Delusions of Grandeur

https://wordsofwomennewsletter.ghost.io/delusions-of-grandeur/

It began as a thought. The kind that flits through your mind like a moth, landing lightly before disappearing. Only this one stayed. It drifted from brain to throat, emerging as a joke:

“If I sell this book,” I said. “I’m buying a Porsche.”

My husband laughed and I did as well, but a small part of me felt serious.

When the conversations with publishers deepened, I told him I might schedule some test drives.

“Lauren, I thought this was a joke.” He looked alarmend, which caused a slight fear to run through me. Once you’ve been labeled unstable, you don’t have a lot of runway for ridiculous fantasies and cooky ideas before people start becoming actually concerned.

“Maybe at first,” I said. “But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s something I really want.”

“Yeah,” he scoffed. “We all want Porsches.”

“So, why can’t I get one? I mean, if it’s my money and my car…”

“Because, he said. “You don’t just get a Porsche.”

“Why not? I see people driving Porsches all the time.”

“Yeah and they’re either old or rich. Trust me, I get it. I want one too. But I’m waiting until my fiftieth birthday.”

Something about his last statement flared something in me.

I tried to put it out of my mind. Instead of looking at Porsches, I started re-reading The Yellow Wallpaper. When I finished it, I was tingling and vibrating. Good writing, I thought to myself, was probably better than a Porsche.

But this wasn’t just writing. This was pain, revolution in prose. I knew the author, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, wasn’t actually insane. I knew it was fiction. But she wrote it so well. How much of the pain was real?

All of it, I found out. She did have postpartum. She did have a husband and a doctor who treated her condition with a blanket ban on all work – including reading, writing and painting. Only unlike the protagonist, Gillman rejected her treatment plan after three months. Aware of how close she’d come to complete mental breakdown, she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.

Gillman portrays the narrator’s insanity as a way to protest the professional and societal oppression against women. While under the impression that husbands and male doctors were acting with their best interests in mind, women were depicted as mentally fragile.

Women were discouraged from writing because it would ultimately create an identity and become a form of defiance. Gillman realized that writing became one of the only forms of expression for women at a time when they had very few rights.

I was thinking about Charlotte, about what I would do if someone took away my pen, while driving my husband’s car after dropping the kids off. He calls it the family car, but I wasn’t with him when he bought it. Nor the one before. He thinks its because I don’t care about cars, but it’s simply that I don’t like to shop for things I can’t have.

A car was as luxury I forwent, like all luxuries, when I decided to be a writer.

Money, cars, fame has never interested me. Writing is all I’ve ever deemed to ask for. And that’s felt like a fight, just to have that. A room of my own. Thus, in thirty-four years I’ve never had my own car. Yet since coming out of this Hell of a summer, something shifted in me.

I needed a car — practically, yes. But more than that, I wanted my car. And when I thought of what I wanted, what I had denied myself, what I would get if the money from my pain, my shame, ever materialized, I thought of a Porsche.

Trust me, I knew it was preposterous. And whenever my fanciful daydream started getting the better of me, I thought again of my husband’s words. Only rich people and old people buy Porsches. What he meant was: Only men buy Porsches. Rich men and old men.

Yet like Charlotte and that yellow wallpaper, I could not stop thinking about it. And like most things I can’t not think about, it seemed to be signaling me everywhere.

For example, I was at another playdate when I excused myself from the group of moms outside to get some water when I noticed a coffee mug on the counter, the kind of mug one gets from a car dealership, with a Ferrari logo.

I went back outside, forgetting my water, and asked the woman of the house, casuaully referencing the mug, if she had a Ferrari.

“Oh, no. That’s my husbands. He’s a real car nut.”

When her husband came out later, I asked him if he liked his Ferrari. He looked caught off guard. “Nah,” he replied, now looking smug, probably wondering who this woman, this mother, was asking him about his car. “I’m actually trading it in for a Porsche.”

A few weeks later, this man’s wife and I were at another playdate and I asked if her husband got his Porsche. She said he did. I texted her later and asked her to send photos of it because my husband was interested. I wondered why I was lying.

She sent the photos. I did eventually show them to my husband. “Oh wow. That’s a 911. What did you say he does again?” I told him I didn’t ask. He continued his praise, admiring it the way no man has ever admired me.

“Those are sick. His is more of a race car though. Pretty impractical.”

I thought the same thing. It was a two-seater. That’s probably what his wife meant when I asked if she liked his new Porsche. She told me she didn’t care for it, but she wasn’t really into cars. That was his thing. But she figured if the worst thing he did was buy Porsches, she shouldn’t complain.

How nice it must be, I thought. To be a man with children and get to buy two-seater cars and be not only allowed, but admired for it.

“I think I want a 9/11,” I told my husband the next evening.

“Yeah, join the club,” he laughed.

“What about them makes them so expensive? Or desirable?”

“There’s probably no better car on earth than a 911. There every man’s dream car…The engine. The prestige.”

The power, I thought.

