The Compliment Goblin
The Compliment Goblin
On sore heads, the socialist revolution, The Other Two, and bonkers Whatsapp groupchats
Hello my little frogs!
How is everyone? Obviously I am only asking this question as a segue into writing about how I am, because I…*dramatic pause*…am…
EXTREMELY!
GODDAMN!
GOOD!
The reason for this great surfeit of goodness is because I have recently emerged from a 10 day migraine that had me so fucked up I couldn’t even scroll the internet. Do you know how fucked up I have to be before I stop enjoying falling down internet bum rabbit holes where I start out idly googling how to fertilise my houseplants and four hours later find myself reading a 12,000 word deep dive on why some Z-list celebrities I've never heard of are having public beef over an ambiguously bitchy caption someone put on an instagram post about salad?
I have to be very fucked up not to enjoy that stuff. But you know what, that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst of it was that I was puking and groaning and shielding my eyes from the brutal light of day so much that I couldn't even watch TV!!!
I can't tell you how depressing it was to be trapped inside my head with no external stimuli and only my own thoughts for company. If you’re interested, those thoughts during this period consisted of two major themes:
Ow. OW!
The complete lyrics to The Smiths’ 1986 track, Vicar in a Tutu, going round in circles, just vicar in a tutu, he’s not strange, he just wants to live his life this way over and over and over again.
No, I cannot explain it.
Anyway, I tired of this condition, and decided to do something about it, but this was not a straightforward business—I had to go to the hospital emergency department THREE separate times before anyone managed to cure me. I went to a public hospital twice, and spent a cumulative 16 hours there, which, to be honest, was about as enjoyable as hanging out in an overcrowded medieval prison rec room during the black plague. The doctors were trying, but they were also harried and hurried and they simply did not have time to get invested in my tale of non-life-threatening woe. They did some tests and threw some treatments at me but none of it worked.
On my third trip I tried a private hospital, which was a whole different experience. There was a nearly empty waiting room with padded chairs and not a single person heaving into a vomit bag, which I didn’t even get to enjoy because they whisked me away almost immediately to set me up in a cubicle. Within about an hour of arrival I’d been seen by a doctor, who was cheerful and chatty, and keen to try a range of interventions to prevent my left eyeball from violently breaking out of my skull. They did some more tests and gave me a range of drugs and then—hallelujah baby, I was cured! The pain stopped! It was a miracle!!!
These miracle treatments, however, did not come cheap—we had to pay $400 just to get through the door to the Emergency Department. Then, at 3.30am, when I was fast asleep and in the midst of 4 hours of IV drug treatment, they decided to admit me to a ward. An upbeat little guy crept in my room, shook me out of my coma, and asked me to sign three money-related (I think!) consent forms. What were they for? Who knows! I was still migrained to the hilt and foggier that a Yorkshire moor from all the drugs they were pumping into me. ‘Do you have a credit card?’ he asked, as I lay, barely conscious, on my hospital gurney, hooked up to no less than five separate devices. ‘We’ll need to collect your $500 gap fee to get you admitted. I’ll just have a look in your handbag here for your wallet, okay?’ Gotta say, even in the midst of the drug and pain cloud I was floating around in, this seemed like a pretty messed up manœuvre.
I guess the moral of this story is that the best way to get a doctor to care about your suffering is to pay $900 in un-rebate-able upfront fees. Essentially: Just Be Rich! Frankly, the whole experience made me rage about how underfunded the public system is, and how messed up it is that a reasonable standard of care isn't freely available to everyone (not here to criticise the public hospital I attended, everyone was doing their best, but they are under so much pressure). It aroused my inner socialist and so if someone is up for organising a gentle (non-Stalinesque) socialist revolution I would definitely be keen to sign a petition or two. Actually, with my legal background, and assuming it doesn't interfere with me watching the last 8 seasons of Vanderpump Rules in the next few weeks, I could probably be EVEN MORE helpful than that—eg I could have look over your manifesto or perhaps set out some of the OH&S risks associated with carrying out modern revolutionary social change during a pandemic? Just let me know what u need, revolutionary pals xx
Television
Other than having a migraine, the one fun thing I did manage during the past two weeks was to catch up on the latest season of The Other Two (Binge). It's a comedy about two adult siblings, Cary and Brooke Dubeck, whose sweet and somewhat gormless teenage brother has become an overnight pop sensation. Cary and Brooke spend the first season struggling to deal with their feelings of envy and their desire both to protect their brother and to exploit his success for their own benefit. In the second and current seasons, the show has branched out in some unexpected ways, exploring celebrity, relationships, meaning and virtue, and the weird business of showbiz. It’s frequently absurd and sometimes hilariously shocking—there's an episode in this season featuring a viral photo of a…a certain hole…that had me falling off the couch cringing and laughing.
