the middle of the night o’clock, if that makes sense — I woke up because I was, stunningly, too warm to sleep.

I honestly can’t remember the last time that happened; it’s almost certainly last summer during the heatwave — although, even then, I stayed asleep through most of that because I fell asleep knowing how uncomfortably warm it was in the first place. But, no, I woke up because I felt as if I was oppressed by the heat.

I knew, even as I moved the covers off me (keeping the cat as unbothered as possible in the process; I was half-asleep, but not insane, after all), that this was something I probably should have been annoyed by. Who wants to wake up in the middle of the night for any reason, after all? But, no; there was something thrilled about this disturbance, apparently. I was almost gleeful for the unexpected heatwave, and determined to appreciate it even as I made necessary changes to allow me to sleep through the rest of the night.

Of course, I felt somewhat less grateful when I woke up this morning still exhausted, but you can’t have everything, can you? In related news: it’s cold again, now.

A thought occurred the other day, that I’ve been online for so long — by which I mean, working online for such an extended period, as opposed to “I have been sitting in front of my laptop all this time, oh no what have I done with my life” (but also, that) — that I’ve passed through multiple incarnations of who and what my peers are.

I came up with the first wave of what we called the comics blogosphere, and there are names from that period of time, almost 20 years ago, that I still see and have such affinity and affection for that I think of them as smarter and more on top of shit than me on almost every topic. I was part of the launch team for io9, which meant I was a professional blogger and a Gawker Media employee, so my peer group shifted to something more professional, which continued and expanded as I worked through Time, Wired, Playboy, The Hollywood Reporter and so on. And the people I worked beside each time because peers and other people who I feel on the same level as, except when they go on to do something more amazing altogether.

(A lot of people I’ve worked with on those outlets have gone on to write books, video games, TV shows, and the like; others have gone on to found tech start-ups or journalism groups, or edit big magazines or whatever. I feel like a kid compared with them, but I still think of them as peers in some way, somewhat selfishly.)

There are hordes, hosts, of people who have disappeared from the fields that I’ve worked and still work in — people whose losses I feel on a near-atomic level. (I could name names, but that might be embarrassing for everyone involved.) I feel very lucky to still be able to do what I do, and even more so when I think about some of the people who aren’t still doing it beside me on a regular basis.

As I’ve already complained about, I’ve been pretty busy lately.

By “pretty busy,” I mean, “I haven’t actually been this busy in a couple of years, in terms of workload.” That makes sense; this month is genuinely so loaded with deadlines all collapsing into each other thanks to unfortunate timing that I will, thankfully, be making the most money I’ve made in a one month period since the end of 2019. It’s a nice milestone to reach, but perhaps one I might have swapped for a little bit more downtime in the last week or so, had I known ahead of time.

Things are running into each other in such a way that I find myself living in two different understandings of time simultaneously. On the one hand, there’s what I’ve taken to thinking of as long-short term thinking. That’s the part of my brain that’s vaguely aware of what deadlines I have in the next couple of weeks, and maps out what order I need to take care of things so that they all get done. It’s also the part that tends to get me in trouble, whether it’s accidentally forgetting something I have due or simply assuming that I’ll magically learn how not to feel overwhelmed when a particularly hairy piece of scheduling hits future me a week or so away.

And then, there’s short-short term thinking. That’s the me I wake up to every morning, the one that goes, Okay, today you have to achieve exactly three things for work. Here’s how you’re going to do that. Of the two time senses, this is the one that feels the most understanding and forgiving; the one that takes a moment to recognize that certain things can’t be done on the schedule I’d originally planned, and tries to work out alternatives, and the one that knows just how much internal pushing can be achieved before I lose my mind. (Also, how much I can lose my mind before I really lose my mind; there is a difference, you know.)

Holding both of these senses of time in my head simultaneously is something that is, most of the time, not really much of a problem… apart from those days when I wake up convinced that it’s Saturday, and really it’s just Wednesday and so much more needs to be done than I’d previously assumed.

In related news, I’m tired.

Things continue to get busier work wise in ways that feel almost impossible after the last year that I’ve had. It’s a genuinely strange feeling, to go from almost expecting rejection and having a lot of time on my hands to juggling projects and wondering how I’ll get it all done. Was this how things used to be? Was I always quite this busy, before?

(The real answer to that is complicated, because when I was essentially staff at THR, I managed to mix longer pieces with short ones that I could move in and out of effortlessly; I wasn’t writing 1000-word arguments after another all the time. I also wasn’t responsible for tracking payments and deadlines from four or five directions simultaneously, which I suspect may be where my brain is getting more tripped up these days.)

Nevertheless, it feels good to be swamped in this way. Stressful, too, definitely— I felt a tension in my shoulders and back that I honestly don’t think has been there in a year or so, the other day; that was a strange realization — but there’s nothing like the feeling of accomplishment that comes from triumphing over deadline adversity in circumstances like this. I become Alan Cumming at the end of Goldeneye, arms outstretched and yelling, “I am invincible” at the top of his voice in an unconvincing Russian accent.

(Yes, I know he immediately dies after saying that; we’re ignoring that part for now.)

There’s no small amount of mental muscle memory happening as I negotiate everything necessary right now. I have an awareness of what needs to be done, of deadlines lying ahead of me, and I’m finding myself jumping almost instinctively between projects in order to make things happen on time. Without thinking, I’m finding time (making time in some cases) to fit everything in, and somehow making it all work. It feels as if everything is speeding up, but I’m remembering how fast I can move to keep up. Right now, it’s exhilarating.

I did my taxes today, only partially remembering how overwhelming and demoralizing an experience that actually is.

I forgot how long it takes, and how much it takes out of me; in my head, I thought to myself, it’s mostly just scanning all the 1099s I’ve received and doing some math, how bad can it be? but the reality of the situation is that there are always, always complications even in the bets of years, and 2021 was nowhere near the best of years.

In fact, that was one of the problems about doing it this year: when you actually sit down and work out just how much you earned across an entire year, and then work out all of your living expenses across that same year, it’s a sobering experience no matter what. When you do it in a year when you’ve known all along that you’re not making anywhere near enough and, instead, surviving off your savings, it’s… well, depressing isn’t even close to the right word. Looking at things as simply as a math problem and realizing just how much of your savings have disappeared into the ether is… a whole thing that I hope as few people as possible ever have to experience.

(It’s a lot of money, that’s all I’m going to say. A lot of money.)

The other problem was that, thanks to COVID and multiple other factors that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with corporate changes internally at various places, I had to do more than a little bit of detective work to fully track down what I’d received in terms of paperwork and what I hadn’t, making the process longer, more exhausting, and more confusing than it should have been.  Every single year, doing taxes turns into detective work, and I can never fully prepare for it.

I’d make a joke about wishing I’d been an accountant instead of a writer, so at least I would’ve been paid for all this work, but just imagine how bad my taxes would’ve been if that had been the case.