If you are taking notes, you are insisting that what is happening matters enough to be recorded. You are insisting that it is real. You are insisting that you are real.
I am re-reading the WITD essays that are still in my in box because I had to go through them too fast and knew there was more wisdom to discern. All of your essays are A papers, as they say, and I get so much out of them. For example, here in this one, you say that we don't know what we are writing until we do it. YAY. I am pleading guilty to that one although I gained a great insight recently to start with the paradigm shift I want to see; my litigation stories will fill in to support the right theme.
We can bear more than we think- gotta be true and we can bare more than we think we can too. Ha. I love that we are saving ourselves over and over with every sentence we commit to "with every revision that sharpens a thing until it becomes true rather than merely accurate." That means so much to my writing mission. Thank you so much. I am here to seek and speak truth, not just be accurate. Really my mission is pressing me in the midst of new work, including an appeal to our supreme court now that I recently lost something that means so much to my farmer clients.
And last but not least in the wisdom I take from this essay: "The story is smarter than the story teller." Thank God!! You write alot and it is hard to keep up on as you do not just need read, you need studied. Thank you so much, Jeannine!
What a beautiful piece. Hit me in the gut and soothed my heart. Thank you.
I’ve been stuck in revision for a long while now, the very messy middle for me. I lost sight of the “why”— when I began. And cannot feel or see the destination. This essay helped with the unknowing. Thank you for your insights and encouragement.
Jeannine,thank you for this powerful essay. You’ve opened a door, I walked through and saw how my addiction to perfection, or what I take to be perfection, holds me back in my writing. This is where I play Natalie Merchant’s Kind and Generous, the thank you anthem.
"profound act of self-creation. The self that writes is not the same self that lived the experience” this sentence is the truth.
Contemplate, to retrace old territory for a new perspective, is how I view writing about the past,
and to heal my frightened child, and emerge as a new me.
I also ask questions:
When writing about my abusive Father
It takes two to tango
Who was I then? Was I part of the cause of suffering?
Can I forgive knowing that he did the best he could do, in knowing of how his childhood was hell: poverty, violence and abandonment.
How could he know how to love when he didn’t know what love was?
"we are saving ourselves, always, over and over, with every sentence we commit to, with every revision” this sentence is gold
I have written out my past many times and each time, the new version is nearer to the truth. Each time, I’m a new version of myself , and each time I see a new perspective I hadn’t realised before.
Its like peeling an onion, healing each layer and diving into the next with tears in your eyes and releasing. It can be said, an Onion, is the only vegetable that cries when you are chopping it up.
We get chopped up in little pieces each time we dig deep to write our past and make sense of it.
I think we need to let of these pieces and let us get to the core of the truth, by contemplating not memorising: meditate and ponder and play with words to describe the story in a way for others to see themselves in it too.
I found this each time I sit down to write my memoir. I am never the same person I was back then, and now as I write. I welcome the new me who emerges with love and curiosity, as she is the person I was before all the suffering took place, instead of the false self we created to survive it all.
I love this essay and was so moved by it! So many things resonated with me and how I have experienced myself as a writer (including but not limited to that I too was a onetime Harriet the Spy wannabe, notebook and all)! My favorites: the "discovery of the self as narrator," the one who "sees," who "notices," who "speaks." The way I mentally (or physically, especially through journaling) am "taking notes" as a way of "insisting that what is happening matters enough to be recorded ... that it is real ... that [I] am real." (And, from my perspective, writing was/is a way of insisting that I personally matter, if only to myself.) Lastly, I love, love, love this: "the part of you that narrates is the part of you that survives." This made me cry. Thank you.
One of the illegibilities of queerness is that it often shows up before you know what it is, or at least that’s how it was for me, born before the internet, all those years trying to stick a queer self into the square peg of straightness, but sit that queer kid down on the floor in the dark with Little Girl Blue and suddenly everything makes sense, because the music lets it sink in to the body that nothing has to make sense, that we can stop making sense, a message that when sung by the saddest girl from Texas and a minor chord progression, makes all the sense in the world, and it seems to me that some of my best writing comes when I am writing about music because when I write about music the song has already put me in the place where everything and nothing makes sense, and I can start from there.
P.S. the idea of double consciousness in a sociological context has always been tied with a kind of socially unrecognized superpower of insider knowledge among the marginalized that facilitates survival.
"the idea of double consciousness in a sociological context has always been tied with a kind of socially unrecognized superpower of insider knowledge among the marginalized that facilitates survival.”
My interpretation and version of this Monica, is that we create a few false versions of ourselves to cope with the demands of society to conform to the Status Quo and the rejection of society because of our weirdness eccentric ways of living, others find hard to accept. But us weirdos, accentrics and marginalised individuals have special gifts (like you say Superpowers) and know that these false selfs are created to survive the on slaughter of rejection and non acceptance. From there we rise up to, and from this to thrive as our true selfs.
