Let go of the "Mastery Myth"

and embrace the unsung joy of being completely incomplete

Will I ever run out of things to confess here?

Apparently not. Because recently, I landed on this memory. At 16, I took a French immersion program and then met my parents in Paris. The dollar was really strong. And on day one we went to Bertillion, famously THE ice cream place in Paris. This was well before the birth of very unusual flavors. Plus I might never be there again! And I got it in my head that I needed to - NEEDED TO - try ever single flavor that was interesting to me. Right then. You could get a 1, 2, or 3 scoop cone. I got one two-scoop cone. And four three-scoop cones.

(Pausing so you can re-read that here. While I take a few deep breaths.)

This is what I call “the drive to master.” That feeling that I (and maybe you) need to get, within my possession or understanding, ticking a list, all of the things in the spaces of my great interest and love. It can be good! And it can be bad. For example, sometimes you will comment that when I cover something for this newsletter, I’m so “thorough” (thank you!). That’s the same drive. Like I need to chase down every idea worth anything until completion in my mind. It’s good in academic settings. With exceptions! One time I decided to write about cloak imagery in Yeats poetry (omg already obsessed with clothes!) and this professor told me, smiling, something like “you can’t just get an A because you find and list and address every single cloak example!”

When we travel to a new place, my husband’s drive to master kicks in around monuments, attractions and food. Where I’d rather sit in a coffee shop people watching. It makes him crazy. He must see every Diego mural and try every street taco! And actually, it can feel stressful.

And don’t worry, I’m working my way to the shopping part.

Back in the day of print magazines and today on like Who What Wear, influencer youtube channels, etc., there have always been these editor-beloved, click-bait-y must-have lists. The 10 things you need for fall. And I know full well from my experience at brands and in PR that most of these placements are pitched! Like the link above makes no attempt to hide that it’s sponsored by Calvin Klein. But no matter how these lists come to pass, and no matter how much I know, they get me. They poke my desire to master! Fashion overall is too big and too hard to master, but by distilling it into these lists, brands, content-creators drum up this sensation (at least in me) of “I need these things! And I can just cross them off! And then I will have — the thing! The mastery. It will be known to me. I will have it under control.” Then I can relax, and, you know … be done.

Of course, the thing is (and the reason you’re laughing) is that those of us who love fashion will never “be done.” The possibility of mastery that these stories convey is as false as my hub’s plan to eat every street taco in Mexico City. Neither my wallet not his stomach nor either of our sanity would survive.

Now I have sort of thought that there was a harmless quality to this mastery-seeking. Sometimes I’ve even thought of it as somehow virtuous? Like - I’m getting it done! Knowing the things, considering the things, working hard and acquiring the things, one by one, an assassin!

But you know I started thinking of this very early poem by Mark Halliday, a poet I heard back at Penn and have followed since. And this bit in this one (disturbing) early poem about ogling women he sees women on the street:

(trigger warning: the stanzas to follow may be disturbing, in particular to anyone who has experienced assault/harassment, his awareness and subsequent commentary about this poem and this action notwithstanding.)

So I'm left to rely on my technique of
covert ogling-in-passing--
I eat them with my eyes.
--Is it like eating? It's a job of
disposing of them, one by one:

All right, I see that body,
I have seen it.

--Which means, that body is taken care of now,
that body is disarmed, normalized,
brought under control, it is forgivable now:
I have disposed of it through ritual,
the ritual of snapshot glancing, and now
its power is dead.
ah. So is it, then, a kind of murder fantasy?

I'm admitting to an enduring energy in me that says
an attractive woman is not simply one more comrade on earth,
nor is she just another nice thing about life;

an ATTRACTIVE WOMAN is a PROBLEM.

And at some point in my list tracking, my conjuring up “I need these things” and strategically acquiring them, the weird, false, frenetic urgency of this “ownership desire” brought these disturbing lines back to me.

Like why this need to eat up all this stuff, take it down, get it done? Why this frenetic need to master? (Did you know there’s this thing you can use to swoop in with a winning eBay bid at the last minute? It’s called …. wait for it … Auction Sniper.) While I don’t liken shopping to Halliday’s digestion and reduction of women, I do find it meaningful that these lines came back to me; I do find it meaningful the sometimes-frenetic nature of it all. And maybe you do too.

Is this you?

If any one of these is relatable, you may have a mastery issue: