I woke up on Monday of last week and saw that, on Twitter, a bad man was having his Day of Reckoning. I was not surprised by this; I had had a bad experience with him myself a handful of years ago, and have since learned that if I mentioned this to people who'd worked with him, their response would pretty inevitably be, "Oh yeah, well, he's an abusive nightmare." (What happened between us was mild and largely personal; he edited my writing a handful of times, but was never my actual boss, and thank god.) So this did not come as a surprise to me.

But still, I spent the rest of the week dealing with the fallout. I wrote a Tinyletter draft that detailed what happened between us in order to get my story straight with myself, and also to see if it felt like something I wanted to speak about in detail in public. (This is not that Tinyletter.) I spoke to a journalist on the phone about him, and then spoke to some friends and colleagues about whether they'd want to speak to the journalist, too. I called my mom to let her know what was happening; I texted my friends, who have heard me complain about this dude for years and were sympathetic and supportive, because my friends fucking rule.

It was fine. It was scary and exhausting. It was, above all, so fucking time-consuming. It ate up mental and emotional energy and hours in the day that I did not have to spare, because unlike that man, I do not have a staff job that pays me several hundred thousand dollars a year to scream at my direct reports and then sexually harass them. I spent a good amount of the week stomping around the hills and listening to the Haim song The Steps on repeat. Every day I wake up and I make money for myself!!!!

I have told the story of what happened between us plenty of times over the years. I told it several times last week, to my therapist and the journalist and my mom. It's very banal. I was young and he had the career I wanted and I didn't understand that the way he liked me meant he would never really respect me. I could tell it again here. It wouldn't cost me all that much to do so.

But man, I don't want to! It's an embarrassing story about a concatenation of shitty times in my life, moments when I was insecure and seeking validation from someone who made me feel wanted and also afraid. Other people have spoken plenty about Peter's failures as an editor and manager, and I want to support them-- that's why I talked with the journalist-- but also, I'm tired of thinking about this. This is not an original thought but: I'm tired of the way he takes up my fucking time. 

That was what I kept thinking about, writing that Tinyletter draft, dredging up every bad decision I'd made and all the crappy feelings that had informed them. Why are you doing this? I asked myself, watching my much-needed morning slip away. Why are you putting yourself through these paces?

The answer is at least in part that half a lifetime spent blogging and four years freelancing on the internet, selling personal essays and my self as a personality on various social media platforms, I have become kind of reflexively confessional: my automatic response to any strong sensation, particularly a negative one, is to open a draft window and lay myself bare. 

I don't mean to say that this is always a bad thing: I like telling the truth about my life, and I like trying to hold myself accountable for what I've done and felt. It's not like I ended up here by accident, and I think that, on balance, my willingness to go on record about my own idiocy and failings helps me more than it hurts.

I can also categorize it, if I want to, as part of a feminist project: women are not supposed to live in public, much less hurt here. Taking up the space of my own flawed and particular life is not a radical action, but it is, somehow still, a defiant one.  

And so this is where it gets really tricky. To what extent am I inhabiting and defanging my own pain when I share it, and to what extent am I performing and fetishizing it? Did I want to write that essay to rid myself of Peter, or to further shame myself for the part I played in what happened between us?

I don't know the answers to those questions yet. What I do know is that it is exhausting to dissect yourself in public, and sometimes-- maybe even often-- it's actually entirely unnecessary. I can deal with what happened between us and within myself on my own time, with my own people. I do not owe the internet anything. 

I really needed to remember that last week: I do not owe the internet anything. The pain of shame, like any strong sensation, can become strangely narcotic. It was a good reminder that confession isn't good for me because it feels bad. It's only useful when it serves a larger purpose. And so again, again, again: sometimes all that's needed is to just sit still and be quiet for a while!!

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And yet, I have things I need you to know about, so a little more talking before I go away again:

Ann Friedman & Aminatou Sow, authors of the forthcoming book Big Friendship, curated a bunch of conversations between authors, and I got to talk to my longtime BuzzFeed editor Karolina Waclawiak about our books, writing Los Angeles, and peering through people's windows. You can read that here.  

I'm doing a very belated virtual book launch for Look at my beloved Skylight Books on July 15! I'll be in conversation with a handful of other YA authors who also write about queer girls in SoCal-- Amy Spalding, Aminah Mae Safi, and Robyn Schneider. RSVP here!

& I interviewed an old friend about living on a miniature commune for Curbed's package about how neighbors are handling the pandemic.