On the Porsche website I found a used one that looked like a 911, but was half the price. It was burgundy and a convertible and I sent it to my husband. He laughed once again. Because I really was just a silly girl. “That’s a Boxster,” he said. Known as the Hairdressers Porsche.

“People who don’t know cars might see it as a Porsche. But any guy who knows anything about cars, knows a poor man’s Porsche.”

I was fascinated now. Not just by this world of Porsche’s but this wealth of knowledge my husband carried. He didn’t know what endomitosis was, but he knew the history, model, make and nuance of every Porsche I showed him. Did all men know this? Did they teach it somewhere? Or did they pick it up like common lore?

I read on one of the many Reddit threads that Porsche’s, unlike most cars, can be an investment. There’s a 50/50 chance you won’t not only lose money the minute you drive it off the lot, but could sell it years later for more than you paid. I wondered if this was the kind of insider knowledge men don’t want us to know. They tell us it’s impractical, but tell each other it’s an investment.

I started to tell a few friends about this Porsche fantasy. I considered the notion that I was talking about it more to make it real. The more people I told about it, the more I’d have to explain to if I didn’t get it. It felt as shameful as having to tell people if I didn’t sell my book.

They were becoming intertwined. The book and the Porsche. It was becoming very yellow wallpapery. I had to do something while I waited for the publishers to decide my fate. Yet the more I researched, the clearer my fears and my husband’s words became:

Because of the price, owning a Porsche meant you were in the 1%.
The statistical chance of an author getting a book deal with a Top 5 publisher is 1-2%.

Maybe I’d never be rich enough for a Porsche. But I had been in the 1% before. I had written my way there.

Late one night, like a secret, I told another friend about my Porsche fantasy. She tried to be supportive, but did what a good friend should always do. Asked me to think it through.

I told her: I know, save the money. Be smart. A new roof might be needed one day, a washer when it breaks, buffer cash in case my husband loses his job and remains unemployable because he’s contracted some rare disease.

There are thousands of scenarios and better, more practical ways to use this imagined money.. But I’m tired of the right and practical way. I’ve always done the right and pracitcal thing… and where did it land me?

All these men aren’t doing the practical, sensible thing when they buy their Porsches. Yet we allow it. We honor it. If we think anything of it, we may wonder how he got it. How he makes his money. But never think he’s crazy or irresponsible for it. We think he’s successful, or a car guy, just another man with a Porsche. Well, what I couldn’t stop thinking was: what has any man done for his Porsche that I haven’t done?

I’ve made money. I’ve had two children pulled from my abdomen. I’ve published a book and worked two jobs at once and spent seven days inside a locked psychiatric unit and came out and continued working, raising my children and forgiving and moving on and then started another book, which if I sell, will be as statistically impressive as owning a Porsche.

I know, I told her, I could wait. Another ten or twenty years. But it will always be impractical. There will always be something more suitable I should spend my money on. Whether I’m fifty or sixty, someone will always laugh when I say I’m buying a Porsche. So why keep waiting? I’m young, driven, and will continue writing and working and saving again for those practical things.

But right now, I want to do something for me. Because I’ve been to Hell and back and paid my dues and for once in my life, I want to do something everyone tells me I shouldn’t do and show them I not only can, but I will.

My friend said it sounded like I had it figured out. I told her, tears welling in my throat, that of course, this was all a dream, contingent on the other dream: me selling this book. I didn’t tell her about the five rejections that had just come through.

A few days later, I was in the kitchen, forcing myself away from my phone so I would not press send on the text I drafted to my agent. I may self-combust if I don’t hear something soon. Tell them I’ll sell it for $1. I don’t care about the money. I just need to have this one win.

I hated myself for being so cavellier. Who did I think I was talking about Porsches? Throughout the month of August, I now beleived, I’d jinxed myself with this delusion.

Now it was September and the alternate reality was coming into focus.

The idea of going through all this and coming out of it with….nothing. Forced to live with the other version of this story: That my therapist, my parents, my husband were right. I wasn’t publishing another book. I was never getting a Porsche. I was simply suffering from more delusions of grandeour.

Dear God, I began to pray. I promise I don’t care about the Porsche or the money. But please just let me get this one thing. I need this one thing. I need this.

Five hours later, my agent called.

As I drove my kids to school the next day in my husband’s car, I thought again of Charlotte. I thought of the hysterical women who were forced into rooms and servitude and silence. I thought of their dreams, their pens and papers taken away. And I told myself, this Porsche is for them.

And five years from now, when that money I was instructed to use for something more practical and suitable for a writer, a woman, a mother like me, is forgotten and irrelevant, the only story that will remain is this:

I was labeled, shamed and incarcerated against my will. I was told I was crazy, delusional and an incapable mother. And I survived. But I did more than just survive. I did what one percent of writers or men ever do. I got a book deal and a 911 out of it.

My husband and every man I know may manage one of these things in their lifetime. But I, a woman, thirty-five, am the only one with both.

Now, if I may say. That’s f*cking crazy.