Monica, I need to read your last line above about a hundred times but I think get it. So the split is necessary for survival, right? Can you tell me a book I can read to get a better grasp on this concept?
Hmmm....it's kind of like how sometimes other people know you better than you know yourself, so sociologically, it's like, for example, how Black people understand how whiteness operates better than white people do, and of course also understand, intimately, Black culture in a way that white people never will (including allies). I mean, read some James Baldwin, and you'll see it; his deep understanding of whiteness has taught me more about my own whiteness than being white in a white supremacist society is capable of. Being white alone does not teach me about whiteness. But being queer has taught me a lot about straightness.
Queer people, people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, atheists, women, etc....understand the world through two lenses, the privileged lens and the marginalized lens, so double consciousness is like a kind of bilingualism, and sure, it can be seen and felt as a burden to have to learn how to navigate one world to protect yourself and the other world where you find safety and peace and pride and community, but seen through the lens of knowledge and social change, it means the marginalized have a special window into understanding the entirety of world that the privileged do not, and this knowledge should be harnessed when ideating around change.
W.E.B. DuBois first named the term in The Souls of Black Folks. bell hooks wrote about it in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Patricia Hill Collins wrote about it in Black Feminist Thought. To name a few potentially familiar names, names that I can tell you are banned in classrooms in Florida, so be careful ;)
I find this all particularly fascinating as I have had much truama including in childhood and I am pretty sure I have never had a false sense of myself or had to find who I use to be. Maybe I hid in plain sight but I think I did not shrink to a determinental degree. I may study up on this just to understand myself better. Writing that professes we all change as we write deters me as I really do know who I am and my life shows it and I am not writing to figure myself out or to change myself. Still, we will see what I discover and how I get corrected on notions as the writing unfolds this year!
Thanks Monica, the queer has taught me a lot about straightness, is so interesting and counterintuitive—that’s the piece I was struggling with and I get that. Thank you for the parallels with the White privileged. Your classes must really hum…
"I was here. And I was changed by what I found here." Yep, paying attention--so critical. I needed this today Jeannine as I submitted my ms yesterday at the last minute to AWP. Being here, with you, has made all the difference in my courage.
This piece had me look inside myself and wonder, if I can share the hard stuff. Will it matter to anyone.
“It is the self that looked at the experience and decided it was worth something. Worth shaping. Worth offering to another person. Worth saying: Here. I made this from what happened. Maybe you recognize it. Maybe it is also yours.”
t also had me wondering, why I have the deep desire to write, but struggle to get the words onto the page. I pray I can touch people in this way.
Dear Jeannine, I revere the synchronicity of finishing my best draft of the piece I started talking about at your house (which I then took in a different direction), and reading this wonder of an essay tonight. Much love to you.
The dogs as through-line you didn't know you were creating. That's structure working unconsciously. You thought constraint (one section per dog), discovered architecture (what holds vs. what leaves). The form revealed the meaning you couldn't articulate yet. Beautiful essay. 🐦⬛
Wow, so many incredible essays from you Jeannine! Very moving and I too had a beloved super ball, yellow and orange, a prize for winning a potato sack race.
Oh my god, Jeannine. I love this. It speaks to the very heart of my longing, my need, my fear. I must be afraid to be real. I must have been saying all this time, Is it okay with you if I’m real? Did this matter enough for me to pay close attention? And not getting answers, find myself loitering at the threshold, kicking at the dirt waiting for something else out there to help me cross. It’s why I keep coming back to writing only to turn away from it. This essay is beautiful, powerful, wise, true. Thank you.
Jeannine, this is among my favorite of so many essays you have written about writing, ✍️ and I’ll be rereading and savoring it and finding sustenance from it for a long time to come. This passage made me wonder if you have seen the film ‘Hamnet,’ (based on the exquisite novel) because of the way it depicts trees as thresholds and doorways so powerfully, from the opening frame: “I became fascinated with doorways made by tree branches arching overhead. The way you could step under them and feel, however briefly, like you had passed into another world. I didn’t have language for what I was practicing then—the vocabulary of liminality, of threshold, of the psychic necessity of passage—but I was practicing it anyway, the way children do things they need to do without the theoretical apparatus to explain why.”
Wait, that's from Hamnet? I saw the movie but did not read the book yet--wrote similarly about doorways, specifically tree branches forming arches, in TPTB!!!
