Hi, I am once again writing about writing. This is a free essay for all subscribers. Will be back next week with a paid subscribers only post. For one more day, you can get 28 percent off paid subscriptions. Either way, thanks for reading.
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To be a woman is to waste so much time and energy. Charlotte texts me this as we discuss our mutual disappointment in behavior from certain men we know. What many women accept is rarely a representation of what we actually deserve. I’ve seen this in my own life, in my friends’ lives too. I repeat to her what Annie told me weeks ago about the only arc of progress is getting closer to knowing what you deserve. I realize how exhausted I am because for a long time, I refused to admit I was tired of it at all.
I used to think that it was impossible for a person to waste your time. People aren’t capable of controlling your time, therefore they can’t waste it. Besides, to say something/someone is a waste of time puts a transactional value on a relationship. Time is inherently free. It exists beyond the language and science we try to impose on it.
But it isn’t entirely true that you can’t waste someone’s time. In fact, it’s matter of a choice. They can give you their minutes and hours without expectation of return. They can waste time waiting for you to make up your mind. Waste time waiting for you to treat them better. Waste time wanting you when you want someone or something else entirely.
All my theories aside, now I know if someone wants something from you, they won’t drag their feet. Otherwise you’re a cushion for them until they figure it out. That’s not who you are—the doormat, the unlocked window, the placeholder—but that is how you feel. And no matter how many times someone denies it, it’s not for them to decide what’s true.
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Theorem: I want to say that you wasted my time even if I don’t believe that’s possible.
Proof: I am left with nothing to show for what you claimed had meaning and what I claimed you took from me.
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I’m standing in my kitchen naked on the phone with Annie as she walks through a rummage sale two hundred miles away. It’s unseasonably hot and I’ve just gotten home drenched in sweat. So I took off my clothes just before Annie returned my call. We’re discussing some texts she sent me a few days ago. About how being a woman is to never be able to contend with our actual desires because they are unbearable. The sadomasochistic desire to gut yourself in order to be understood somehow makes you even more alienated. The same goes for the creative process. To attempt to connect is a constant severing of the self only to remain even more fragmented and misunderstood than you were before.
Then my roommate Annie comes home. There’s a moment of confusion because I say out loud: Annie, hang on, I’m naked. The two Annies laugh as I scramble to my bedroom. I’m both seen and unseen. I have to explain what’s happened to the Annie on the other side of the phone, and explain myself to the Annie now in the kitchen.
It’s not so much that I’m ashamed of being naked, but the surprise of someone coming home and seeing me. That what I thought was a private ritual suddenly was made public. And I will make it public again here.
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Theorem: Someone claims they don’t read my writing in order to respect my privacy.
Proof: Yet this is the least private format imaginable.
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The hours spent dissecting. To try to make someone understand through the imperfect medium of language. We volley voice memos back and forth. Forgetting what we needed to say so we send another one. Re-contextualize texts. Recount the phone conversations, the regret over what should have been expressed if given the chance to talk again. How we know that the energy spent will never be reclaimed. That we’ll always be this exhausted because how can you make someone understand when they simply don’t want to?
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Theorem: To write for men is not to write to them as an audience, but to vocalize what they won’t hear.
Proof: I could write the same sentence over and over and it would still be indecipherable.
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Do you feel this way? That you write for men to understand you? Annie asks me this. I wonder how many times I’ve written in order to communicate what I couldn’t say in fewer words. (I think of recently when my therapist asks me to name something difficult. I realize how angry I’ve been and how angry I wanted to be when I couldn’t be. I find myself saying cruel and harsh things, acknowledging how cruel and harsh what I’m saying actually is and being angry at myself for not being more levelheaded.) That is a truth about me: I become antagonistic rather than elegant when I’m struggling to exorcize my own thoughts. Which is to say all the things I couldn’t say to you, I’ll say them here.
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Theorem: I won’t write and/or publish about what I have yet to solve in my personal life until it is solved.
Proof: That which is complicated rarely can be solved by silence, if it can be solved at all.
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I felt a little bit indignant when someone makes it a point to tell me: don’t write about this in the Substack. As if I’m slinking around gathering everyone’s sordid details and chomping at the bit to reveal what I’ve been told in confidence. As if I have no self-control or awareness. As if I want to damage the most precious relationships in my life by sharing what’s not mine to share with strangers. Am I not trustworthy? Is what I’ve written here a betrayal of every person in my life? Would I not know the difference between what is sacred and what can be shared?
And yet here I am, writing about it when I was told not to write about it.
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Theorem: We play a party game called Pizza Box where landing on a certain space requires you to perform an action. To kiss, to drink, to run around the block, to tell a secret.
Proof: I can’t think of a secret because I have already told all of mine to every single person in the room.
