confessions and thanks
A friend of mine reminded me [albeit in a roundabout way] of how my writing has sometimes gotten me in trouble. It is in that vein that I am writing this down now: a true confession [even though I may run the risk of sounding like a dangerous animal] because I am tired of being misunderstood.
There is a quote at the top of my blog that I put there as a warning. Maybe it’s still too vague, and that’s my fault. The quote is from Jeanette Winterson’s “The Passion,” uttered by a young woman who was known for the stories she wove, for seeing truth as abstract and malleable – a tool, and occasionally, a weapon.
I have been accused of being a lesbian, a hooker, a drug addict/dealer. I’ve been accused of lying, and covering up facts, and reneging on promises. I’ve been accused of feeling too much, and then not feeling anything at all. It would have made my life more exciting, I suppose, had these things been true, but the accusations are mostly baseless, the only evidence being something I may have written a long time ago.
I write the way I do – in the first person, in somewhat lyrical prose, so I suppose it’s easy for my work to take on the tone of raw confession. It doesn’t matter how often I explain that I’m a writer, a fictionist at that. It doesn’t matter how often I tell them I traffic in contrived emotions as part of my day to day. They only see the I, and I suppose that is enough.
This blog was never meant to be a factually accurate narration of my life. Consider this, instead, to be the borderlands where my reality and fiction meet. It’s the laboratory of an asocial heart. A bottling plant to preserve feelings for future use - feelings I must usually construct for myself [like some kind of Frankenstein]. I project emotions unto placeholders [friends, lovers, even a beautiful stranger in a cafe], and while I like to think the emotions are honest, most times the honesty isn’t truly mine – it belongs to a character in my head, the voice of story.
I remember times when I would present people with a work of fiction or even a vaguely rendered blog entry, only to have them searching out clues to the truth of my life. The breadcrumbs of truth are there, no doubt, but often they are so torn up, and diffused, and distilled, it would be difficult to come up with something coherent and whole - like calculating a number from only its distinct primes. Or guessing the shape of a thing simply from its atoms.
Those who know me best know that at heart, I am often too stoic, much too detached. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t despise the mess and chaos of emotions found in reality a little too much. But this is how I am, and I don’t know any different. [I have always been like this. Up until the fifth grade, I barely spoke to anyone and had no friends, because I did not see the need. My class advisor recommended a psychological evaluation, the details of which I shall not bore you with.]
I assume that is why I’m so fascinated by sentiment, like it’s some important archeological find to study, or a new element to be experimented with. I assume that is why I mine it so much in my writing. I cull emotions from the bits and bobs of my life, cobble them from different moments and different fictions, fashion them into the mold of something akin to real. But I can only ever hold it long enough to write it down. Like all unstable compounds, it eventually, naturally, deconstructs into its parts, often much too soon.
Within this platform, I’m not too concerned with the trajectories of emotions; I only care for the truth of the emotions themselves. Most times, I discard the amalgamations of who and the labyrinths of how, and collect only the what and the why of sentiment, believing that most other things can easily be replaced, diffused into the elements of story.
My one and only ex, a man who, at one point, knew me best, once likened me to Dexter, the serial killer of that eponymous series. I was built differently, he said. Some facets of my humanity are acquired skills rather than innate, instinctive things. I sometimes over/under compensate for emotions, especially in new territory, especially when navigating the gray. He used to tell me that he often thought that when I’d say “I love you,” I meant it not as an announcement of fact, but as a reminder to myself that I did.
At the end of the day, I trust my closest friends to understand my quirks and my shortcomings, the flaws of who I am. I trust that they see how seriously I take my friendships, how I stand by the people in my life, how I am always rock solid in spite of my detachment, in spite of my stoicism. I trust you. And I confess, it still surprises me how much they comprehend, how much you can love me back.
And thanks for that.
Originally published on Tumblr, January 2011.