Just found this post now, felt every word in my marrow, feel both humbled and emboldened by it, thank you Jeannine! 😘
I am re-reading the WITD essays that are still in my in box because I had to go through them too fast and knew there was more wisdom to discern. All of your essays are A papers, as they say, and I get so much out of them. For example, here in this one, you say that we don't know what we are writing until we do it. YAY. I am pleading guilty to that one although I gained a great insight recently to start with the paradigm shift I want to see; my litigation stories will fill in to support the right theme.
We can bear more than we think- gotta be true and we can bare more than we think we can too. Ha. I love that we are saving ourselves over and over with every sentence we commit to "with every revision that sharpens a thing until it becomes true rather than merely accurate." That means so much to my writing mission. Thank you so much. I am here to seek and speak truth, not just be accurate. Really my mission is pressing me in the midst of new work, including an appeal to our supreme court now that I recently lost something that means so much to my farmer clients.
And last but not least in the wisdom I take from this essay: "The story is smarter than the story teller." Thank God!! You write alot and it is hard to keep up on as you do not just need read, you need studied. Thank you so much, Jeannine!
What a beautiful piece. Hit me in the gut and soothed my heart. Thank you.
I’ve been stuck in revision for a long while now, the very messy middle for me. I lost sight of the “why”— when I began. And cannot feel or see the destination. This essay helped with the unknowing. Thank you for your insights and encouragement.
Yay, thank you, Cherryll!
Jeannine,thank you for this powerful essay. You’ve opened a door, I walked through and saw how my addiction to perfection, or what I take to be perfection, holds me back in my writing. This is where I play Natalie Merchant’s Kind and Generous, the thank you anthem.
"profound act of self-creation. The self that writes is not the same self that lived the experience” this sentence is the truth.
Contemplate, to retrace old territory for a new perspective, is how I view writing about the past,
and to heal my frightened child, and emerge as a new me.
I also ask questions:
When writing about my abusive Father
It takes two to tango
Who was I then? Was I part of the cause of suffering?
Can I forgive knowing that he did the best he could do, in knowing of how his childhood was hell: poverty, violence and abandonment.
How could he know how to love when he didn’t know what love was?
"we are saving ourselves, always, over and over, with every sentence we commit to, with every revision” this sentence is gold
I have written out my past many times and each time, the new version is nearer to the truth. Each time, I’m a new version of myself , and each time I see a new perspective I hadn’t realised before.
Its like peeling an onion, healing each layer and diving into the next with tears in your eyes and releasing. It can be said, an Onion, is the only vegetable that cries when you are chopping it up.
We get chopped up in little pieces each time we dig deep to write our past and make sense of it.
I think we need to let of these pieces and let us get to the core of the truth, by contemplating not memorising: meditate and ponder and play with words to describe the story in a way for others to see themselves in it too.
I found this each time I sit down to write my memoir. I am never the same person I was back then, and now as I write. I welcome the new me who emerges with love and curiosity, as she is the person I was before all the suffering took place, instead of the false self we created to survive it all.
I love this essay and was so moved by it! So many things resonated with me and how I have experienced myself as a writer (including but not limited to that I too was a onetime Harriet the Spy wannabe, notebook and all)! My favorites: the "discovery of the self as narrator," the one who "sees," who "notices," who "speaks." The way I mentally (or physically, especially through journaling) am "taking notes" as a way of "insisting that what is happening matters enough to be recorded ... that it is real ... that [I] am real." (And, from my perspective, writing was/is a way of insisting that I personally matter, if only to myself.) Lastly, I love, love, love this: "the part of you that narrates is the part of you that survives." This made me cry. Thank you.
and even thrives.
One of the illegibilities of queerness is that it often shows up before you know what it is, or at least that’s how it was for me, born before the internet, all those years trying to stick a queer self into the square peg of straightness, but sit that queer kid down on the floor in the dark with Little Girl Blue and suddenly everything makes sense, because the music lets it sink in to the body that nothing has to make sense, that we can stop making sense, a message that when sung by the saddest girl from Texas and a minor chord progression, makes all the sense in the world, and it seems to me that some of my best writing comes when I am writing about music because when I write about music the song has already put me in the place where everything and nothing makes sense, and I can start from there.
P.S. the idea of double consciousness in a sociological context has always been tied with a kind of socially unrecognized superpower of insider knowledge among the marginalized that facilitates survival.
"the idea of double consciousness in a sociological context has always been tied with a kind of socially unrecognized superpower of insider knowledge among the marginalized that facilitates survival.”
My interpretation and version of this Monica, is that we create a few false versions of ourselves to cope with the demands of society to conform to the Status Quo and the rejection of society because of our weirdness eccentric ways of living, others find hard to accept. But us weirdos, accentrics and marginalised individuals have special gifts (like you say Superpowers) and know that these false selfs are created to survive the on slaughter of rejection and non acceptance. From there we rise up to, and from this to thrive as our true selfs.
