I Wrote Something Awesome, and You Can't Read It.

Or why I'm so bad at making up titles

Once you put it out there, you can’t take it back. As I often warn my kids, the internet is forever.

I wrote something I was going to send out today in this newsletter. As so often happens when I write about personal things, it started as one thing and ended up as another.

I had this idea to write about a series of spring break camping trips I took in college in which I always wanted to be somewhere else, with someone else. If I were with my parents, I wanted to be with my friends. If I were pitching a tent with friends, I’d wish I were sleeping in the great outdoors with different friends in a different place.

I planned to make the point that I was always pining for some different situation whose grass I imagined was greener. I planned to congratulate myself at the end for the person I’ve become — one who is much better at living in the now and relishing wherever she is.

But sometimes my subconscious sneaks out of the recesses of my brain and into my fingers as I type, and something wholly different than I intended emerges.

Much to my surprise, references to the same person from my past popped up in all the stories, even when he wasn’t physically present at the time. I found myself confessing to selfish and impulsive things I had done in my early 20s. And as I wrote about the final camping trip — one that took place over 25 years ago — I realized for the first time what an emotionally pivotal moment it was for me.

When I finished, let out a sigh and sat back in my chair to read what I had written, wanting to be somewhere else was only a minor theme. It was about love, heartbreak and overcoming the agony of moving on. Shit, I thought, This was supposed to be light. In fact it is very, very heavy. It is weighed down with realization and life lessons. It’s about overcoming, but it’s not necessarily an upper.

This morning, I went to publish it and send it out to all of my mailing list. I needed an image, so I dragged out old photo albums with ragged corners and found some washed-out, pre-digital pictures of those camping trips with friends. I fell into them a little bit, remembering how I felt, how much I loved hanging out with that group, and how much they were a part of who I was back then. How tortured I felt by that one boy, and how my dumbass couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I was a willing participant in my own misery and that my choices were only making things worse.

I re-read the draft, and goddamnit, it’s really good — beautiful even — but I couldn’t hit “publish.”

I anxiously wondered, would the other people in this story be comfortable with this? I was uneasy about it from a confidentiality angle. But mostly — though it didn’t divulge any scandalous secrets, at least none that I haven’t shared with the interwebs before — it felt too vulnerable. I just now, after all these years, discovered a new perspective on events I thought I’d put to bed long ago.

Berating myself for being a self-centered idiot back then is an old tape in my brain. What I discovered this time around was how I came out of that relationship with baggage, yes, but also with strength — with a subconscious knowledge that I could survive heartbreak.

It’s kind of stupid that I don’t feel comfortable publishing the story, but I’ve just sat here and given you its entire backstory, fore-story and surrounding environmental side stories. Meh, what can you say? Artists, right?

What Would You Say... You Write About?

This, I guess, is my way of getting comfortable with it, so that maybe next week, I can send the actual piece out into the world and not freak out too much that hundreds of people read it and know the inner workings of my mind. It’s a little unsettling to run into people at HEB who say, “I read your last post. It was so great,” and realize it was an in-depth analysis of my teenage insecurities. They know my childhood stories, precisely why my first marriage fell apart and how my hysterectomy went. I can’t even call up their name, as I stare, like a deer frozen in the headlights, over our grocery carts into their eyes, wondering what the fuck they must think of me.

It feels like that dream in which you suddenly realize you’re naked in public and then hope no one notices.

But I keep doing it, keep writing the personal stuff and letting it out to play in the world, so either I am a masochist, an egomaniac, or I see some value in it. Or it’s kinda like therapy but cheaper.

Anyway…this has been hastily written at the last minute since I scrapped my plans to share “Spring Heartbreak.” (It’s even a good title, and I am terrible at titles!) I’m committed to sending out this newsletter every Friday, so this is what y’all get today. It’s a little rambly and sparsely edited, but that makes it closer to what REALLY goes on in my brain. I will probably share the heartbreak story eventually. It’s one of the better things I’ve written, and my ego won’t allow it to languish in “drafts.”

Have a good weekend, y’all.