(Continued, kind of, from last week…)
Ever since I can remember, so let’s say “a very young age,” I had this fear that I would do something that would completely count me out; end me. I used to be afraid that I’d accidentally kill someone when I was sleeping (sleepwalking murders were a thing to be concerned about in the early ‘90s if you ever read about Halcion in your parents’ Newsweek, which I did), or commit some other kind of involuntary heinous crime. And there I’d be, the object of a shared social hatred; the reviled one, the hideous beast, Cerci doing her shame walk to the Red Keep. Take what you will from the following statement, but: I’m pretty sure in some former life I was definitely a witch that was burned at the stake. All of this makes my particular career choice both obvious and a specific kind of death instinct.
When I first started writing in 2014, my fear around having any kind of opinion that was not wholly accepted (by everyone) was mammoth. Before there even was a mob (there is a small mob, I promise, I have receipts), an invisible one was lodged in my psyche, and I never have really published anything that meant something to me without holding my breath or holding my throat or just immediately getting diarrhea. I have many times hit send or publish or whatever and thrown my phone in a drawer for a day. I have many many times regretted publishing this post or that essay at all because the price of it was too high; my poor mental health, my poor stomach, my poor bed that has to hold me for hours and days far greater than it ever agreed to because I’m hiding from what the internet says.
There’s the part of me that wonders why, as in why haven’t I gone back to waitressing. One of the definitions of addiction is the compulsion to continuously engage in a behavior that negatively impacts you—that you can’t quit despite those negative consequences—and writing fits that definition to a degree. The writing in of itself is a special kind of hell. I know when the writing is good, and I know when it’s bad, and for the most part it’s pretty bad, and the whole thing is this disaster of a struggle where you take all the thoughts in your head and pull them out and smear them around until they sound like a passable, mediocre translation of the brilliant thing you have in your mind. And that’s a good day. But that’s just writing and not the bad part. What I’m talking about here in the “Why do I keep doing that to myself?” section, is the sharing of that writing. What happens when something leaves you, is no longer your own whole piece of art, becomes a zillion grains of 0s and 1s that sprinkles across the entire fucking planet, gets absorbed by other humans, gets turned into their own subjective meaning, gets turned back to you in the form of their love or hate or their strongly worded letter or their shitty meme that calls you a problematic psychopath and has you suckling plastic dolls into abstinence.
In summation: putting writing out there, for me, is kind of like hurtling face first and belly down onto a Slip N’ Slide of razor blades and lemon juice. It cuts and stings and burns and you’re just sitting there saying “I saw the razor blades and the lemon juice, like I saw them, and I still ran and leapt and slid down it and I’m bleeding and this is awful and also I’ll probably do it again in like four days?”
This is sort of a continuation of the discussion I started last week, about how entirely gutting it can be to have so much attention on you, how bad it can hurt. In the last newsletter I was talking about press attention; about something that I hadn’t written but something someone else had written about what I had written. Which is all the same to me because whether or not I write it or someone else writes it, I have no control over how it’s interpreted, its fruits if you will. The point is, any attention (especially these days due to endless pandemic, two years of a specific kind of exposure, general existential crisis) causes me to spiral into my Worst Nightmare, or my (irrational, inflated) fear of being persecuted. It’s not dissimilar to what Marlee Grace recently wrote:
Worst nightmares for me are situations that manifest and result in my self esteem completely plummeting. I feel mortified, small, useless, and like I am the least desirable or efficient person on the planet…Worst Nightmare is almost always about what other people think of me, and most importantly - what I think something else means ABOUT me. These nightmares are about the stories I make up to prove my unlovability.
In the case of that Cut article, it was probably my worst Worst Nightmare, because I’d just gotten that exposure on SATC, and these past two years have repeatedly proven there’s no good that comes without an equal and opposite terrible. As soon as I knew the article was coming out (nine months from the original interview, without my involvement in the fact checking, danger everywhere) I completely went into freeze mode and started working through the emergency plan that goes something like, I need to move to a nunnery. If this sounds dramatic, it isn’t. It’s normal to me now. I have become accustomed to living and dying by the reactions of the fucking internet. This is a Tuesday.
There is a very good reason I quit drinking, and that’s because it made my life small, impossible, terrifying, hell. I would have rather died than keep cycling through what I was.