Monica, I need to read your last line above about a hundred times but I think get it. So the split is necessary for survival, right? Can you tell me a book I can read to get a better grasp on this concept?
Hmmm....it's kind of like how sometimes other people know you better than you know yourself, so sociologically, it's like, for example, how Black people understand how whiteness operates better than white people do, and of course also understand, intimately, Black culture in a way that white people never will (including allies). I mean, read some James Baldwin, and you'll see it; his deep understanding of whiteness has taught me more about my own whiteness than being white in a white supremacist society is capable of. Being white alone does not teach me about whiteness. But being queer has taught me a lot about straightness.
Queer people, people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, atheists, women, etc....understand the world through two lenses, the privileged lens and the marginalized lens, so double consciousness is like a kind of bilingualism, and sure, it can be seen and felt as a burden to have to learn how to navigate one world to protect yourself and the other world where you find safety and peace and pride and community, but seen through the lens of knowledge and social change, it means the marginalized have a special window into understanding the entirety of world that the privileged do not, and this knowledge should be harnessed when ideating around change.
W.E.B. DuBois first named the term in The Souls of Black Folks. bell hooks wrote about it in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Patricia Hill Collins wrote about it in Black Feminist Thought. To name a few potentially familiar names, names that I can tell you are banned in classrooms in Florida, so be careful ;)
I find this all particularly fascinating as I have had much truama including in childhood and I am pretty sure I have never had a false sense of myself or had to find who I use to be. Maybe I hid in plain sight but I think I did not shrink to a determinental degree. I may study up on this just to understand myself better. Writing that professes we all change as we write deters me as I really do know who I am and my life shows it and I am not writing to figure myself out or to change myself. Still, we will see what I discover and how I get corrected on notions as the writing unfolds this year!
Thanks Monica, the queer has taught me a lot about straightness, is so interesting and counterintuitive—that’s the piece I was struggling with and I get that. Thank you for the parallels with the White privileged. Your classes must really hum…
"I was here. And I was changed by what I found here." Yep, paying attention--so critical. I needed this today Jeannine as I submitted my ms yesterday at the last minute to AWP. Being here, with you, has made all the difference in my courage.
I was thinking about you yesterday, Trish. Hugs.
Right back at ya, big hug
This piece had me look inside myself and wonder, if I can share the hard stuff. Will it matter to anyone.
“It is the self that looked at the experience and decided it was worth something. Worth shaping. Worth offering to another person. Worth saying: Here. I made this from what happened. Maybe you recognize it. Maybe it is also yours.”
t also had me wondering, why I have the deep desire to write, but struggle to get the words onto the page. I pray I can touch people in this way.
Dear Jeannine, I revere the synchronicity of finishing my best draft of the piece I started talking about at your house (which I then took in a different direction), and reading this wonder of an essay tonight. Much love to you.
The dogs as through-line you didn't know you were creating. That's structure working unconsciously. You thought constraint (one section per dog), discovered architecture (what holds vs. what leaves). The form revealed the meaning you couldn't articulate yet. Beautiful essay. 🐦⬛
Wow, thank you, Jennifer!!
I call it like I see it. Again, beautiful. 🐦⬛
BOOM 💥
Thanks, Sarah!
Wow, so many incredible essays from you Jeannine! Very moving and I too had a beloved super ball, yellow and orange, a prize for winning a potato sack race.
We both had prized super balls!! Soul sisters.
Oh my god, Jeannine. I love this. It speaks to the very heart of my longing, my need, my fear. I must be afraid to be real. I must have been saying all this time, Is it okay with you if I’m real? Did this matter enough for me to pay close attention? And not getting answers, find myself loitering at the threshold, kicking at the dirt waiting for something else out there to help me cross. It’s why I keep coming back to writing only to turn away from it. This essay is beautiful, powerful, wise, true. Thank you.
Thank you so so much, Kyra!
Jeannine, this is among my favorite of so many essays you have written about writing, ✍️ and I’ll be rereading and savoring it and finding sustenance from it for a long time to come. This passage made me wonder if you have seen the film ‘Hamnet,’ (based on the exquisite novel) because of the way it depicts trees as thresholds and doorways so powerfully, from the opening frame: “I became fascinated with doorways made by tree branches arching overhead. The way you could step under them and feel, however briefly, like you had passed into another world. I didn’t have language for what I was practicing then—the vocabulary of liminality, of threshold, of the psychic necessity of passage—but I was practicing it anyway, the way children do things they need to do without the theoretical apparatus to explain why.”
Wait, that's from Hamnet? I saw the movie but did not read the book yet--wrote similarly about doorways, specifically tree branches forming arches, in TPTB!!!
Beautiful, thank you.
Thank you, Cathie!!