Remembering Why We Write
Why we must look at ourselves without flinching
(note: discussion of sexual assault and abortion)
Hello wonderful writers,
Today I woke up and saw that Roe v Wade is being overturned, and I cried. I imagine that you, like me, are inundated with discussions surrounding this verdict.
I categorically support abortion rights. I have had more than one abortion, and I’m grateful for those abortions. Often, I think of my gratitude being about not having been forced to raise a child I wasn’t prepared for— but today I realized that much of my gratitude is actually about being alive. Without access to safe, legal abortions, I would be dead.
I had my first abortion when I was sixteen. I’d lost my virginity three years earlier. I was early to sex, in general. I was raised in a way that convinced me my body wasn’t mine, and I was taught very early to give my body away, so sex was natural to me. It erased me. I wanted to be erased, so I didn’t have to feel.
I found out I was pregnant after having sex with someone under a bridge, where I was sleeping at the time. We were both homeless. The sex was terrible, and he didn’t use a condom. Because my upbringing erased me and my voice, I never asked men to wear condoms. But it didn’t matter. Many men pretend to wear condoms and don’t.
By the time I found out I was pregnant, I was living with my mom and stepfather again, in Olympia, WA. My mom took my to get my abortion. The procedure was painful (I opted for a surgical procedure, more common in 1996), and within a few days I hemorrhaged and had to go to the hospital for a second procedure.
I think about what it was like, to be sixteen, to walk past the protestors outside the clinic who called me a whore, to experience that pain but also the camaraderie I felt when I glimpsed the other girls there; girls who were taking care of themselves, who were making a choice for themselves.
You see, my mom had me when she was twenty. She was married, but she was so young. So unprepared for a child. She had few resources. I know she had the best of intentions when she had me, but my upbringing was chaotic, abusive, and unstable. I was neglected and beat down, emotionally and physically.
I knew I didn’t want to have a child until I was ready— emotionally and financially. Really, I didn’t know if I wanted a child at all.
What I did know was that I didn’t want to have a child I resented, as my mother resented me. I grew up feeling guilty about being alive. Guilty for needing love. I didn’t want to inflict that on anyone.
That’s why I had four abortions. Another when I was twenty-seven, one when I was twenty-nine, after a friend got me pregnant shortly after my mom died by suicide, and the last one when I was 35, a senior in college. The last two abortions were the result of men who said they were going to do something they didn’t.
It’s not his rights that are being taken away (though I understand that some men give birth, you understand what I am saying).
I thought about having each of those babies. Especially the last one. With the last one, I knew it was likely the last chance I’d have to give birth. I imagined having the child, whose father was an irresponsible alcoholic, absolutely incapable of holding himself accountable. I imagined renting an apartment in Syracuse, beginning my MFA program as a first-year while raising an infant.
I imagined all of this without fantasy, because I’d worked as a nanny for over a decade. I know what it takes to raise a child the way a child deserves to be raised. The devotion. The self-care. The money.
I knew I had an eating disorder. I knew I had no money. But more than anything, I knew I didn’t want to. I didn’t want a child.
I don’t want a child.
I am grateful for my abortions.
I am not ashamed of those choices.
It is not my place to tell others what to do with their bodies.
I’m not sure why I’m a writer.
Maybe it’s the only way of being in the world that makes sense to me.
I began writing because I lived in a world I couldn’t comprehend. A world that wanted to crush me. I wrote to create new worlds. To imagine new ways of being.
I write to understand myself and others.
And lately I have realized that the understanding I seek, has limits.
That the kind of writing I want to do, and aim for, doesn’t understand. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t assert, or know.
It ponders.
It grieves.
It hopes.
It imagines.
After Donald Trump won the election, I gathered with several of my fellow writers, fellow MFA students, in a room at Syracuse University. We were seated in a semi-circle, all facing the semi-famous writer who led our class. He was at a loss for words, and apparently felt a kind of pep talk was in order. But it was clear that he was questioning his role as a writer.
I understand why.
It’s hard to justify something like writing when you aren’t taking real risks as a writer, and many writers either don’t take risks, or stop taking risks.
Taking risks is fucking hard.
It’s hard to be vulnerable in our writing.
Yet, I love nonfiction as a genre, specifically personal nonfiction, because it requires a level of risk to create the kind of energy and change that makes it vital.
In fiction, writers can hide behind the construct (but still, some choose not to).
Not so much with nonfiction.
My favorite writers are the writers that lay themselves on the page, unafraid to be ugly, or abhorrent, or evil.
Or, maybe not unafraid. Maybe, brave.
That’s what I’ve been telling myself lately. That what I must do in my writing is be brave. Stop thinking about what people will think, or worrying about being cancelled. Know that, if I am brutally, ruthlessly honest with myself and my reader, I will be seen, and in seeing me, some of my readers may see themselves.
Others may refuse.
Because, my friends, humans are not innately good.
The more I ponder humanity, the more I think the opposite is true.
That we are innately power-hungry beings, and that navigating our humanity, which is also our animal nature, means seeing that in ourselves.
Not turning away from those urges, or rejecting them.
Bringing the parts of ourselves we hate into the fold, and holding them there, with everything else, with love.
How else can we be better? And make this world better? And teach future generations not to hate?
If we hate parts of ourselves, that hatred will inevitably color everything around us.
We are taught that, as humans, we are logical. But we are also ruled by our limbic systems, which defy the logical systems we so admire.
When we inevitably act from those impulses, we reject ourselves. We turn our back to a part ourselves, and reject that part. And when we see anything that resembles that part of ourselves in others, we react with hatred.
Shame creates hatred creates violence, and so on.
When we hate, we want to overpower. When we want to overpower, we oppress. When we oppress, we must somehow justify it to ourselves. When we have created our own system of justifications, we say we are being logical, and that our way of being is the right way of being. When that way of being is threatened, we react with hatred and violence.
And so on.
I leave you with these notes from Susan Sontag’s journals:
“Not only must I summon the courage to be a bad writer— I must dare to be truly unhappy. Desperate. And not save myself, short-circuit the despair.
By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. I’ve nothing to write about. Every topic burns.”
“Writing is like a little door. Some Fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.”
Dearest writers, don’t waste this pain. Don’t turn away from it. Leave the fantasies behind.
Dive into it, and write.
(and take care of yourselves, I love you)