How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

ate bagels. * * * For

wanted to make an ugly painting—pit mine against theirs and see whose would win. What would my painting look like? How would I proceed? I thought it would be a simple, interesting thing to do. I had spent so much time trying to make the play I was writing—and my life, and my self—into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew.

There was something wrong inside me, something ugly, which I didn’t want anyone to see, which would contaminate everything I would ever do. I knew the only way to repair this badness was devotion in love—the promise of my love to a man. Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving, and true. I wanted to be an ideal, and believed marrying would make me into the upright, good-inside person I hoped to show the world. Maybe it would correct my flightiness, confusion, and selfishness, which I despised, and which ever revealed my lack of unity inside.

my distress only growing as the time I spent on the play expanded, as the good work I had done represented an ever smaller percentage of the time I had applied to it.

But in answer to this, the universe gave me no solid signs. That didn’t prevent me from looking, anyway, or from believing an answer was out there. It was, in a sense, how I spent all my time, for how else could I make the universe love me? If I did things badly, I would surely lose all its favors, all its protection—as if the universe would delight in me for being a certain way.

myself, The flower of love soon fades, but the flower of art is immortal!

But while others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!

They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger.

The hard part of moving somewhere else is that I have to start from where I am.

saved. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life—living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life. … a weak personality … who only wishes to avoid suffering!

There’s so much beauty in this world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live—if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.

Being grateful that your heart beats, and your vocal cords vibrate, and your fingers feel.

Knowing this, I don’t see why I don’t just kick it all to hell and shut up at last about my concern that I might put more shit into the world. The world is full to brimming with its own shit. A little more from me won’t even make a difference—it’s only natural. It’s to be expected. I should put a lot of shit in the play, so it will be a multicolored shit.