spooky paws
Something you may have noticed is that I don’t do a lot of writing about individual people. I write about demographics and places and trends and theories and ideas (and politicians but to paraphrase an argument first posited by the Muppets: Mr. The Frog, we all agreed that a politician is not a people). There are a couple of reasons for this. The first, which is the most superficial, is that a demographic or a place or a trend or a theory or an idea is very unlikely to call you on the phone or text you a screenshot of your own writing or nurture a deep, long-standing grudge regarding something you’ve posted about them online. (Politicians only do this if you’ve really fucked up or they think you matter.)
The second, which arguably comprises the best story or series of stories, is that It Happened To Me (xoJane dot com). You can tell I have a lot of complicated feelings about this because I can’t help but be flip about it. To date, to the best of my knowledge, I have featured in one book, one successful college admissions essay, at least one thinkpiece about trauma narratives in television, and at least one manuscript. All without my permission, not that I think that’s really the point; I’m not particularly interested in relitigating “Cat Person,” which is to say the question of whether it is morally correct to write about other people without asking them. Surely if there’s one thing all writers have in common it’s that we are thieves; we steal from ourselves first and foremost, but even our own lives are not wholly our own to exploit — after all, whose life doesn’t intersect with other people’s in a million places? The point here being that I’m familiar with what it’s like to abruptly encounter a depiction of yourself through an unfamiliar lens, and I’m not particularly interested in being the reason someone else experiences that, for reasons I'll expand on shortly.
The third reason, which is in many ways a further iteration of the second, boils down to — how well do any of us really know each other, anyway? Or:
i gotta suspicion everyone got a secret hoard of something they keep hidden from their friends let if its shoes and makeup or like teacups that shits fine and all but once i went to my buddy mikes house and like,, well i knew him for years since like fucking 2006, we talk non stop,used to be my bff of the year and what not, ya whatever, i hop to get something from his basement once and i turn on the light and its littered with not a handful, but at least 20 hand made dollhouses with little trees and paint jobs and everything made from wood he harvested from his fathers construction company, all he missing is furniture and little people like FUCK that fucked me up so bad, but thats not the point of my story here see, it didnt fuck w me as much as after i visited my not so much anymore freinds house in 10th grade and she had a collection of her friends hair and she asked me for a snippet becasue she never had blue before and i went home and blocked her number anyway she jsut messaged me on instagram 30 min ago and i had to like sit in my kitchen in the dark for a while jsut thinking about how scary it is to know people but not know them at all
(Here's the full post, including the source of this letter’s title.)
When I encounter a depiction of myself in somebody else's work, it makes me feel at best unsettled — in my perception of myself, of them, of the nature of our relationship — and at worst badly misunderstood, sometimes willfully. The latter is pretty straightforward to explain, especially now that we all tend to be primed for bad-faith readings of our writing or tweeting or whatever. It's pretty easy to look at yourself and see what someone else might pick out as your worst traits or selectively highlight as proof that you're a bad actor. This is part, I think, of why so many people find the idea of "cancel culture" so seductive; it plays into our worst fears that other people might not only not give us the benefit of the doubt, but actively be seeking to discredit or malign us for reasons that are out of our control and against which we have no recourse. If you are constantly braced against paranoid reading, of course a philosophy that such readings have Gone Too Far is going to represent safety and community. But this represents a kind of outsourcing of the self in which other people's perceptions of you carry more weight than your own. You are never going to make everyone happy all the time, and you are also never going to successfully argue that people should not be allowed to be unhappy about or your work.
But that's kind of a worst-case scenario. The other gradations of this experience are much murkier, unsurprisingly: the ways in which other people fail to see you, the ways in which they understand you differently than you understand yourself, the ways in which we are always alien to each other. Which makes it sound sad, but of course it isn't; that infinite variety is equally what makes people so infinitely rewarding to meet, talk to, fuck, argue with, shitpost at, et cetera. It's strange to encounter a version of yourself that is so different from the version with whom you are familiar. It's strange to have empirical proof that other people experience you differently, not just from yourself but from each other. It's even stranger to understand that, sometimes, they aren't wrong.
