A Letter to Don Draper

Dear Don,

I hate that I see your struggles and see my own. I don’t have issues of substance abuse or rationalized alcoholism, but I share with you a desire to escape into darkness alone with my thoughts amidst an alienation despite my own efforts of separation.

There is something ethereal about living ever so separate from everyone else. I can be amongst others in undeniable material realities but still be completely alone. This is paradoxically both involuntary and of my own volition.

I didn’t come from an alcoholic father, an unknown mother, a whorehouse for a setting of a tortured adolescence, or a stolen identity, but somehow, I internalized a sentiment that if anyone ever knew me entirely, I’d lose everything. This sentiment lasted a long time until I finally let someone know me fully, and it didn’t seem to have the desired effect. This part you and I share in common. A best friend from high school and a pair of bartenders I had the privilege of working with all didn’t see the big deal. Perhaps it’s an odd strain of narcissism we share that prompted our surprise at the lack of reaction, or perhaps we just found kindred spirits who had touched the void one too many times. I know for you it was a bit different with the wife of your stolen identity, a wife that was never truly for you, and your third wife whom you loved but didn’t know how to hold. The most recent person to truly know me is my wife, and while this may be callous to say, seeing the marriage you wanted disintegrate through both your actions and your lack of action has had me look into the mirror of my shadow and understand what not to do.

I don’t profess that women could be my undoing or alcoholism for that matter, but the raw through line of the two is something that you and I both benefit and suffer from. “Escapism” is both our gold and our poison.

“Leave me alone, I’m having an interesting thought” is the statement either spoken or unspoken that explains our actions that most would deem erratic. The facilitation of an idea that is not forced comes through means that are never quantifiable. You can go for a walk til you’re blue in the face and can sit alone in a bar, staring at the remains of a glass of rye, but you can never replicate the same source of an idea. They come at the most inconvenient times when you’re surrounded by the others. They want you to be present. They want you to be joyful and engaged, but you’ve been called elsewhere to dwell in a realm where no one else seems to go. You let the ideas themselves color the life in front of you, and it seems far more grim and far more euphoric than anyone else typically understands. Neither of us seem to be sure if we want them to understand regardless.

But there’s an override of our lives that we can’t allow, and I’m sorry that it has caused so much chaos in your life thus far. I know people characterize you as someone who only likes the ideas of things as opposed to their material realities, but it’s clear that you simply lack the tools to materialize these particular ideas in reality: marriage, fatherhood, and stability. You don’t want to feel alienated from your wife and children, but that same switch that turns off the ideas to color the world every once in a while grants you relief for a time before monotony becomes unbearable. Then when the ideas turn back on you’re relieved, but you’re no longer acting.

There are typically two kinds of men on this Earth. There are the men who are rooted in action, and there are men who are rooted in seeking the deepest depths of thought imaginable. Great men of the past were able to master both: to first go further in thought than any men before and surround themselves to then build systems to materialize these ideas into reality. Truth be told, I think you have an advance on that when it comes to your work. Sure you walk out of meetings unannounced. Sure you go on ill-advised benders. But you seem to always find a way to turn those ideas of yours into piercing, hard copy reinforced by the visual arts. It is in your personal life where you don’t seem to be capable of transferring this skillset.

Perhaps it’s because you’re not Don Draper. Perhaps it’s because you’re Dick Whitman. Im not so sure this is the case however. While you may have switched dog tags with your lieutenant in a foxhole in Korea, the question, “Who is Don Draper?” is one you’ve answered whether you’ve realized it or not. You’ve embodied this identity with authenticity despite the fact it functions and feels like a mask. This identity belonged to the late husband of the woman who fully knew you in peace. And Bert Cooper rightfully declared, “a man is whatever room he is in, and I assure you Don Draper is in this room.”

The fact that you are the mask you wear may be a difficult pill to swallow. But the mask you wear is one of who you wanted to be all this time. This desire for this identity and the work you put in to embody it eventually granted this mask permanence. When you look back and see the young Dick Whitman, this is likely who he wanted to be as well, far away from the life you left and created from nothing to something in a Manhattan office with a view.

You are Don Draper. Not just in name, but in will to power. Suggesting this to you may be dangerous, but it’s worth noting you’re not as powerless as you may seem to think.

The action that you and I both need to take sometimes feels fatal: to let some ideas go for the greater good, to not let the ideas rule the self all the time. To balance what is seemingly an infinite space of mind and world beyond is an ironclad rule for time. It will bee uncomfortable being present with people who do not understand, even if they are the closest ones to us. But this unlimited wealth of ideas can be used in these times our loved ones are leaning us to grant them the stability they so desire. If an ounce of your creativity was used in finding ways to connect with your children and your wife of the future, I promise you, you would beokay. I am not a model of perfection in terms of embodying this suggestion, but I can promise these steps often appear grueling.

The discomfort however, after a short bit of time, I promise you, will fade. You once said advertising is telling people that what they’re doing is okay, and instead of internalizing a foil to this notion in doing the opposite of what you know to be okay, you could find what will reinforce what is indeed okay.

The will to engage with the mundane aspects of life and the will to action not solely flashes of brilliance, but in the counterbalance to these flashes, it is in this where we will find peace. It is in this where our ideas will not only be supported but indeed found.

And then, maybe, our loved ones won’t suffer any longer. And then, maybe, we can be known fully. And then, maybe, we can live up to their expectations without feeling like we’re losing and betraying ourselves, as living reinforces writing while writing reinforces living in gorgeous symbiosis. And then, maybe, the ideas and the actions can be one and the same, coloring life with a stability and enduring strength we have never known.

I hope unlike most things, we take this to heart.

Sincerely,

Arthur Constantine