weaving the threads of ourselves into a beautiful tapestry; that’s writing

An inspiration touchstone

Apr 26, 2022

I’m writing from where I’ve been for the past three weeks: my bed. I am still without full use of my left leg and in a considerable amount of pain. On Thursday I meet with one of two neurosurgeons; I’ll meet with the other one next Monday. Apparently I have not only three slipped discs but also a narrowing of my spinal canal due to bone growths (I think??), which could lead to impingement of my spinal cord which…wouldn’t be a good thing.

I’m really glad I bought that marketplace insurance even though it is incredibly expensive.

Yesterday, I tweeted about despair. For me, despair is one of the most difficult emotions to metabolize. Frustration at my situation, my loss of function, my lack of community in the city where I currently reside, my absence of family. There’s this weird little glitch in my brain that clicks on whenever I think of how terrible things are- it says, “but it could be worse,” and “I’m lucky to have what I do.”

Both things are true, and yet. And yet can I acknowledge what is true in the moment, and allow myself to feel what comes along with that? The emotions?

The truth of the situation. The truth of any situation is so complex because there is no one truth. Our experiences are multilayered and interconnected. My experience of being disabled as a white person living in a wealthy country where I have running water and grocery delivery is one of privilege. My experience of being disabled as a nonbinary person with two deceased parents and no savings or option to forego work is not privileged. Both of those sentences are true. And they only scratch the surface of my personal experience, much less the experiences of those within my radius, geographically and culturally.

I have been thinking a lot about how everything I write is personal and how I cannot have a newsletter where I don’t share myself, yet I am self-conscious about sharing the immense pain I feel sometimes, on many levels. I feel this pain as a single person, as a queer person, as a fat person, as a person who grew up in poverty, and yet this pain is something that I often feel ashamed of and want to hide from others. The shame and the hiding increase the pain, and my being taught that my very existence was shameful, me learning as a child to hide my needs and desires, likely led to some of this pain. As I navigate this pain I become aware of how my body guards itself, how I brace myself for more pain- not just physical pain. How I have spent the majority of my life braving for pain, expecting pain, and how that in turn created more pain.

When we have experienced pain, shame, trauma…we brace for it. And many of us hide ourselves, or manicure our outward-facing selves in ways we think will please others. That’s something I learned I needed to do in order to survive. Many of us do, in many different ways and to many different degrees.

And yet. Writing about this pain, being honest with you, dear newsletter readers, and myself about this pain, is a release valve. It’s also a bridge.

For me, writing has many functions. It’s how I stay alive, for one. It’s how I understand the world. If I didn’t have my journal, where I could stream my thoughts and experiences onto the page and then look at them as they are, I wouldn’t be able to see myself or the world clearly. Writing somehow allows me to see and make sense of the world, or to reckon with how things don’t make sense.

Writing is also a kind of release valve. It helps me let go of things I am holding too tightly. Sometimes I’ll write the same things repeatedly in different ways but eventually I’ll write them enough to release them. For other things, like my mom’s suicide, which is still unfathomable to me over a decade later, writing receives. The page receives the story without judgement, any way I want to write it. I can write it as many times as I need to write it, letting it go again and again.

I once went to a reading where an audience member asked a writer if he thought writing was therapeutic. He said, unequivocally, no. His no was forceful and immediate. I’ve heard many writers argue about the therapeutic qualities of writing, whether it is or isn’t, and I think it is and isn’t.

Writing is not a replacement for therapy. It will not save your life if you are losing yourself. But it is a good companion. An extension of therapy. And can be therapeutic, if you can release the need to please anyone inside of your writing.

It’s almost three years ago that I sold my book. I thought selling my book would fill the empty space inside me but it didn’t. Someday my book will be in the world, and I’m grateful that I now understand that my book being in the world will not fill the empty space inside me. It will not cure my sense of longing or my sense of loneliness. Thank goodness, because without longing and loneliness I wouldn’t truly appreciate the textures of connection, of beauty and a sense of belonging.

But back to writing. Because, while my book being published won’t solve my life (because life is not a puzzle to be solved or a goal to be met), it could save a life, like many books have saved my own.

When I want to hide away and take my true self out of my writing for fear of being seen, I remind myself of the bravery of the writers who wrote books that saved my life, and I return myself to the page without fear. Nothing can hurt me more than what has already hurt me. And if someone doesn’t like my writing? That’s okay.

In this current reactive world, where so much writing is consumed on a surface level and the news cycle has an attention span shorter than any toddler’s, it makes sense to be scared of putting yourself into your writing and being totally honest about what you think and feel, but it’s imperative that you do that. By you, I mean me. Or maybe I mean us.

It’s imperative that we are honest in our writing.

For me, it’s also imperative that my writing is not commodified.

People may pay for my writing, and for that I am deeply grateful. But I will not create writing that is not true to me. I will not write towards something that doesn’t feel true to me.

These long paragraphs of me pouring my heart out to you, writer to writer, have led to this wonderful speech by Charlie Kaufman, which is why I am in your inbox. I came back to this speech yesterday because I needed to be reminded of why I write and why it’s important that I write honestly, and not from a place of fear.

This speech is a touchstone for me and I encourage you to take the time to listen to/watch the entire thing. It’s overflowing with gems.

weaving the threads of ourselves into a beautiful tapestry; that’s writing

An inspiration touchstone

It’s imperative that we are honest in our writing.

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