Angels and Monsters

The Unreasonable Advantage of Selfishness

"The brighter the light, the darker the shadow." - Carl Jung

DIANA NYAD is an author, journalist and long-distance swimmer who in 2013 swam 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. She swam non-stop for 53 hours through two days and two nights. It took over 35 years and five attempts for her to do it. Her team—which included her best friend—remortgaged their houses and gave up their jobs to help her. Specialists were brought in with technology to keep killer sharks and jellyfish away. Even the captain of the safety boat that sailed alongside her was dying of cancer throughout it all.

The whole spectacle is captured in a brilliant biographical drama on Netflix called Nyad. The film shows that Diana Nyad didn't give one solitary shit about any of the people helping her. She only thought of herself and her goal.

I got a taste of this tension recently during the Write of Passage writing course that I completed. My essays were praised by the leaders of the course and shown to hundreds of other students. My subscriber number doubled. Peers sent me really nice messages. The surprising (or perhaps, unsurprising) thing that happened, which was uncharacteristic of me, was that I ended up being glued to my phone way more, even when I was supposed to be spending time with my fiancé.

It got so bad—for example, we were having lunch on a beautiful tropical island next to a group of elephants and I wasn’t even looking at the elephants!—that in the end, I decided to delete the Substack and Linkedin apps that I’d been obsessing over so I couldn’t use them outside of work hours.

Deleting the apps was definitely the right thing to do for my relationship and for my sanity. But now I'm not reading as much. I’m not spending as long engaging with my writing peers. I’m missing out on opportunities to build more and deeper connections and to promote and distribute the work that I’ve worked hard to create. The fact is that I have deprioritised my craft.

And I can’t help but wonder: Would Nyad have deleted the apps?

What I like most about the film is it honestly depicts the conflict that occurs at the coming together of one person's unreasonable vision and everyone else's reasonable expectations. And when I see Nyad, or anybody else, being selfish and alienating themselves in pursuit of their version of glory, my brain tends to file those stories away in the little box labelled Beware! Success Corrupts! I get to enjoy a momentary spurt of moral superiority, thinking “I never wanna be like them. There’s no excuse for that kind of behaviour.”

But, then, I find myself sitting right on the edge of the sofa watching Nyad as she crawls those final strokes toward the Key West shoreline. I have to stand up as I watch her rise out of the water. I’m yelling at the TV, “DON’T TOUCH HER! DON’T TOUCH HER!” because her world record will be invalidated if any of the hundreds of idolising fans touches her even once. There's a lump in my throat because I'm so fucking inspired and grateful to be alive in a world where people like Nyad can have such outsized visions and see them through despite all the doubters and despite all the critics—and in the process completely change my beliefs about what’s possible and how much of it just comes down to having the right mindset.

The credits roll but I just can’t sit back down. I need to do something. I need to write something.

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Thank you Diana Demco, Michael Skinner, CansaFis Foote, Treeckster, Meryl Rowlands, Rahul Sanghi, and Meaningful Magpie for reading drafts of this.