Stories You Tell

My first blog was a My Open Diary in or around the year 1998.

It was your typical teenage angsty crap, and was something I kept up in addition to the extensive journaling I did during that time in my life. As I grew up I moved on (who remembers Live Journal?) to different platforms, eventually landing here in 2007. Adventures in Poor Grammar is my second longest relationship (marginally beat by my love affair with the state of Minnesota). More importantly, I've been writing, and writing for an audience (other angsty teenagers are an audience, and a thoroughly bitchy one at that) for sixteen years. 

Sixteen years. 

Of course there are a number of things I learned in the process. Namely, no one likes to read song lyrics (I still use them anyway), that my poetry was terrible at sixteen and wasn't much better at 28, first drafts will always be shitty, and there's no substitute for the sheer, grinding work of sitting down at the keyboard especially when you don't want to be there.

I've learned that there are the stories you tell.

Mine vary, based on audience. It's the same for everyone. You don't want to tell the story of the one-night stand that made you quit online dating in front of your grandmother and there's just no way you're telling any of the stories of you as a a gawky teenager to your (somewhat) merciless adult friends. 

Then there are the stories that you hold close to you, the moments in your life that were so startling, beautiful, or unreal that you stop and think to yourself "Did that actually happen? Is this really my life?" Those are the stories you pull out at dinner parties, with new friends, and with the occasional indulgence of very old friends. Mine are about a particularly bad sleep-walking episode (Grand Empress of Prussia), watching the sun rise while hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge, and meeting Neil Gaiman. They're the funny, surprising, moving moments in my life, the moments that I've decided mean something and are worth retelling. 

Then there are the stories you don't tell. 

There are the bad ones. The times you failed someone close to you, cheated on an exam, stole a candy bar from the corner store, broke someone's heart just to see if you could. Those are the stories you don't tell because they reflect on you badly, they highlight all of the terrible things you know about yourself. 

There are the other stories you don't tell. They're not inherently either bad or good, they're just the stories you don't tell, the stories you instinctively know to keep to yourself. I have a lot of these. Moments of such extraordinary beauty and grace that the prospect of sharing them with someone feels like it will diminish them. Conversations I've had with other people that are so surprising I'm thinking about them weeks later. Things I've sighed to another person in the dark that still elevate my heart rate and dilate my pupils. 

In my earliest years as a writer, I didn't know how to make the distinction between the things you write about and the things you don't. I wrote about the most deeply, intensely personal things for the sake of having people read them. I mistook over-sharing for honesty, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to sort out the difference between the two. Part of the difficulty in separating the two is that I write to process, to understand and interpret a lot of complex emotions. And because I'm a self-involved person, it can be difficult to write something and not immediately post it and wait for accolades and support to come flooding in. 

A friend of mine one described my public writing persona as a "based-upon-a-true-story literary character." It was an amusing distinction, and one that was not entirely correct, but he was right insofar as the things that I write publicly are rarely all of the truth. They're the stories I tell, the details I choose not to keep private. I make the distinction between public and private writing not, as my extremely young self would think, out of a desire to be disingenuous or to hide something.  I still write to understand complex emotions, and I've lost none of the explicitness that was evident in my early writing, but I've learned that those things are best kept in a private journal (although I am amused by the thought of grandchildren someday discovering the mildly salacious journals of my 20s). There are stories that are best written for one set of eyes, things you say to another person that belong to the two of you, words that are best revisited in private.

They're the stories you retell to yourself.