On Goblin Mode

I love goblins, don't get me wrong, but we're using the wrong word...

A couple of years ago, a phrase started floating around the Internet: “goblin mode.”

Goblin mode, as I understand it, is when you creep around your apartment in comfy clothes with holes in them and all the shades drawn. It’s bed rot and eating cookie crumbs off the floor. It’s hours and hours of mainlining Ugly Betty and not talking to anybody but your cat.

In other words: the way I live my actual life. All the time. Except I always used a different word for it.

The word I used was “feral.”

My entire adult life I’ve felt that there was a very thin membrane separating normal, semi-functional human grownup me and this other, truer thing; an absolutely undomesticated, chaotic, ravenous…creature. When I was feeling generous and clever, I’d tell people that I was basically living like Kevin McCallister with a cat.

When I was young, this separation manifested as a spiky, comprehensive dreaminess–the membrane was separating the me in the real world and the me in the fake worlds in my head. It was only recently that it occurred to me what a betrayal of myself it was to cast the fake me as a feral other and the stressed, white-knuckling, semi-functional me as the real person who counts.

And I think that’s what “Goblin Mode” does. It says the touching, smelling, sweating, tasting, grabbing, sinking, consuming you is a mode, and not your identity. So I’m claiming a new word.

I’m a hedonist.

A hedonist is someone who can’t keep their fingers off of velvet or silk. A hedonist wants chocolate in their mouth because of how chocolate feels and tastes and smells in their mouth. They want to swallow and drink and dance and touch big red “Don’t Touch” buttons and stick their whole heads in bakery ovens and keep all the lights on and all the TVs on and feel, see, hear, touch, smell everything.

I’m a hedonist. I’m a maximalist who loves bed but can’t sleep. I have a complicated relationship with my body; of course I do. But it’s getting better and I think it’s getting better in part because I embrace the side of me that feels pleasure instead of banishing her to the shadows, because she’s just too messy.

I also think being a hedonist has made me a better writer (which also makes me like myself better, so win-win.) And that’s because I spend a lot of time inside my characters’ skins. How I root myself inside of somebody else is within their sensations. Are they cold? Are they sweaty and cold? What happens in their body–in their senses–when they see something they like? Something they love? Something they hate? Characters without bodies, unless that’s the point, are just paper dolls, and I don’t know how to get inside them.

Because your brain is your body, too. If you don’t know that, then congratulations, your life is going really well. But if you’re like most writers, you know that without being told. You know the itch that starts in your cerebral cortex and makes it to your sternum. That’s where you find characters. Or at least where I do.

I’m very focused on my body. When I was a kid I broke my leg and nobody believed me and the lesson I learned was hypochondria. I’m the one who has Pepto Bismol on my person at all times. I have recurring skin issues and I’m perennially itchy. I have a decades-long chronic cough and environmental allergies. Even more potently, I have Panic Disorder. Anyone who has an intimate relationship with panic knows how physical that can be. My body, in other words, is a battlefield.

It’s also my only periscope. It’s my buoy in the bay. I am in my body. I don’t have a choice.

I do choose to use it. And I’m trying to – deciding to – enjoy it.