Shifting From Powerlessness to Power

Making sense of a new vantage point, and wrestling with the complexity it brings.

Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash

Before we get into this week’s post, I’d be remiss not to remind you that my debut novel, VICTIM, is now available for pre-order. VICTIM, due 3/12/24 from Doubleday Books, is a fearless satire about a hustler from the Bronx who sees through the veneer of diversity initiatives and cashes in on the odd currency of identity. If you enjoy this newsletter, I think you’ll also enjoy the book.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my Equinox gym membership. I bought the ridiculously expensive membership last year as a gift to myself after the first check from my book deal cleared. 

I love working out there. Not because I care about getting ripped or anything. It’s more so the physical release. The mental clarity that emerges after exerting yourself for 45 minutes or so. It sucks while doing the work, especially on the days when it’s 5am and I could be sleeping. But afterwards, I feel so good—and those positive feelings radiate outward for the rest of my day. I’m a better father, husband, and writer after I workout.

I’ve worked out in all types of places in the past. For a long time, I made due with a tiny weight set in my old apartment in the Bronx. Later, I hired a “personal trainer” when I lived in Washington Heights—an ex-con who taught me all types of prison workouts, and who also tried to extort me for a couple grand. In Miami, I graduated to an LA Fitness membership, but got tired scouring the place for missing weights and fighting off meatheads just to get a few reps in on the squat rack. 

I don’t have these problems at Equinox. It’s painless. Clean, spacious, plentiful. The towels are nice and they don’t care if you take them home. Shit, the place even smells good. This is what I pay for. 

But despite how great the gym is, and how often I use it, I feel like a fraud from time to time for having the membership. I felt that way the day I first signed up for it. Me? Andrew from the block? An Equinox membership? Do I think I’m bougie or something? 

I’ve felt similar feelings—this tension between being “authentic” (whatever that means) and being bougie—at various points in my life. Often, while purchasing things that seem incongruous with my humble beginnings. I felt it at 25, for example, when I pulled off the Honda lot in a brand new, tricked out Civic I financed on my own.

The best way to describe this feeling is an underlying unease. This sense that I’m doing something out of character. 

I think it is because for so long, I grew up with this chip on my shoulder: Me against the world. I felt like there were things being held out of my reach, like the game I was playing in was rigged from the start, and it was up to me to make it out despite the odds.

But then, as I got into my mid-20s, and now, my early 30s, I’ve had to come to the realization that, in many ways, I actually did make it out. Yeah, I still have that scrappy kid from the Bronx inside of me, and he’ll always be there to tap into. But the truth is, my day to day life is much different at this point. 

I’m not rich, and I still feel like some opportunities are particularly daunting—like affording a house in a neighborhood my wife and I would really like to raise our kids in. But I don’t feel that pressing weight on me that I once did. I don’t look around and think: I have to get out of here.

When I compare what I have today to what I come from, and more so to what my mom or my grandma come from, I realize that I’ve got it pretty fucking good. The truth is, I am the privileged guy with the Equinox membership and the tote bag I probably disdained as a kid from the hood coming up.

And that shit is a little mind boggling.

Which is why I really want to write about it. Or at least, why I’m trying to, in this new thing that I’m working on. 

I’d like to call this thing a novel, but I’d be lying to you if I did. It’s a pastiche right now. Random chunks of stuff that kept coming out of me. What I can say is that in this thing I’m working on, I’m trying to grapple with this fundamental shift in perspective I’ve been dwelling on here. 

You see, I wrote Victim with the energy of a man who felt his back was against the wall. Mostly because, for the 10 years I was writing it, I really did feel that way. But I want to challenge myself to do something different this next time around. To do something that feels as scary and uncertain as writing Victim did at times. 

Embarking on this journey over the past couple months has made me think a lot about something the excellent novelist Victor LaValle told me back in 2017 when I got the chance to interview him while he was in town at the Miami Book Fair.  

I’ve been a fan of LaValle’s ever since I read his beautiful debut short story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus. It was a seminal text for me. The sort of book I encountered as a young man trying to decide if I even had the permission to write the kinds of stories and characters I was trying to write. The sort of book that made it unequivocally clear—just like Drown by Junot Diaz or Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez—that yeah, there was some space in this literary world for my shit, too. 

During my conversation with LaValle, we mostly focused on his excellent novel, The Changeling, which has since been turned into an Apple TV television series that premieres on September 8. I asked him about crafting characters from New York that were navigating a rapidly gentrifying city in the novel, but also coming to grips with their role in the changes and the benefits from such gentrification. 

LaValle talked about his own feelings around gentrification and the changing city, as a Queens kid who grew up very differently from his circumstances at the time of the interview. His most profound point, and the part that I’ve been thinking about the most, was this: 

The biggest danger I think, is staying stuck in the kid I was, the working class kid from Queens, the son of an immigrant single mom. There is something very flattering about staying that kid and forgetting that afterwards, I went to Cornell, I got a degree from Columbia, and now I teach at Columbia. I’m not quite that Queens kid alone anymore. You can’t write from and only hold on to that powerlessness. You’re going to have to start wrestling with your own power if you want to be honest. And I think that sometimes complicates things more than people want them complicated. 

The idea of not only writing from and holding onto “powerlessness,” has hit me like a revelation lately. Because LaValle is right. Letting go of that powerlessness, and wrestling with your own power, and being honest about that on the page, is really fucking complicated. Especially when you’re not used to it.

Writing from that vantage point just doesn’t come as natural to me as writing from the vantage point of the underdog. Often as I’ve worked on this new thing, I’ve had to stop and ask myself: How do I write from this new, perspective? What does it look like? What does it sound like?

How do I move from writing as the kid who is angry at the world and ready to get his by any means, to the perspective of the man who works out at Equinox, lives in a good neighborhood where he doesn’t worry about safety as much as he once did, and travels a couple of times a year with his wife and children? How do I move from the perspective of the kid scarred by emotional trauma he doesn’t have the tools to understand, to the man who had the good fortune of receiving the professional and spiritual guidance needed to move past some of those scars?  

These are the big questions I’m thinking a lot about as I see where this new thing I’m writing takes me. I’ll be honest. So far the writing hasn’t come all that smooth. Often, it has felt complicated, uncertain, and vulnerable.

But that’s precisely why I figure it’s worth leaning into. 

Peace, 

Andrew 

Recommendations:

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke with director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed, Fruitvale Station) on Coogler’s podcast. It was a two-part interview in fact, and I highly recommend both episodes. Coates has long been one of my favorite writers and thinkers. I also find him to be incredibly honest—especially when speaking about the writing life. Here, he shares some powerful insights on why it’s important to figure out what you’re really trying to say before embarking on a new writing project. That sounds simple, but as I’m learning, again, it really isn’t.

2. (This is going to be a podcast heavy list, FYI.) I found a lot of value listening to writer/director/comic Judd Apatow on the Rich Roll Podcast. In particular, I enjoyed listening to Apatow talk about learning to be more vulnerable and write about what is going on in his life in his scripts. He made a great point about why it is important to find—and believe—that your own life is interesting. Not to only write about yourself, but to use some of your every day experiences as a starting point to build off of.

3. Really enjoyed this conversation between Junot Diaz and Stephen G. Adubato on the Cracks in Post Modernity Podcast. I love seeing Junot out in the world again, and I thought his insights on how social media has turned us into prosecutors was really profound. “Prosecutors don’t want to hear about nuance, prosecutors don’t want to hear about transformation.”

4. David Brooks wrote a great column for the New York Times that I think is worth sitting with and thinking about.