CALLED OUT! CALLED IN!
a clumsy surrender to authenticity
Before I tell you what happened, it’s important that I admit something to you : most of the time, posting anything I write makes me feel like this George Tooker painting. I think about it all the time.
I’m sure we all have a level of this anticipation or hyper-awareness (panopticon etc). For reasons I will one day explain, I happen to have a particularly heavy dose. When I write something to be read, it feels transgressive and risky and physically agitating.
You might think: Well girl… sounds like a you-problem. Why have a Substack? Why write at all?
The question is a good one and the answer is: I am not sure! I am working on it in therapy!
I do know that fears of being misunderstood, judged, and punished are anxieties rather than intuitions. I believe writing good stuff comes from a quieter place than all this discomfort. So it’s a push/pull — an unpleasantness that is sometimes punitive-feeling and sometimes cathartic. Also, a lot of good has come from this portal, this strange epistolary thing. Like you are reading this now. That, to me, is good.
I try to remember the Robert Hass poem “Meditation at Lagunitas”. Great poem across the board, but in particular, ‘a word is an elegy to what it signifies’. In other words, misunderstanding is inherent, natural, inevitable.
So, I think of writing through fear of being misunderstood as (when it doesn’t feel like a Big MISTAKE) a ‘working through’. I acknowledge that doing this still feels spooky to me. It requires an alternating of gumption and dissociation in order to click POST.
Anyway, I will tell you what happened. It all started because I had made a terrible mistake, which was Looking at the Numbers.
On Substack, your Dashboard shows you subscriber and follower counts, plus a list of who subscribes to you. I had posted something earlier that week and I looked at the Numbers and I saw that there… weren’t many. Whatever! This passing-by-feeling kind of activated a sense of liberating nihilism and a thrill of freedom.
I don’t really understand Substack Notes versus Posts, and I was wondering at their distinction. ‘Notes’ seem familiar, quick, quippy, image-based. I was thinking about images, and how I feel like pictures can feel more protected and protective than language can. I felt stifled by the city in the summer, as usual, which mostly happens during the afternoons -- muggy and listless.
I was remembering a time that felt opposite - cold and open and vast - when I lived on a tiny island off the coast of Washington, in the San Juans. I have lived there two times, each an adventure of its own, each feeling very far away that day.
I was thinking about a house we lived in, in 2020. Chaos. We moved around a lot that year on that island but one place we lived was this house built by a mom in the 70’s for her two kids. The house was rickety and strange, damp and shadowed -- but the skylights were beautiful.
We had bats fly in during the night, three different times. Which felt almost-comically unsubtle, meaningful, ominous – so I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections in bed, under the skylights which were under the trees, and learned a lot.
I was remembering what life felt like then and I was remembering some pictures that I took there. It was not an easy time, but the island felt lush. Waking under the trees, across the road and down the path of the Nature Preserve, through the densely-wooded forest over puddles and moss, til we got to the Puget Sound. Spilling coffee from the Chemex over my sweatpants, getting to the smell of seaweed and walking along the edge of the water. At the time, I felt lost and strange but committed to whatever that life was. Looking back, I realize, I was lucky.
These flashes of memory all while I looked at my stinky computer in stinky NYC (where I am also lucky, a fact I will surely understand more as time goes on). I figured ‘okay, shout out to that time, I guess’ and I posted a tiny note about that house because, I thought, smiling, ‘who cares anyway?’ So I did. Then I went up to my roof to sweat and do some weird yoga and to meditate.
I returned to my computer and people had liked the note, which was a nice feeling with a sort of synthetic quality to it. A couple of people had re-stacked it, which also was nice and felt somehow deeply real and personal. I clicked on one re-stack and saw this caption.
OH BROTHER!
Of course, my body freaked out and felt personally betrayed. Then I sort of was like… this feels important? I did some pacing and frenetic sighing and then thought… this might mean something…
Well! Remember my deep fear of being perceived or misunderstood on the internet? Interesting.
“What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.”1
There was something funny about my intention versus my fears, in tandem with the inevitable reaction. I had tried to protect myself by “note-ing” a personal but vague, aesthetically-driven memory. I had tried to fling the most inoffensive version of myself into the ether. I had ended up attracting the same energies I had been afraid of: judgment, misunderstanding, disappointment, impatience, displeasure.
A consequence of fear of judgment, for me, has likely been an attempt at being inoffensive. This is a defense mechanism that may keep things more surface level: it isn’t a matter of taste, it’s a matter of substance. It’s also a pretty confused state of being: both preparing for the imminent arrival of an opponent, and praying that they do not show up. Putting a note outside my front door, and then triple-locking it from inside.
This is not my first rodeo with a reader of this sort. I’ve gotten some comments like this in the past: how lucky a person is to get to think about food – to have that be the thing they spend their time analyzing. That is totally true and, excuse the pretension, but Bourdieu would agree! Navel gazing, after all..
The truth is, what the re-stacker had to say was their right. I am in many ways privileged, and I am certainly whimsical. Blessedly, I have always been housed… but two out of three ain’t bad.
Whether they were right isn’t really the point, either. They were allowed to think what they thought, and I was destined to have to notice how much that moved me.
This comment helped me because it made me understand sort of… the futility of my efforts? But in a good way? If the nature of all of this is that it is – like food – made to be given away, then I have to release ideas around it being digested to match my intention.
There is a difference between in-person life and this digital one; some analogue good faith, maybe. I really believe in this concept: real life conversations have a different, vastly more dynamic energy to them. You may still misunderstand me, but that feels more okay — especially if I trust what I have said, and done it in good faith. That doesn’t feel so bad to me. Also from Med. at Lag: “We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while, I understood that talking this way, everything dissolves.”
Thinking back, I wonder if the image of that cabin was so strong that day for its quietness. It was hushed and isolated, with only the wind to cause friction. No man is an island, and no girl is a back-to-the-land cabin in the woods.2
So if I release the idea that I can control what you think of me, why not experiment more diligently in authenticity? Why not tell the truth?
And for that, I thank the observant and opinionated re-stacker… except. They are blocked.
Jung, again. sorry! :)
People are always saying this!
This was a delight to read, my dear friend. I so relate to all of it — thank you for bravely naming the things, as you do.
Rosa your words are beautiful. I’m so glad I found you again 🤍