Witness Me: On Confessional Writing, the Pandemic, and Instagram
Content warning: This essay discusses sexual assault and intimate partner violence
Kate Zambreno is my favorite author. Her novel Drifts features a narrator indistinguishable from her life – her family, job, her and her spouse’s names, their child, really born around the time Zambreno was writing, all mirror Zambreno in perfect simulacrum. I don’t know what was meant to be fictional, but I don’t need to. She tells a good story, which I think is mostly true. And Kate, if you’re reading this because, like your narrator, you obsessively Google yourself to see what people say – I love you. Please love me back.
I cannot tell a lie in a poem
When I first learned about poetry a decade after I started writing it, I couldn’t understand “the speaker” as a fictional position, because I thought everyone wrote the speaker-as-I, as I did. Even now, I am shocked when an “I” speaker differs wildly from the poet in poems not historical or persona – when someone jokes that their family cannot understand that the “I” speaker’s parent is dead but the poet’s is not, I don’t understand writing an “I” whose parent is dead. What if I brought death upon me by pretending, and in putting on the mourning veil, made it permanent? Or what if, in the marketplace of Twitter takes, I were cancelled for stolen orphan valor, if my not-me-I-speaker-with-the-dead-parents poem got a crumb of success and everyone learned I was a phony, a parented poet?
Revealing my difficulties with a different “I” than the poet makes me sound like a child learning that actors s are playing pretend on television and don’t live out this day again and again for my amusement. Even now, I cannot tell a lie in a poem unless I inhabit an entirely different persona. I am working on a series of poems told from the perspective of a woman who could have been me in another timeline. That’s as far away as I can get, I think, to follow the fork in the road I did not take to its logical conclusions. I cannot become an “I” too far away.
I wonder if I have grown tired of poetry because I am tired of everything (the pandemic and subsequent isolation), or because I was never really in it for the poetry. I was in it to be seen.
300mg of caffeine a day
My social media presence, like most, derives from my desire to be seen. On Instagram, when the pandemic began, everyone scrambled to figure out what to show and what to obscure. Without concerts or festivals or restaurant meals, some people still lived glamorously, jetting off while we peasants hunkered down with Instacart and Uber Eats and Zoom happy hours and yoga YouTubers and standing desks and sinks and sinks of dishes and despair. Nobody wants despair on Instagram. Mostly, despair is boring, unless it’s a pastel flat lay graphic about despair. Especially in the first month of the pandemic, I obsessively monitored everyone’s social media, keeping tabs of who was breaking protocol, who was espousing stay at home mantras while gathering with “only” ten or twenty people. I spent $250 on groceries and we didn’t eat a fresh vegetable for five days early on, too terrified to go to the grocery store. I wanted praise and attention for not doing anything. That’s a hard ask because you need to do something for praise.
I’ve always been online, but not in a way that makes me cool to other people who have also always been online. I never wrote fanfic or had a LiveJournal. I was on social media sites early, sure, but I don’t find anything I do on them interesting. Still, I will share this article on my Facebook; I don’t know how to break out of the internet, and I don’t want to. I love social media like I loved smoking cigarettes, like I love drinking 300 mg of caffeine a day, like I love everything bad a little too much.
I used to get FOMO, but was rarely invited anywhere, so it was more FOHN: fear of having nobody. I became honest with myself too early. I don’t like camping, music festivals, heights, being thirsty, hungry, or hot, worldbuilding board games, multiplayer video games, liquor (anymore), being hit on, being in a crowd, and so many other things that people in their twenties should like. I tried for a while to do what other people liked, and I pretended that I liked them, too. And maybe I really did, but only because I wanted people to like me. I worry that I don’t enjoy anything, and that it makes me boring, or cynical. Aren’t you supposed to like doing things that look fun? Aren’t you supposed to want to do these things? I wanted to want to go to a music festival for a long time, like I wanted to want to date and drink and go to the lake and take bikini pictures and have a big group of friends in high school while I spent my summers alone in my parents’ house, weeding the garden before the sun was too high and then tanning on the back porch through long afternoons, but I realized I didn’t want to be friends with the people with the boats and bikinis and sex and booze, I just wanted to want to be their friend.
But wanting to want something is not the same as wanting it.
I want to not want to be witnessed.
lavinia
In Jia Tolentino’s essay “We Come From Old Virginia” from her 2019 book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Tolentino dissects the famous 2014 Rolling Stone article about a rape on UVA’s campus, which was later retracted for inconsistencies. In the essay, Tolentino gives voice to the theory I have always held about the article and case, but couldn’t articulate: the victim did survive asexual assault, and made the story larger, more shocking and theatrical, because to say what had really happened to her did not reflect what it felt like. In order to get the reaction and feel the power of what had happened to her reflected onto the audience, the victim grew the story, because her story was too normal, too every day, just another sexual assault on another college campus.
I made my trauma an entire universe for my writing to live in. I once wrote a story that turned my tale of a shitty relationship, which at several points had pinpricks of abuse shining through a generally bad but not abusive time, into a sprawling, metaphorical, fantastical tale of unrequited affection and abuse, an amalgamation of several bad relationships, several sexual assaults, and several harms that, at the time, I had no cohesive language for. To describe the actual impact on me, the harm larger than any individual moments that took place over months and years, I needed a world larger, more saturated, than our own. I’m still proud of the piece because instead of claiming that everything was factual, I claimed it was true. I felt like Lavinia, staggering around my life with hands and tongue cut out, visibly wounded from my trauma .I wasn’t. I just felt that way. I wrote the trauma larger and larger, poetically, in fiction, attempting to get other people to wince at my pain, finally large enough to be recognized.
When Dickinson writes her “I,” now, I envy that “I,” wealthy and connected, probably living a very gay and happy life, unbothered and unseen, coddled and cared for. Emily Dickinson never worked a day in her life. Plath published nationally at 18, and her father was a university professor. Neither were really like me. The lie is we can become these women if we yell loud enough. We too can be young, successful, noticed, if we have the bravery to say everything. We too could be canonized if we write our traumas, every single thing that has ever hurt us, and publish.
Enough for a book
My crisis of writing and publishing stems from writing the darkest and most horrific parts of my life, without having processed them, publishing in soon-defunct literary magazines with little to no audience, and getting eight likes on social media as payment. Is this what I should turn myself inside out for? Shouldn’t I at least get paid, or get enough attention to fill my well? But that’s what I didn’t learn until too late – there’s never enough attention to heal. There’s never enough attention to make you feel better.
So, I stopped writing the trauma parts. With any luck, everything I published in my early twenties will disappear into the internet’s dustiest corners with time. I think some people may find the process cathartic, and maybe their well of attention requires less than mine did – maybe they will feel better healed by having their traumas out in the world. But, in talking to my friends who took similar paths through internet publishing, this isn’t usually the case. We end up hurt, embarrassed, overexposed, or we have to walk back what we said in our writing to match the facts of what actually happened. Maybe if I had waited until my thirties or forties to start writing, compiling three decades of trauma instead of moment by moment accounts, I would have enough for a book, something literary and measured instead of screaming and terrified. Maybe I started too early.
I’ve started taking pictures of my outfits in my windowless office each day, balancing my phone on the back of a chair and setting a timer. I share these photos on my Twitter and Instagram stories, momentary flashes before they are swept away. I’m no influencer, not popular, my clothes from Target and the GAP, nothing quirky or high fashion or thrifted, all entirely normal, boring even. Why do I do it, then? It’s my latest way to scratch the itch. Witness me.