On the date of writing this, it will have been three years since I’ve had a job on a show. This Low Maintenance substack is the closest I’ve had to a monetary exchange for showbiz. And, in this case, the subject of the show is me.
In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote that writing itself requires a kind of self-objectification — that the raw energies of grandiosity and exhibitionism, once “aim-inhibited, tamed, and neutralized,” can be mobilized toward reality rather than fantasy. Confession, he warns, can either become a garrulous monologue traded on celebrity, or it can create distance — insight into the forces that make the self so unstable in the first place.
I’ve been thinking about that distinction as I confess my self’s instability as material.
I recently had a dream where I was completely nude beside an eighty-year-old woman named Dassi Ma, singing the Hanuman Chalisa during kirtan. I felt no shame. I felt loved.
An armchair Freudian might call this a fantasy to expose myself spiritually and be met with unconditional acceptance.
But in reality, it was more complicated.
In my last piece, I recounted how a few years ago I convinced myself that I was meant to tell the story of Ram Dass. I saw my own ambition reflected in his image. I wrote a pilot about it for FX, but they passed. Others were circling his television biopic. I felt both chosen and threatened — my own private Waco.
In my notes from that period I found a document titled The Shame I Feel. Imagine, if you will, the world’s tiniest violin playing softly as you read.
Despite an illusory quality of zen, I was obsessed that people’s energy shrank around me. I worried I was parlaying my own wounds into content — monetizing healing, turning self-loathing into fuel (like… right now?). Was I was interested in growth only insofar as it could be shaped into a project?
One could argue good art comes from suffering; but High Maintence worked because it focused on the lives of unseen others. Now I felt I was committing a crime of self-indulgence, and marijuana was my accomplice.
When I wasn’t stoned, the shame was louder. When I was stoned, it was stylized.
Smoking pot allowed me to fixate on shame and perceived slights in order to twist them into “fascinating ideas” while muting the background noise of doubt. I told myself it expanded consciousness; but increasingly, it narrowed it. Ram Dass’ guru Maharajji once said marijuana makes you forget your family. I began to suspect it was helping me forget the ripple effects of my own behavior in pursuit of a sophomore project.
That winter I described my life to Jess as a tub of warm water. Work was steady. I was in love. The dogs were asleep in patches of sunlight. I felt capable. But after any type of rejection, it was as though a leak opened in the tub basin. The warmth drained quickly. The cold porcelain beneath it felt like the truth. I began to suspect that the warmth had always been an illusion, that I had been distracting myself from something harder and more permanent.
OK, enough. Put the violin away.
In July of 2022 I returned to Hanuman Maui, the final home of Ram Dass. After being passed over to option his autobiography and alienating those who were making the show, I told myself I was no longer trying to make a biopic about him, but to explore the community he left behind. “What if Elvis has left the building,” I pitched, “and the audience sticks around?”
On arrival, my posture was less anthropological than conquering — I was pissing all over the place, marking my territory. I brought an imperial gift of matching blue jumpsuits that matched one that I owned. I filmed everything while commenting that I was “sucking the soul from the place.” I shaved my mustache to resemble Ravana, the villain from the Ramayana, a story they tell in devoting to Ram and Hanuman. What was I hoping to get by casting myself as the villain, believing that self-awareness absolved me?
One afternoon, high and indignant, I barged into a board meeting to question the nonprofit’s financial structure, accusing them of cultural appropriation on indigenous land. I told myself I was creating a story engine. In reality, I was testing whether conflict would make my “character” indispensable.
I show Dassi Ma my Colbert interview (Ram Dass’ nightly program), demonstrating my compulsion to be the person who explains love to others while privately unsure of even being loved myself. I said, “Real love is wanting the person you love to be happy whether or not it includes you.” While I sort of believe that sentence, it was a definition of the made-up word compersion lifted from polyamory jargon — a lifestyle I 85% don’t believe in. How often I have tried to engineer the conditions under which love might include me?
At Hanuman Maui, I spoke in abstractions about “more love, more love,” while scanning the room for confirmation. I wanted to surrender, but I also wanted authorship.
A caregiver later told me it was painful to watch me objectify something he held sacred. He told me this while I sat in Ram Dass’ wheelchair — which was meant only for his portrait — practicing “acting” like I had had a stroke. While I conceded his point, I didn’t fully feel it yet.
One evening, in Ram Dass’ backyard, Carl (the man with the maniacal laugh) and Seth (the other guy) and I took ketamine in Cark’s tiny house. Ironically, we compared notes on ego death.
On Carl’s desk was a sticker: No abstraction without goodwill. It lodged in my chest. I began to suspect that I was abstracting people — converting them into narrative components — without first ensuring goodwill.
While swimming naked in the pool the next morning, that caregiver who resented my sacrilege came to me and offered me his reticent blessing and a handshake — I stifled the impulse to pull him into the pool. Progress!
On my final morning, I saw with Dassi Ma and asked for her blessing, even a reticent one. She couldn’t give it to me. And I admitted that even in my best-case scenario — a show made with care broadcast on TV — that an audience’s objectifying attention would alter the place. Some communities do not want to be placed under a microscope. I told her I would not pursue a series about them.
She smiled and told me Ram Dass was smiling too.
I left a donation of $10,800 — the holy number 108 embedded within it — and flew home. I felt I had exited gracefully.
For what it’s worth, I never received a thank-you note.
That detail embarrasses me. Not because I wanted the note, but because I noticed its absence. The ego, even in retreat, keeps receipts.
It occurs to me now that writing this risks repeating the very gesture I pledged to avoid — turning a private spiritual community into a backdrop for my self-analysis. My only defense is that the lens here is pointed primarily at my own mechanism: the drive to convert longing into architecture, to build elaborate structures around a simple need.
The need is not complicated.
To feel loved without staging the conditions.
To relinquish control of how that love arrives.
Lasch suggested that useful creative work confronts the individual with unsolved intellectual and aesthetic problems, mobilizing narcissism on behalf of something outside the self. I am trying to determine whether this is that — whether examining the impulse to narrate my own seeking is itself a step away from it.
When I watch footage from that time, I see a messy man ACTIVELY SEEKING as a trauma response to divorce and relying on drugs to get him through. Mischievous, but not malicious. Authentic, but not heroic. Thirsty. Hungry. Trying to become the authority on love while still unsure how to rest inside it. Perhaps putting his worst foot forward as a challenge — “can you love me even when I… confess in print that I watch rim job videos?”
Carl’s sums it up: “Part of me sees you wanting to tell the truth, but maybe not sure of how to express that. Not settling for fake-ness. Genuinely taking the steps toward authenticity.”
Yeah. I feel compassion for that. Or something like it.
Compassion, I’m learning, is quieter than spectacle. It doesn’t require a camera angle. It doesn’t need a hook. It doesn’t spike engagement.
It feels less like cosmic revelation and more like something administrative — chopping wood and carrying water. Making someone else’s day slightly easier. Perhaps surrender is not dramatic. Perhaps it is simply the willingness to let something continue without you at its center.
I don’t know if this confession moves narcissism outward or merely rearranges it. I know only that I am less interested now in conquering love than in noticing when I am trying to.
That may be the beginning of distance.
And distance, for writing this substack, might be enough.
Or maybe I should just express outrage about the Epstein Files like everyone else.