This isn't about code-switching, exactly, but that's the closest analogy I can think of to what I'm trying to describe here. I think it's something most of us experience in one of two contexts: introducing your friends to each other, and grieving one.
When you introduce your friends to each other, you realize that they are going to interact with each other differently than they interact with you, and perhaps you also realize that you interact with each of them differently. Your selves collide and fragment. Perhaps they recoalesce in a cohesive way; perhaps not. (This generally determines whether or not your three-way friendship will take on a life of its own or not.) Either way, you have seen and been seen in a new way.
When you grieve a friend, whether there is the possibility that you will see them again or not, you are also grieving the person that they brought out in you, and vice versa. What is friendship if not an opportunity to find out who someone is and, in turn, to find out a little more about yourself? To challenge, to be challenged, and to grow; to become someone different for and because of them? What does it mean when that goes away? From In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado:
She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together.
(Machado is writing here about an abusive partner, specifically the version of that partner who she thought she knew — to extrapolate a little, the one who was present on the good days. So the one who never really existed in the first place.)
What happens when a relationship, of whatever kind, ends? It's a little history, an experience shared by however many people were involved, that is in many ways unrecoverable. You carry your version of it around forever, and you know that everyone else experienced it differently, but even if you stay on good terms with those people, I think, you can never really understand their versions, just as they can never really understand yours. The versions of yourselves that were present, that were real and true in the context of that little history, are in many ways lost to it, even if the growth is not. You remain changed, but you are the only person who really understands what that means. You are the only one who remembers.
This essay is a study in negative space, in case you haven't picked up on that yet. It's an exercise in not writing about specific people, but it's also a eulogy for the selves I was, the understandings I thought I shared, the lost cryptophasia, the abandoned pocket worlds that we built and inhabited. The parts of myself that, even now, I am digging out of the sand and dusting off. It's also an essay that I needed to write so that I could stop thinking about writing it and start thinking about writing other things. It isn't the little history that now I, alone, am left to carry, because that would be impossible to write down: You had to be there.
This obviously isn’t either of the essays that I said I was going to write last time. It is, for what it’s worth, a little related to one of the questions I promised to mull, which is: How do you get older without getting worse? The answer, I think, has to do with that accreted history and the ways in which the past and future both become foreign countries. Here’s some other stuff, as usual:
Recently I read Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer, which finally prompted me to get into the Southern Reach trilogy. (Which I would have read a lot sooner if I’d realized it takes a hard veer into le Carré territory partway through.)
I enjoyed Several People are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke, which is told entirely in Slack transcripts and more than justifies that stylistic choice.
I pre-ordered Tell Me I’m Worthless, by Alison Rumfitt, and will be gently gnawing on a piece of drywall until it finally comes out. (She’s also got “The T(y)ranny,” a poetry pamphlet, out in ebook and hard copy, if you need something to tide you over. Strongly recommend. She also takes writing commissions!)
I would love it if a trans writer with more time and energy than me wanted to write a reading of the Matrix films (and the Wachowskis’ work in general) through a lens of the specific subgenre of trans speculative fiction that includes Sybil Lamb’s work and Torrey Peters’ novellas, among, I’m sure, others: I would argue that Future Feeling by Joss Lake and The Seep by Chana Porter also qualify, as will, I suspect, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s upcoming Manhunt. (This is not, to be clear, a particularly cohesive subgenre. I know it when I see it.) If you manage to get someone to pay you to do this, all the better!
We’re looking for voice actors for issue 3 of khōréō! Specifically, we’re looking for a trans woman who can give voice to a raspy Mel Brooks/Bernie Sanders Jewish Brooklyn accent. Please feel free to email me for more details or check out the submissions guidelines here! We pay! Tell everyone!
Jenn could use your help to repair her car! Donate, share, pester your salaried friends.