Last night I watched Brokeback Mountain for the first time ever, and fucking hell I was not prepared! I’m not a big movie person so I haven’t seen a lot of classics, and while you’d think the general vibe of “gay” and “sad” and “cowboys” and “mountains” would’ve convinced me to make an exception for this film, you would be wrong.
Parker and I have enacted a “no take out” January after assessing that we were spending way too much money on delivery, especially considering we both really love to cook and we’re both really competent at making food that tastes delicious, but I still wanted Saturday night to feel “special” so we made cheeseburgers and fries for dinner last night (with homemade hamburger buns that were really mini challah rolls, made intentionally when we baked challah for Shabbat the day before) and then she turned on the football for a while because she’s committed to “getting into football” as her only new year’s resolution (lol), and our tiny dog whined and whined until we both got cozy on the sofa in the same room (he truly hates it when we are not in the same room, he darts to and fro between us on these occasions, and I imagine him thinking “these dykes! Why won’t they just get together in the same room, preferably on a soft surface, so I can relax for once in my life!!! And who doesn’t want to sit on a comfy sofa all together, just the three of us, is that so much to ask?!?!” to which I say, fair point), and then the football game ended and Parker was like “I want to watch Brokeback Mountain,” which is really unlike her because she shares my general disinterest for movies, and I shrugged and said okay and kept working on our wedding registry on my laptop, and then a few scenes into the movie I had to admit I was transfixed, and then a little while later I said, “Does someone die in this movie?” and she said, “I don’t remember, I really don’t, I haven’t seen it in so long,” but it seemed sort of inevitable, and then yeah, by the end we were both crying. That’s an understatement. I went to bed feeling really sad and confused, like grateful that it’s 2023 and I live in Portland in a house with my future wife and it’s okay, and also like, what the fuck, why are people hateful, why do people still hate gay people, why couldn’t Ennis and Jack just have a nice fucking life together, what the fuck.
I had a vague recollection that the movie was based on a book so I googled it this morning, while still lying in bed in my nice fucking life, the dog nestled between us and calm, and I learned it was originally a short story by Annie Proulx, published in The New Yorker in 1997, so I spent an hour reading it and have spent all the hours of the day since then just gobsmacked, just sort of in a daze, the kind of feeling you have when you read really good short fiction. It makes me want to write but it also makes me want to just sit and think. I tell my students that thinking is part of writing, so.
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing — what we write, what we don’t. This is maybe only interesting to other writers, but I also tell my students that everyone is a writer if they wanna be, and sometimes even if they don’t, so that’s okay.
I think because the writers who are my contemporaries have all grown up in The Internet Age, or whatever, we’re all grappling with a sort of specific question of what to share in our writing on the internet, which is different than the more general idea of what to share in one’s writing. It’s not completely separate, but it’s not entirely the same. The internet, the viral personal essay, social media, immediacy, accessibility — they have all impacted writing and what it means to “share” yourself in your writing. I’m not interested in whether these impacts are “good” or “bad” — I’m more just, interested.
When one of my best friends started trauma therapy a few years ago, she told me her therapist was really into her “noticing” things. It’s come up for me too, now that I go to a DBT group regularly. One of the main tenets of DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) is mindfulness, and to be mindful, we must spend time noticing. The definition of “being mindful,” at least in DBT, is three pronged: observe, describe, participate. The homework my DBT group therapist often gives us is simply “practice mindfulness for 5 minutes a day.” I try. Observe, describe, participate. Notice. I remember asking my friend, when she told me about her therapist’s penchant for “noticing” things — mainly things that brought her discomfort — what the next step was supposed to be.
This is perhaps the most telling detail of all: I do not remember her answer.
I was dating someone who was cheating on me at the time. My friend had resigned herself to the reality that I had not yet come to accept: the problem wasn’t just my ex cheating, the problem was that I was staying even though I knew the situation was making me feel bad, agitated, crazy. I feel crazy, I said all the time, that spring. Now I know it wasn’t really crazy — what I meant was, when she looks me in the eye and tells me she has never lied to me, but I know in my gut she is lying to me, my heart rate quickens and my stomach drops to my ankles and I feel a little bit like I might vomit, and then I need to lie down on the hardwood floor in my bedroom for at least ten minutes. It took me so many months to leave after I noticed all that. I was also practicing not noticing, I suppose. Do not notice the harness that is out of its usual drawer, that looks used, that looks like maybe it was strapped to her body while I was out of town. Do not notice the phone that she keeps close to her hand at all times, that she never lets rest face up on the table, that she once unthinkingly passed to me on a long car ride when she needed help reading the directions but quickly snatched back when it pinged and I had just enough time to see the other girl’s name flash across the screen, accompanied with three purple devil emojis.
Do not notice the obvious lies when she says she is not lying.
Now I tell my friends, when they are dating people who I suspect are cheating on them and they say, I feel crazy, I tell them: Don’t get confused between crazy and intuition.
But I digress. I’m talking about noticing the changes that have cropped up for writers when considering what to share and what not to share, especially in a medium like a newsletter, or a blog I guess, one that lands in a bunch of inboxes as soon as the writer hits “send,” one whose audience is a mixture of friends and exes and lovers and strangers and people who don’t wish the writer well at all but enjoy the access the words grant to the writer’s inner world.
