Curiosity Killed The Cat, or Did It?

A reader asks how to have ZEST for life

First of all I have been sick as a dog and I am packing for Miami now, and this has actually been in my drafts for over a week…Apologies! I always want to make sure I’m approaching a question from all angles…

Designs for Living is an advice column "dispensing sound advice in a noisy world.” Need advice? Write to me here. The previous home of this column was The Baffler.

Hi Marlowe,

I just turned 20 and I want to be so curious [that] I get something out of every room I enter. I’m beautiful, smart, interesting, anxious, I lack spatial awareness, and I have this pressing impulse to learn how to live again because I feel like I’m always in my head. I imagine some would think I’m asking because I lack some vague and mystified ‘star quality’, or I’m under-appreciated, or my interpersonal connections are lacking, but it isn’t any of that.

I feel absent and dissociated always, and I think charisma, charm, and curiosity require a certain bodily presence and groundedness that I cannot figure out how to access as a neurodivergent person. I receive no shortage of fleeting attention from strangers that I never know what to do with, and said strangers can hardly tell because they figure I’m content enough with being complimented through the night but never conversed with. You illustrate a zest for life well in everything you write and I often wonder how you live it. How do I become an active participant in my own life? How does one live glamorously? How do you get the outside world to respond to what’s inside you? Through which mediums does a theoretical party girl become practical?

Dear Theoretical Party Girl,

Oh my god! Only TWENTY! These are the preoccupations of someone much older. I love how you say “live again” as though you’ve been through two divorces and are now making a come back. First of all, being absent and dissociated is often because you are used to being the Object. At least that is how I used to feel. One is looked at, referred to, perceived. As someone who is young, this is often just what happens because young people possess YOUTH and people love to look at whoever possesses it. It’s all well and good (and tends to be flattering) but at the end of the day it doesn’t really help build anything like character or a point of view.

It’s how I feel about press or publicity. I’m sure there are people out there who would relish in that kind of attention. Of course I get the function of it, but ultimately it doesn’t fulfill me, and it definitely doesn’t have any substantive use when it comes to making art. Sometimes it actually does the opposite and inhibits the work.

Nowadays, I get kind of vague when I meet people for the first time and I don’t want to bring up anything about my work. It’s not that I’m feigning humility, it’s just I don’t think it’s very interesting to talk about and the kind of awe people have for anyone who has written a book feels kind of… undeserved, icky or something. I also don’t think it’s good to go around living off that kind of reception. It takes me out of reality when really, keeping close to the ground is integral to me as a person and as an artist.