Might as well work
Riveting essay via Bookslut by the girlfriend of Johnathon Franzen, Kathryn Chectkovich, about her fight with envy... a fight applicable to the Christian life where we also encounter our "limits of goodness". She writes that she was raised to admire a life of service and that she considered writing a way of service only if it is good:
Isn't this perhaps one reason why women, as a whole, are more apt than men to see writing and reading as therapeutic acts? All that private time spent rendering and transforming personal experience on paper is easier to justify if the writer - and, ideally, reader - is healed in the process.
She concludes:
And yet I am doing better because something within me has surfaced: another story. In this new story, every ugly impulse and selfish yearning, the whole insecure unlovable mess, has been given wing. There's no better self to protect any more; the moral high ground has been ceded.
In this story I don't do the work I was born to, perhaps not even the work I am best at, but the work I have chosen - incompletely, erratically, often unhappily and uncertainly.
I have met the circumstances that are larger than my capacity to be gracious, it turns out. I have come up against the limits of my goodness: someone I love has what I want, and he probably always will. What else is there to do for it? I might as well work.
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