Often, I find myself jealous of people who don’t write. My fiancée is a talented writer — when we first began our courtship we wrote each other long emails and she responded to writing prompts I set up for her, told interesting stories, made me blush, told the truth, lit my screen and my heart up with her words — but she doesn’t write for public consumption. She rarely posts on social media. It’s not possible to track her life, her thoughts, her brain by clicking around on the internet. She does not have a library of information chronicling her thought patterns for anyone to look through as they please.
If I didn’t write, I think, I wouldn’t have to worry about writing.
Recently — I think because of the ritual of starting fresh in January — several writers I admire have drawn stronger boundaries around what they will or will not share moving forward, or have written explicitly about what they’ve chosen never to share. Some writers have written about their loves in the past and regret it. Some writers have never shared certain aspects of their relationships, guarding those details as precious things that no one else should be able to consume. One writer wrote of feeling deep regret when she realized that she had written so much about love, would always write about love — she wondered if maybe some other writers were right, if maybe we as Writers On The Internet should be more careful about what we share, and what it does to our special relationships when we give those precious details away.
In the Autostraddle slack, our virtual office where all the writers can chat with each other all day if we so choose, a few of my colleagues expressed feeling sort of guilty about not sharing all of their personal lives, all of their private thoughts, when they wrote. It’s the opposite action of purposefully guarding information that you once gave away freely; the worry that since you are a writer you should always be giving away your thoughts freely. I wrote this, in response to some of the conversation: “i don’t think crafting a “self” on the page is lying fwiw. i think you get to decide who you are and what you share in your writing.” One of my colleagues brought the root of the question to the table though, succinctly noting the tension that is the reality of Being A Writer always, whether the internet exists or not: “i want to keep certain things mine but i can't ever really decide what those things are.”
So when it comes to my writing — what is mine, and what is yours?
In her brilliant essay about craft, Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy, T Kira Madden uses a memory of her own to weave a complex answer to the question “is writing your therapy?”
But by the end of the piece, once she’s shown all that writing can do and all the ways in which a reader participates in the act of writing by simply reading and projecting their own thoughts/feelings/memories/emotions/etc onto the work, she concludes simply, sharply, honestly: “That memory is no longer mine. It’s yours.”
I regret certain things I’ve written about, but not many. I am always crafting a self on the page. My close friends will sometimes jokingly call me on a “lie” I have fabricated in my work — a composite character I created to move the story along more swiftly, a date I needed to fudge a bit to get the beats to line up, a conclusion that leaves out some of the wreckage for the sake of all the people involved — but I like what this proves. I like that to know me is a different experience than to read my writing. I like that I am still afforded the personal, even when I have chosen to work as someone who writes about the personal in a public forum.
In 2019 at Tin House Summer Workshop, Michelle Tea taught me that to be a writer is to grow up in public, but when we had lunch together in LA just a few weeks ago, she told me that as she’s gotten older she’s become more careful about what she chooses to write about, or she at least thinks about it more deeply before rushing to the page. Noticing. I’m paraphrasing here, but she basically said that when she was younger she didn’t mind the idea of blowing her life up, but as you get older and things feel more stable and you like your life, you don’t necessarily want to jeopardize it by writing about everyone who contributes to making your life what it is. That makes sense to me. I also do understand the writers in my life who guard their most personal relationships, the little details that make up a Love, to hold on to something that belongs just to them. It’s strange to have other people project themselves onto your most intimate relationships.
It’s also what successful writing does.
I am not a gay cowboy on Brokeback Mountain in the 1960s. Yet I found myself weeping to the movie last night and the short story this morning. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are alive in my brain now. And also, it’s fiction, which is different than personal essay or memoir. That’s not nothing. That may, actually, be everything. I remember a book talk I saw between Torrey Peters and Carrot Quinn after Detransition, Baby came out where Torrey said she preferred to write fiction rather than memoir because it allowed her to tell the truth. Maybe that is the largest question: how do we tell the truth, while also guarding our own inner worlds, while also accepting that as writers the point is to share our inner worlds… maybe that final point is incorrect. Maybe we can tell the truth and not share our inner worlds. Maybe! I’m really not sure.
I feel grateful for the times I’ve held back in my writing, but I also feel grateful for the times when I’ve let my heart pump and glisten on the page. I have spent my entire life trying to contain myself more, to put up stronger boundaries, to be more careful about what I share, to take more precautions about who I let in — but at the end of the day, I am me. I am a writer. I fall in love quickly. I trust easily. I get hurt and promise I’ll never let it happen again and try to close myself up but in the end I am splayed open again, swiftly, almost effortlessly, every time. I always decide it’s worth it. Not to be messy with what I write, not to harm people needlessly, not to blow up my life — but to share. To be open. To love. To let you in.
I do not have a tidy conclusion here. Do not consider this an essay. I’m not focused on fully thought out tidy writing this year, remember? I’m just blogging every Sunday. I’m just noticing. I’m being mindful.
Observe, describe, participate.
Now — if you want — it’s your turn.
Reminder! If you want to take writing classes with me this winter/spring, you sure can — there are a few spots left in my Creative Nonfiction Workshop and my Instant Feedback Workshop — and if you’d like to see me and genius Emme Lund talk about her brilliant debut novel, The Boy With a Bird in His Chest, in person this very evening, you can do that too! We’ll be at Powell’s at 7pm (we’re dressing on theme with the book: punk witchy lesbians of the PNW, which I know many of you can accomplish with ease!) and I’d love to see you there.