quiet
The problem with saying "I'm listening" is that you aren't: you're talking. That's something I've been trying to keep right at the front of my brain these last few weeks, the difference between announcing my intentions and enacting them. Honestly, my main feeling as a white person right now is that there is little to say, especially publicly, and very much to do.
So then the problem, such as it is, is that I have these social media platforms, and it also feels wrong to let them lie fallow. Especially when I see what everyone else is sharing: I think, I should do that, and that, and that, and then if I don't I imagine that some enormous eyeball is keeping track of my posts and judging me for them, declaring me not the right sort of white person. Finding me wanting.
One of the decisions I had to make when I wrote Look was to accept that I might disappoint some queer readers, who would then be able to come to me and say, you had no right to write this book in the first place. I would have no argument against them. (Except, who has the right to write anything, which is sort of a different conversation.) I had to think: I cannot please everyone. And so I will decide who I am responsible to, and who I am not.
I asked as many queer friends to read the book as I could. I took their blessing not as a general permission, but as reassurance that I wasn't hurting my close community. The rest of the world I respect and try to care for, but I cannot take its entirety on my shoulders. No one can. Anyway, that's the ethos I try to take with me in my ongoing efforts to "be a good person:" to know who I'm really responsible to, and to serve them before I try to take on the world.
There is always friction between my public and private lives, but I feel it intensely these days, the gap between trying to perform the self I want to be and being her at the same time. Those efforts are often in harmony, but in this instance they are at odds: because I really think performing my self is the least useful thing I can be doing right now. And I see how it detracts from my energy for doing the quiet, private, intimate work with the people who are actually, deeply in my life, the people who maybe don't read my tweets but do answer my late-night calls. Sometimes people can do both. Sometimes I can. Right now, I can't.
In addition to all that, I am trying very hard to write two books at once-- one the ghostwriting project that is paying my bills, and the other my fourth YA novel, which is a beast in a way nothing I've written before has been. Both projects are due in late July, and increasingly, I don't see a way to get from here to there with my sanity intact and my Twitter account continually updated.
It's not a hard decision, when you actually come down to it, but it feels scary. It feels like I've only been able to have and hang on to my marginal and uncertain career by being the right kind of personality, a bookish white girl who knows how to make a joke and find an angle, to keep herself in the conversation day after day after day. Who am I if I actually get quiet? What would it feel like to take myself off of the display shelf for a month, or maybe two?
Who am I in quiet, alone?
Right before the pandemic started I wrote about wanting to be better company for myself, to learn how to spend time in rooms where I had nothing to do. I didn't do it on that expensive writing retreat; in fact, I barely got any writing done. (To be fair, this was the earliest days of lockdown in the US and following the news felt legitimately life or death.)
But now here I am. I don't have to go anywhere. I know what work I have to do-- on the page, in my life-- and it is private work. So I am trying to recognize the opportunity, and I am trying to take it in hand.
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Before I go:
I interviewed Hannah Orenstein about her new book Head Over Heels, a delightful romcom about a failed Olympic gymnast trying to figure out how to move on from the sport that used to define her.
I appeared on Casually Obsessed to talk about Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House, a book that I loooooved. (I also interviewed Leigh about it when it came out; apparently our conversation inflamed a bunch of Twitter drama but I missed it because it was Yom Kippur and by the time I turned my phone back on, everything had been deleted.)
& I contributed to The Caret's roundup of the best magazine journalism, recommending my friend Amanda Chicago Lewis' absolute banger of a piece about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape and how it helped invent modern privacy laws and internet video streaming.
Finally: I wrote a lot above about my close community, but I also wanted to say that I'm taking this time to deepen my volunteering, to make sure I'm reaching out beyond my circle, too. In case you're looking for inspiration, I'm working with LA Forward on doing neighborhood organizing, looking beyond Silver Lake with Mutual Aid LA, and keeping an eye on the rest of the country with my old pal Sister District.