letting you look

The other night I was at a party where everybody was doing karaoke except for me. Not-doing karaoke is a little bit like not-drinking, in that almost everybody will try to convince you that you've made the wrong choice about it-- except, that is, for the ones who take great pains to explain to you that they, like, tooootally respect your choices, they get it, they get you and your, like, weird thing that you have, or whatever. 

Not-doing karaoke is unlike not-drinking in that there's no good reason for my abstention. It's really just that I can't. 

This particular party was being held at A's house after a reading he had organized. He was one of the ones who asked. "Don't tell me you're not performative," he said, and I thought about how, an hour ago, I had walked on stage and read an essay about one of the darkest periods of my life into a microphone. I had checked that it was loud enough before I did it; I had made absolutely sure that everyone could hear me. 

Or like, look, I've been keeping a blog on and off since I was fourteen. It's not that I mind people paying attention to me, exactly. The thing is that I have to make myself feel like I've invited them to look at me, and that I know what they're seeing when they do it. I wrote that essay, and then I edited it; I practiced reading it aloud. Control is almost always an illusion but that doesn't mean it isn't a comforting one. 

There's also the difference between being asked to perform entertainment and a confession. The point of karaoke is to please an audience. To write and read and talk about your own emotional life pretends that the goal is honesty, which sets up a very different framework for judgement. For one thing, honesty implies vulnerability, so performing it means you get credit for bravery.

In fact, of course, I had crafted that essay to reveal limited specifics, and to cast my story in a certain, sympathetic light. It was vulnerable to read and write it, but it was also, and I think equally, powerful. There is power in a reveal that you control, and there is pleasure in controlling something that slippery and dangerous, which has that much potential to cut the other way if you’re not careful with it.

I keep trying to come up with a phrase that will describe how it feels to have this book coming out, and psychotically vulnerable is the thing that keeps occurring to me. A book is too long-- too many pages and words, too many years of my life-- to even pretend to have control over. I thought when I was writing it that it was all fiction, just made-up stuff I pulled from the air, but every time I read it again I see how close to my life it is, how it reveals me in ways I never considered or intended. It's like I've spent the last few years doing burlesque, dancing a tease; now I'm standing still on stage, naked, letting you look from every angle.