To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
April is the start of a new year for me, so of course I’m reflecting. One of the most important things that happened last year was that I completed a yearlong training in narrative therapy with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, where I studied the self as relational, among other things. Freedman and Combs describe self “not as a noun referring to a container filled with resources but as a verb referring to a project we are pursuing in active, ongoing relationship with other people across a wide variety of contexts.1”
As a result of this big shift in perspective, I started to pay closer attention to the ways that who I am is forged in the companies I keep. I noticed there were dimensions of me I wanted to accentuate, and dimensions I wanted to tone down. There were versions of me I wanted to hang out with more often, and ones I never missed when they were gone. I spent most of my time with people I love and feel free with. People I trust.
I also worked with my dog a lot, and noticed the ways our relationship nurtured parts of my self that are protective, committed, and sure. I rode horses as much as I could, and noticed how everyone seems to have a much better time when I can get clear on what it is that I want, and request it in a clean, direct way. I also withdrew. A lot. And I wrote about that last week, as a strategy to suspend the relational self from unwanted forces, key in to aspects one hopes to preserve or develop, and imagine what kinds of relationships will best nourish what wants to emerge.
And though it felt a bit risky to tout the benefits of withdrawal in a time when political action’s so urgently needed, I wanted to dwell in the possibility that the instinct to pull back can be generative. Because it’s something I do that I know others do too. One useful way to think about how withdrawal can be different from passivity or avoidance is that it may work best when in contrast to an otherwise engaged life. When it’s the exception, and not the rule.
In interpersonal life, withdrawal might be a sort of relational fugitivity that uses renunciation as a stepping stone toward reconnection and reconstruction with greater tact and integrity. And I think the notion of self as a relational project really shines here. In Politics of Withdrawal, Pepita Hesselberth and Joost de Bloois’ cite French philosopher Michel Foucault who felt that the “gesture of retreat” made way for “a deeper understanding of the true nature of the world, through a deeper understanding of ourselves.”
Which is to say that withdrawal can be fertile ground for a “radical overhaul.” And importantly, it’s “primarily about affirming relations, rather than cutting ties.” Withdrawal’s not “a solitary gesture.”2 So whether the withdrawal in question is from Instagram, a set of relationships, a space, or a community, what I’m hoping to suggest is that it can still be thought about as a relational move. And a potentially powerful part of the ongoing process of self.
As I mentioned, I used withdrawal a lot this past year. I stayed mostly off Instagram, for instance. I was grieving and felt like IG didn’t want me to be. Not because mourning is particularly desirable, I just knew in my bones that it mattered. So when I felt like my grief was in danger, I pulled back. I leaned into those beings and spaces that gave it the room that it needed to live on its own, rebellious time.
I stayed off most of the winter, but as the daffodils began to bloom here in Eastern Pennsylvania, I began to log on more often. I’ll be in and out more this month too, because Xaviera López and I have a new deck coming out called The Change Tarot. A couple weeks ago, I was on just long enough to catch a post by artist Catherine Sieck (whose work I adore, please check it out), quoting poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir and her book, Animal Joy. The caption of Sieck’s post was a quote from the book, in which Alsadir is paraphrasing Christopher Bayes, her instructor in a two-week clowning workshop.
On performing, Bayes said:
“If you’re honest in the moment when something isn’t working, we love you more. Acknowledge it. When it’s going well, you can celebrate that. If it’s going badly and you admit that, you’re alive. If you pretend it’s okay when we know it isn’t, we hate you a little bit. If you’re bad and you admit it, we love you again.”
I’ve always tried to write from the hip, or from an honest locale like a wound or a wish. I try not to fuss about words much, since they often go cold when I do. If it feels true then I trust it, and have felt readers trust me in return. But because the self is relational, big relational loss involves loss of other things, too. Like clarity about what’s true, and certainty about what to name things.
Because of how disoriented I was by my losses, it’s been hard to write in my usual way. As philosopher Ami Harbin has written, disorientation can be like “arriving at an impasse or finding oneself having challenged too many basic assumptions to be able to go on.3” In such a place, one may find footing in certain kinds of narrative, which can work like a sort of scaffolding4; ideas about loss rather than the experience of loss itself. And this is exactly what I did. I bolstered myself in others’ ideas on grief and I wrote about them. I wrote thousands of words about grief, loss and mourning, but wrote little from the rupture itself.
At a certain point some semblance of self starts to gather again. Through writing, I made attempts at this early, like when it seemed like the time to feel better, or show up with a gem from the depths, I wrote like I was feeling and holding what I thought that I should. Which isn’t to say I was faking. I was just hoping to make certain things true. And while this has worked well in some aspects of life, it’s never quite worked in my writing.
I was so moved by those paraphrased words—about being bad and admitting it and being loved for just that—that I bought Animal Joy and began to thumb through it. Alsadir talks about how in clown school she and her peers would all boo one of their classmates, who’d reflexively say “it’s cool” when no one was laughing at his bit because they knew he wasn’t being authentic.
Recently I’ve started to feel like I’ve leaned too long on scaffolding. I feel disconnected from writing, and you. To be perfectly honest, I’ve felt like my writing is flopping lately. And the disappointment I feel is less that I’m not being praised for something I know I work hard on, and more that, as Alsadir puts it, “when someone pretends everything is fine when we know it isn’t, we disconnect.” I’m holding back in the work and I think you can feel it. I feel that you feel it, and it doesn’t feel good.
(And, if you are someone who’s been touched by something recent and took the time to send kind words these last months please know how much it means to me. I may not be doing my best work, but am truly here trying each week.)
More than withdrawn I’ve been somewhat in hiding. Not just in life, but in writing. Having spent some time thinking about why this is happening, it’s not just that I’ve gotten too comfortable in the safety of other people’s ideas and am hesitant to stand on my own again. It’s also not that I don’t want you to see what I’m feeling. I think the biggest issue for me is that—and this feels very vulnerable to admit—there is a handful of people on earth as we speak, whose eyes I don’t want to have on me. And though I doubt they’ve been reading, when I picture their gaze it affects what I share.
And this is what I mean about the self as relational. We make each other up,5 even when we’re long gone. There’s a singer somewhere with a gazillion fans whose whole catalog’s made for one lover. And a novelist, I bet, who writes tales for their best friend’s eyes only. I’m holding back in my work for a few sets of eyes who most likely are not even looking. Wild, huh.
I used to think the best reason to write about my pain was that others would say “hey, that hurts for me too” and then we’d all get to feel less alone. We’d belong then. To some secret scar clan6. But last year changed me forever and belonging’s no longer my wish. I want to name the unusual knowledges that have come out of heartbreak, disorientation, humiliation, isolation, and withdrawal done well.
I want to name them and then take them in what philosophy professor Elise Springer calls “a queer direction.7” And in doing so, expose the “cover-up operation8” of those flattening forces that say your grief is too long and your fury’s too loud and your desires too strange for our comfort. I want to become real again in my life and my writing. And I think I am ready. I’ve been writing Offerings for seven years now. Thank you so much for being here.
If you’re looking for ways to support Palestinian people in a direct and material way please check out Operation Olive Branch, a mutual aid organization that has compiled a list of GoFundMe’s for those in need of urgent financial support. Even if you cannot afford to give, it’s worth taking a look at what they’re doing and spreading the word.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
You’re reading the Offering for April 2024. I make these Offerings weekly for those interested in supporting the work for $5 a month of $50 a year. To upgrade your subscription, click the subscribe button below.