Oversharing

on being a writer that writes about their life

Today at the park a kid threw a shoe at the kid I nanny. I picked her up and got her away from that kid and she told me that she “hated that kid”. I didn’t know what to say. Are we allowed to hate the people who hurt us? I wasn’t about to tell her that she couldn’t hate him. She was the one in pain. Later on we spread a blanket on the deck and brought out watercolors and kettle corn. I showed her how to mix colors outside of the palette so the paint doesn’t get muddy. She dug her paintbrush in and made craters inside the yellow. I let her do this. 

Today I am rundown—part sick with kid germs, part sick from this town’s wild pollen count, part sick to my stomach thinking of the parents freshly without their children. 

My feelings have been “getting hurt” recently. (I don’t know how else to say that.) Which also makes me feel like a kid. Even the phrase, “getting my feelings hurt” seems so childish to me. Some of you have commented on the fact that I seem able to gracefully share things about my life, which I think is somewhat true, but it’s also true that I don’t share everything. I wish I could share everything. To me, that is what is so appealing about fiction or even creative non-fiction. Maybe that is just the truth about some of the lives we have. Not that they are too scary to write about, but it’s too scary to name as real truth.

Writers mask our lives in other ways, too. Like all the things that I’ve said about “Mother” (what I call her in my poems and prose)—she’s swaying, she’s dancing in clouds, she is boiling in hot water like a frog. In other words: Mother is not okay, she is far away, she is sometimes unrecognizable as a mother to me.

Some things emerge in time and it feels okay to share. Writing is a lot of discerning. Maybe, in fact, it’s made up of mostly discerning. For example my window is cracked open and I hear the lows and highs of children voices. Laughing, screaming, crying, fighting. All that within a minute. I could write about that. Or I could not write about that. Writing is really about making a bunch of good decisions.

Here I am in newsletter form, with a whole lot of love. These keep me writing and checking in with myself and I’m grateful to whoever reads them. 

Photo taken by Sammie featuring my playing cards that have been to a lot of places this year. Goal for next newsletter is 1. a littleee more on time, not because time is real, but because otherwise I’ll get lost. 2. take pictures this week