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“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is an unmerited privilege, a sign of that person’s socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and cosign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can self-righteously bestow DWYL as career advice to those covetous of her success.

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves — in fact, to loving ourselves — what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

”

“ …the “need for love” … and the “need for a woman” are really phrases disguising a profound inner emptiness, the neurotic emptiness which no quantity of love, no quantity of fucking, can fill. A woman can pour herself, for a lifetime, into such emptiness, believing herself the redemptive female whose mission it is to “save” the man, humanize him, forgive him when he cannot forgive himself.The “need for love” is not the same thing as a desire for relation; the desire for relation implies a degree of wholeness, which needs a fellow-being not for completion of the self but for extension and challenge of the self. The “need for woman” can be the man’s need for a receptacle for his own fear, vulnerability, tears, uncertainty for which he has made no psychic room; or, for an object-creation to be painted with the mask of Medea, Circe, Medusa, Helen, or Salomé; then used, raped, idolized, or punished accordingly. ”

“ Never apologize for burning too brightly or collapsing into yourself every night. That is how galaxies are made. ”