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Getting what I want wouldn’t solve anything because I can’t contend with what I actually want. As Annie says, the truth is the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us.
Language is entirely unbearable because it is an act of fantasy and not realization. Searching for the right words, in the heat of really writing, can feel like edging. But unlike sex, when the sentence finally comes, it’s entirely dissatisfying. All along, I had it on my tongue but when I spit it out, it’s crude. It taunts me for not finishing sooner. Whatever beauty there is doesn’t come from the struggle to write, but the recognition that I’ve made something that is now separate from me. That I willed it into existence and now I have no responsibility for it. I barely recognize what I’ve done. And that’s the only way I’ve learned how to live with the unbearable.
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Theorem: When you said you love me, I wanted to remind you what Barthes said about the first avowal.
Proof: You were drunk when you told me this so you rendered it even more meaningless than it already is.
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At the boygenius show a few weeks ago, Phoebe Bridgers played “Letter to an Old Poet” towards the end of the set. Before she did, she asked if people wouldn’t record it, because it’s a difficult song for her to play. Most of the people complied. It was one of the few moments in the night where you could hear the actual singers without the entire crowd screaming along.
She said couldn’t have written the song without her bandmates. And that if anyone in the crowd related to it, she was sorry. Of course I relate to the song. And just because it’s specifically about loving someone with an addiction, and about loving someone who hates themselves so much that hatred is cast towards you, you can be in either or none of these situations and still relate to the song. But what she said before resonated with me even more than hearing the song live. Of course I couldn’t have written so much about my own pain without the friends who read it and held me through it.
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Theorem: To keep talking could ruin everything. To be told that someone understands what you’re saying can stop that from happening.
Proof: You made me feel like this was a kindness when really it was another lock I’d have to pick. It took me only a few months to realize the key had been in my pocket all along. I just didn’t want to use it.
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Sometimes a friend of mine sends me kind texts about pieces I’ve written. His interpretations always surprise me because his reading is often very different from what I was thinking as I wrote at the time. This shouldn’t be surprising. Despite technically being understood, I feel oddly more understood. His interpretations are rich and thoughtful. They make me wish that those meanings were my intention. Of course his reading is as valid as whatever it is I was trying to write. I know this. This is the entire purpose of literature—to contain a multitude of possible meanings. I know this, too. I was an English major who went to a professor’s office to continue to argue that my interpretation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was correct because the professor only accepted his own interpretation and given me a lower grade on an essay than I believe I deserved.
My sister struggles to separate the characters in my novel from their real-life inspirations. I ask if this makes them seem less real. No, she says. Only too real. Is there any other way to interpret this? Sometimes I imagine the book being read by the living counterparts and wonder what they will feel. If they will feel understood or entirely violated.
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Theorem: You’re a very good writer, but this text is hard to parse.
Proof: You don’t actually think I am a good writer.
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Later texting Annie again I mentioned how a professor once told me that all writers have a singular obsession. They spend their early years writing around it, trying to actually identify it. There may be many obsessions masquerading as the singular one. They’re distracting, but it is a process of eventual discovery. Once you name it, you can properly write towards it. And then you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to convey why this one thing obsesses you.
My singular obsession is the desire to merge completely with the other. I sent this realization to Annie when I was lying in bed on Sunday. My head finally stopped spinning from the Halloween weekend hangover. It surprised me that after years of wondering what my obsession was, that this could be it. I’m not surprised that I was only able to name this when I was in total physical agony.
Through all of this work, I’ve tried to merge again but failed. With the self that wants to be someone else in order to be understood. The fictional self, the self who writes this. The self I am when Charlotte and I swap Halloween costumes at four AM. The self I am for the seconds I am alone in my bedroom when I first wake and have forgotten entirely who I am, but am certain for once, I made a singular right decision.
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Theorem: To know your subject is to eventually be set free of what obsesses you.
Proof: Yet I will always be writing toward the impossible because what obsesses me is ultimately impossible.
I love reading your words. Thank you for sharing them. I nodded along to this entire piece, as if it were a song I already knew yet hadn't heard in years.
"I felt a little bit indignant when someone makes it a point to tell me: don’t write about this in the Substack. As if I’m slinking around gathering everyone’s sordid details and chomping at the bit to reveal what I’ve been told in confidence. As if I have no self-control or awareness. As if I want to damage the most precious relationships in my life by sharing what’s not mine to share with strangers."
Yes, me too, same.
Sending hugs to you, fellow seeker. xo
Just riveting. All the toil and turmoil and wasted time of being a woman. It's a beautiful sorrow. An unbearable lightness. In the words of Julia Jacklin, "strong but willing to be saved, ignore the tenderness you crave."