Can I be vulnerable for a sec?
Oh, I’m already vulnerable?
Thank you for reading me, whoever you are. Even if you just skim a paragraph, or roll your eyes at a sentence. Thank you for any moment where you exhale and think, “That was good,” or “That was funny,” or if there was even a second inside a moment where you compared your own writing efforts to mine.
I’ve written about the loneliness of writing before. I don’t really want to do it again. But I keep coming back to this thought (maybe born from too much isolation):
When I share a link to my writing, why do the people who mean the most to me rarely (if ever) subscribe, or even ask me about it? (Sorry to those who do read: YOU ARE ENOUGH, really!)
The part of my brain that lights up for reciprocity (somewhere between the anterior cingulate cortex and my emotionally attuned limbic system), says quietly: I’d subscribe to them.
It’s that recurring thought that makes me doubt myself and what I’m doing in this space (or this city!?). I know it’s silly. It’s the validation addict in me.
Except I’m rethinking the way I paint myself.
I think it’s something else entirely
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I read about a victim named Bobby McIlvaine, brilliantly written by Jennifer Senior here.
Bobby was only twenty-six when he tragically died in the North Tower, attending a conference at the Windows on the World for a media relations job at Merrill Lynch. To his coworkers or friends, he was ambitious and charming. But (as the article points out right away) Bobby was deeper than that.
He was pages and pages of writing on yellow notepads. He was poetry, diary entries, and musings about nature and pining over love and his small place inside all of these things.
When his parents discovered this hidden part of him, it gave them electric, living threads to their son. Those threads contained peace, but also pain. His father needed conspiracies and activism to cope. His mother chose to starve her grief by withholding. But what does any of that really mean?
I guess I mean to ask… what does it mean to be someone like Bobby?
Someone who lives richly inside themselves. Who documents, who writes it all down. Who moves through the world with wit, warmth, and a sense of gravity. And yet, who isn’t fully seen the way they see themselves. Bobby was in pursuit of a career that likely would’ve cushioned his place in the world. Nothing like the fragile pursuit of being an artist.
Would he have stayed at Merrill Lynch? And if yes, would he have kept filling notebooks in secret? Or would a place like that eventually flatten the part of his soul that needed to see (and write) about it?
Bobby’s quiet legacy can now be read by countless somebodies like me. But to the ones who loved him, he left behind something truly singular and magical.
Like Bobby, I write to keep memory through detail. To offer up my inner world without expecting much in return.
So maybe I’m not really a blogger someone necessarily wants to subscribe to…
Maybe I’m okay with being a memoirist in real-time.
(Daily Writing 028)
post title / aka song is “Mystery of Love” by Sufjan Stevens
Thoughts?