I am aware that this is not the way anything is supposed to work. The job, the opportunity, the positive attention. It feels unearned, even though I am in my mid-thirties and it’s not like I haven’t been unsuccessfully writing things—some of them funny—for years. But the thing about success is that it doesn’t seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness. It feels like success comes despite a lack of success. Or, if you achieve some level of success, your lack of success in the past should be retrofitted as stepping-stones along the path of your rise. And that’s true and not true. Did I have
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