As I said last week, I don’t think every single thing we learn has to be a hard lesson. I think we make things so much harder than they actually have to be, or at least I know I do. But sometimes the pain has to scream its fucking face off before we actually listen. Pain whispers it talks it firmly scolds it yells and then it starts chasing you with a knife.
To answer the why, as in why do I still write or why do I do this to myself, it’s because I love it, it’s because one hundred other reasons, it’s because I’ve found myself to be a brave coward who runs exactly in the direction of the thing I fear the most. I haven’t kept “doing this to myself’ as some form of self-flagellation; I’ve done it because I refuse to leave, and so it is that I either live and die by the opinions of others or live and die by the cheap, capricious assessments of the internet; or I don’t.
And: It isn’t that I haven’t learned to let go. I’ve built up scar tissue along the way, I don’t care as much as I used to about being liked or understood. I’ve become more non-reactive, amused sometimes even. It doesn’t physically hurt as much to stumble upon abusive discourse about me or my work. In this particular way, you could say I’ve succeeded at managing something awful, killed a part of my humanity to survive, and at some point in the past I would have been proud of that. But all of that is a top down approach, dealing with the symptoms, whacking the moles. The real cause of all this fear—the real monster pulling the strings—has nothing to do with what other people do at all, and only to do with my habit of giving my power away.
The idea that anyone or everyone can decide who I am or what I stand for or my total worth as a human being, etc., is the root of the whole damn thing. What I’m scared about the most, what breathes my eternal Worst Nightmare, is that I haven’t learned to stop abandoning myself. I run and leave Holly all alone out there, doom scrolling her name on the internet, letting her think that her worth is to be mined from the faceless judgment of other and that her survival depends on its Net Promotor Score. It’s the fear of a specific kind of annihilation I think I can’t endure because I’m not strong enough to have my own back. I’m still building that muscle. I’m still learning how to hold my own hand.
Pema Chodron says “When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too.” I’ve probably read that line 20 times in her book When Things Fall Apart, and it’s always felt trite. Of course if I were friends with myself my situation would be friendly, the same way if I were rich it would be easier to buy a yacht. It’s one of those statements that’s completely flat and benign until something in your experience illuminates it, gives it miles of depth. The fear that I’ll be persecuted has always been a what happens when…; a situation that might occur in the future and one I have no control over. It’s waiting for the other shoe to drop; it’s giving my power away completely, and it requires hypervigilance, defense plans, PR teams, lawyers, and an extreme amount of self-censorship; it’s inauthentic, it’s debilitating, it’s absolutely spirit killing; it’s a great way to not actually live my life. But making friends with myself; being my guide or guru or bae; being the one whose opinion matters or the one who catches me when I fall or the one who knows what I meant or the one who was there when I did it or the one that has the full truth—that’s a freedom I didn’t even think to pursue. What if it only mattered what I thought about myself?
At some point in the not too distant past, I believed that eventually I would become completely desensitized and then I’d be okay!, and that has happened to an extent. You can’t help but go a little numb in this world at this time with all its feedback and highlight reals, impossible standards, and our collective inability to offer charitable assumption to the other.
I am a little dead inside because of the internet. I am a little fucked up over it all, the same way you probably are. I don’t think it has to be this way. I don’t want to kill parts of me in order to survive. I want to make good friends with this woman; I want to stay even if everyone else leaves; I want what I think to be the full point.
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How your writing has healed me. How your existence and the formation of what you have done has healed me. True is that. 200 days today. Oh I have had 200 days before. But not 200 days like this. It was my birthday yesterday. I hated my birthdays. I have had trauma around my birthdays in childhood. Because of the work I have done, which all started with what you gave to me. A book. A platform of recovery. Yesterday for the first time (I was 59 years young) I woke up with a new reframe. I had a simple but beautiful day. I didn’t drink. I didn’t want to drink. But as important I valued who I am, who I have become. I wrote a poem. I met sober friends on a platform YOU created. I walked my pup with another sober friend. I received flowers and love. But I really received me loving me. Why because it all started with a book, and then a platform created by this wonderful person called Holly Whitaker. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your raw self with us. I feel honored to be part of your post today. 🙏
Holly! My first soberversary was a few days ago because you made tempest. Keep on writing and screw the haters. You’ve made a big difference in my life. Thank you.