In this season, Brooke becomes obsessed with the idea that working in The Industry is inherently frivolous, and that she should be spending her life Doing Good (even though she clearly isn't very good at doing good). This felt a bit personal to me as I spent the last 13 years working in human rights law, trying to do something useful…and then this year I dropped out of that life to spend all my days writing comedic novels. This new profession is, ya know, maybe at face value, possibly not so intrinsically noble?? People can get so judge-y these days if you pick up a fiddle when the rooftops of Rome are starting to smoke. But I justify it to myself by trying to remember how much good other people’s art has done in my own life—and it's a LOT OF GOOD! So, I mean, writing novels to entertain people and make them laugh in this strange epoch we’re living through is…um…it’s not nothing, right? Right???
Err, anyway, back to The Other Two. Brooke’s brother Cary is an actor, and season 3 in particular zooms in on his constant, unquenchable desire for external validation—a desire which I suspect is at least a little relatable for anyone involved in an artistic pursuit. During this season, Cary’s having some professional successes, and there are a couple of episodes where he explicitly talks about the validation he wants (just normal stuff, eg a standing ovation with people chanting his name). The thing is, even when he gets exactly what he wants, immediately afterwards he finds himself feeling completely empty.
This pretty much exactly reflects my own experience of people saying something nice about my writing, or of ‘succeeding’ in some way (eg by getting something published). I get an extreme rush of happiness (‘Thank god!!! Someone likes it!!! I’m not just wasting my life banging away at my keyboard like a deluded monkey in a beret!!!!’) and then, almost immediately, phhhhhhhhht, all the air leaks out of me and I am left craving compliments like a pre-menstrual woman craves chocolate and the complete overthrow of the patriarchy. I feel like I could win the Nobel Prize for Literature (which, let's be real, is definitely on the cards) and the moment I stepped away from the prize podium I’d be like, so, uhhh, guys, can you tell me again, do you really really like me???
My highly scientific theory is that inside all of our brittle human shells lives a greedy little compliment goblin who slurps up all the validation as soon as it gets its slimey paws upon it, leaving nothing for us. No level of success/validation will ever fill us up, not while the compliment goblin is stealing our nutrients! This intractable difficulty is part of the reason why I’m so interested in the concept of ‘success’, and whether it has any meaning or value in life. I wrote a whole novel about it!
For me, the best way to survive the compliment goblin is to attempt to focus on what I get personally out of the act of writing, rather than worrying too much on what other people might make of it—though this is often an aspirational state of affairs rather than reality. Reading Cassy Polimeni’s newsletter yesterday also reminded me of another strategy: keeping a file of compliments that you can go back to when feeling low. I did in fact open such a file a month or two ago, and I should probably start putting some things in it—out of the goblin’s reach.
Other Things
No books this week as brain has been too mangled to read, but I did want to note that if you’re interested in hearing about some books that have been published/are about to be published over the first half of this year, The First Time Podcast’s Instagram feed is currently full of short videos by people from my debut authors support group. The group is essentially a bonkers WhatsApp chat full of 30 or so writers who are all publishing their first book this year—and when I say bonkers, I mean it often generates literally hundreds of messages a day! Writers gonna write, I guess! But it’s a lovely group of people who are publishing some great books and I am so happy not to be going through this mysterious publishing business on my own.
Finally, I want to give a shout out to my beloved fella, as we just celebrated the 20th anniversary of meeting drunkenly at this bar in 2003…
…by going out (relatively) soberly to the same bar in 2023. It was remarkably unchanged! Hoping it remains as dingy and divey as it ever was for our next scheduled visit—assuming neither we nor civilisation collapse in the interim—in 2043.
Until next time,
Eleanor xx
Thanks for reading What is This, Who am I, Please Help. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share!