Oh, my goodness HI!!
I’m so sorry I left you hanging there for a couple of weeks. A mix of things kept me away from the blog. But I’m back, inspired by a line from Carole Radziwill’s Substack that she took from Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird.
A Little Update
First and foremost, my edits finally came back from the editor for my YA fantasy novel that I’ve been querying, and I dove right on in there like Greg Louganis. Every day from 8am-5pm and sometimes beyond, I was adding to, subtracting from, and perfecting the manuscript until she was ready to print out at Staples. I feel like there’s still more to go, but I also feel like I’m right there. (More to come about this whole process in a future post.) But I say all that to say that I had tunnel vision and so everything else I’ve been working on fell by the wayside.
I have a small confession…I was feeling a little burnt out by all the blogging and social media posting and TpT store updating I’d been doing. So, the edits came at the right perfect time.
I know that I am in an era of growing right now. And growing takes time and it’s slow. But sometimes it’s hard to keep up the momentum of slow growing when we live in a world of virality. Where you are only one TikTok, blog, or Instagram post away from changing your life and gaining a million followers/subscribers/friends. The slow growing can feel like rejection. What’s wrong with me? Am I not funny? But I thought I was funny? Do I smell? But I’m wearing my best perfume!
But the truth is…there’s nothing wrong with me (I mean, there is, but that’s not the problem here). I need to stop comparing. Everything happens in the time it’s supposed to. And I recently started using the Dove Pumpkin Pie body wash and scrub, so I smell fantastic. Periodt. (Again, more on that in a future post. The not comparing part, not the Dove body wash.)
Now for that Anne Lamott Quote
After my OG RHONY summer where I watched seasons 1-13 for the first time, I have fallen deeply and completely in love with Carole Radziwill.
So, when I saw on Reddit that she had a Substack, I immediately subscribed and started looking around. In one of her Radzi Reports, she was talking about Taylor Swift’s new album, Life of a Showgirl, and how Swift is known for unapologetically writing song lyrics about everyone that’s ever done her wrong.
And that’s where we meet Anne Lamott.
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Ann lamott
As a writer, the sentiment of this quote is one I struggle with.
While it’s true that people should have treated you better if they wanted a better edit in your writing, I’m sorry to say that this is not the kind of writer I am.
Well, at least not anymore.
A Fateful Encounter
I went through an incredibly painful breakup in 2016. The relationship had never been good, but neither one of us had enough energy to end it. Or maybe we didn’t want to. Maybe it was some mix of both?
I wrote about it in 2015. And that writing got published. And it made the other person look like the bad guy. I tried not to throw him under the bus but ended up doing exactly that.
And then our situation finally ended. And I continued to write about it. Oh, God. That writing was INSUFFERABLE. I was so sad and trying to work out all that pain by emoting all over the various marble notebook pages and Microsoft Word Docs. I wanted to make meaning out of how emotionally desperate I felt. I spent a lot of time listening to Beyonce’s Lemonade, which fueled me to continue writing about him and the breakup and our relationship.
Someone should have stopped me. I should have stopped me. Eventually I did move on to other stories because I had other, more interesting stories to tell. Also, my heart healed.
Cut to five years later. December. I’m walking into Barnes and Noble as the man I had spent all that time writing about was walking out. We stopped and talked. It was awkward. We wished each other a happy holiday and moved on. Except when I walked out of the store, he was waiting for me in the parking lot.
(Can I also mention that I had a cavity filled right before this, so my mouth was numb and sagging from the novocaine? Yeah.)
Anyway. He brought up those essays I’d written from five years ago. The ones when I was allowing my very fresh wounds to guide my writing and then posting the bleed out on the internet for the world to see.
To distill our conversation to the bare essentials, he talked about how my writing was painful to read, how it offended him and his now wife (who was his girlfriend at the time of those writings), and that at the time he had been going through some tough stuff and it was immortalized on the internet for his friends and family to see (should they find it).
Well, that was a wallop of realization I wasn’t expecting for a Friday morning. But there it was.
By trying to work out my own pain, I had cosigned on capitalizing on his pain without his consent. Equally as bad is that I took one of the worst eras of his life and turned it into writing that I put on a public domain for all to see. For him and his wife to relive.
We Don’t Talk About Bruno
I haven’t written a creative non-fiction essay, memoir, or really anything about my life, aside from these blog posts, in a very long time. Years, in fact.
I don’t want to be the kind of friend that my friends feel they have to watch themselves around for fear of ending up the ugly monster in one of my stories, fiction or not. And I don’t want to feel like I have to watch myself around some of my writer friends who admittedly use their relationships as story fodder.
My relationships mean more to me than a good story. And not every piece of writing needs to be public. Even in a world where everyone is putting their every thought and feeling on the internet for praise and judgement.
What I did to him wasn’t fair, and I would never want someone to use my life for their work. It’s none of their business. And his business wasn’t mine to tell, even though for a time, his business was part of my story.
I can appreciate using painful relationships as a point of connection with an audience, as a means of catharsis, as a way to make sense of what happened. But I’ll leave that for other writers to do.
For me, those stories are kept in journals, are spoken about during phone calls and wine nights with trusted friends.
I will not use someone else’s pain for my prose.
Not anymore at least.
Robyn Neilsen 