"Oh, you're a writer? Like, I can't tell."
Excuse me? Like, what do you mean you can't tell? It says author. In my bio. Like, it's right there. But okay, fine, I did the thing where you look at your own grid the way a stranger would, like you've never met yourself before and you're deciding whether or not you'd follow you, and I'll be honest with you, I got it. It's mostly pictures of me. Cute pictures, don't get me wrong, but if you came looking for the writing you'd have to go digging for it, and nobody has time to go digging!
So I went digging for it. For you. And for me, mostly for me.
I went all the way back through my personal account, my personal personal, the last post I made was the black BLM square account and what I found instantly restored my faith in my writer’s voice.
The year 2019 was the calm before the storm for me, the wild wild west if you will. It was before I had any kind of audience anywhere period, the aftermath of my Tumblr era if you will. It was just me and me again. Like look at this post in Seattle.
Fifty-four likes.
June, Milan:
Eighty four likes. And there were more, Lake Como, a weekend in Nyack with my family, and reading them back I kept having the same thought over and over, which was, wait, I could have written this yesterday? Like, my voice hasn't changed. At all. Not even a little bit.
the economics of it all
Somewhere in all of that scrolling I read a Reddit post, on Twitter, which is so meta, I know, I know, but stay with me. Someone in r/williamsburg however many years ago, wanted to know if there was a tactful way to tell their artist friends, the ones who aren't independently wealthy, that their work isn't good enough "to make a living off of art." Tactful. As if there's a tactful way to do that. As if there's a nice way to tell somebody to stop being who they are so they can pay their bills.
But one of the replies, actually changed my brain chemistry.
Someone wrote about a girl they used to date who went to art school, and they thought her work was terrible, like genuinely terrible, and they felt bad for her because she was painting for hours a day anyway, no backup plan, fully convinced this was going to be her career and nothing else. And they never said anything. They just stayed supportive and encouraging and kept their opinion to themselves. They stopped seeing each other about eight years ago but they still followed her, and she kept going, a new piece every day, getting better and better, and now she's in galleries, doing commissions, teaching classes, doing amazing, and the commenter is so so glad they kept their mouth shut.
And listen, I love that story. I do. But I noticed something about why I love it, and it's kind of annoying, which is that it only works because of the ending. The galleries are the proof. The galleries are the reason we get to call it perseverance, and if the last line said she's still painting in her apartment every single day and nobody's buying, would we still be passing it around Twitter calling it inspiring? Be honest. We'd be calling it a warning.
That's the economics of it. The original question was literally about money, can this person make a living off of it or not. The reply everybody loved was about money too, at the end of the day, galleries and commissions and classes. And my fifty-four likes? Same currency.
So here's the question underneath all of it, the one we actually care about. If no one can tell, and the “galleries”
and “shiny career ™”
and “dream life ©”
never come,
are you still a writer? Are you still what you’ve always been?
Yes. Obviously yes. For the love of God, yes.
And the funny thing is younger me already knew that, she just said it with a lot more commas. After that weekend in Nyack, phone off the entire time, very proud, I wrote that I'd felt the Spirit tell me
"your responsibility isn't to work out The How, your responsibility is to Do."
Capital T, capital H, capital D.
And that's the thesis, isn't it?
Dancers must always dance not for recognition but for the art of it all. A writer must write, a singer must sing, an artist must create art, a creator must create, and if anybody claps, the clapping happens after the dance is already over anyway, so the dance was never dependent on it.
the semantics of it all
People say "that's just semantics" when they want to win an argument without actually winning the argument, like what a word means is this tiny little detail we can all agree to skip over. I don't think it is. I think what a word means to you decides what you spend your whole life chasing, and I realized I've been walking around with two definitions of freedom at the same time, which is a lot, and honestly not very free of me.
The first one is the one that Reddit post runs on. Freedom is being able to live off of the thing you love. Freedom is the gallery, or the day someone finally looks at your page and goes, oh wow, I can tell. And like every fresh master’s grad, I've been in such a space of trying to figure out my career and what I want to do professionally that this definition has kind of been running the show. Writing became my back burner. Except it's my main burner? It's always been my main burner. I don't know who I thought I was fooling.
The second one is the one I keep coming back to, in 2019 and now. I think it would be a huge loss, a true one, if I came to this earth and I wasn't what I was made to be.
It’d be an even bigger loss if you did the same.
The dramatics, I know, but like, I mean it. It's like coming to a garden as a flower and doing everything in your power to be an eggplant. Or a vegetable. Or the pail that pours the water down on all of the plants. And everybody's standing around like, sweetheart. You're a flower. We thought you knew.
you, specifically
So I'm going to ask you what I've been asking myself, and you don't have to answer, nobody's watching, which is kind of the point. Where in your life have you rejected who you are because the people you thought were supposed to witness it didn't? The ones who were supposed to clap, or at least notice, or at least ask. Or maybe there was no one there to witness it at all, and you took that as a sign that it didn't count, so you stopped. Or you didn't stop, you just started doing it less obviously, and smaller, somewhere nobody would have to look at it.
Hagar knows this one, and if you don't know Hagar, oh, you're going to love her. In Genesis 16 she's the servant Sarai gives to Abram so he can have a child through her, which, yes, is a lot, we’re not unpacking all of that today, but everyone in that house knew exactly what she was for. Nobody was asking who she was. When things turn ugly with Sarai, she runs into the wilderness, alone and pregnant, and the angel of the Lord finds her by a spring on the road to Shur. And Hagar, of all people, the one nobody in that house was really looking at, is the one who gives God a name. "You are the God who sees me" (Genesis 16:13, NIV).
The people who were supposed to see her didn't, and God did, and she named Him for it.
So whatever you do when no one is watching has always had a witness. Always. And if the One who made you is also the One who sees you, then you're free from needing anybody else to see it. Like, actually free. The clapping can come or not come.
anyway
I still think about the person who couldn't tell I was a writer, and the thing is, they weren't wrong, exactly. If you only looked at my grid you wouldn't know. But the writing was there the whole time, just a few years down, on a different account, being exactly what it was. It never needed anybody to tell.
The day after I turned 23, I wrote that "the only way I'd ever consider getting a PhD is if I were studying love, how people perceive it, and the stories surrounding it in their lives, because really it's just G-d, over and over and over again."
And now look at me, writing to you From Love Itself. My spirit knew. It's always known.
To be as God made you is to be free.
