When I was fifteen or so, I was one of the music kids. I sang in a couple of bands that mostly included different permutations of the same music kids. It was a small school. Anyway, for some reason I can’t remember, I sent some of the poems I wrote to another music kid, and he picked one of them and put some music on it. We practised it and performed it for some event; I honestly can’t remember the details, but I have a firm recollection of watching a horrifically embarrassing video of the performance, so I know it happened.
Anyway. After this performance, several well-intentioned people whom I knew glancingly (small community) approached me. Not only could I not take in their compliments, I thought it was a terrible privacy violation to ask me who I wrote the song about. I can’t remember details, but I don’t remember writing creatively after that performance. It’s possible I stopped writing before that, but it definitely didn’t spur me on.
I never really understood this. I thought my reaction had to do with my belief, inherited from my grandmother, that drawing attention to yourself can be dangerous. She had very valid reasons to believe that. And that was probably part of the story. But lately, I’ve been thinking this isn’t the whole story.
The other week, I got an interior layout for my book, Until the Walls Come Down, which will be published (I hope) in the spring. It’s an exciting stage. I opened the file, and it looked like an actual book—chapter titles in a font that matched the cover design and everything. But skimming through the text to catch any layout mishaps, I landed on several sentences that I felt were clunky. That I felt I could write better.
I have zero interest in re-editing this book. A work of art is never done, merely abandoned, and I’ve abandoned this book in the sense that I’m done writing it. Then, I read Nick Cave’s fantastic Red Hand File, which discusses separating the art from the artist. He writes: “An artist and their art are fundamentally intertwined because art is the essence of the artist made manifest.” And it’s a view I totally get. I poured my soul into that book. It will be forever a part of me. But I also feel I’ve changed so much since writing it—not only as a writer but as a person. We change all the time, talk to people, re-think things. How am I expected to be the same person as I was a year ago? Or, more inconceivably, would readers who come across this book in five years think I’m that person still?
I was reading a great book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (I’ll write a proper response at some point, promise). The French Literature professor and psychoanalyst talks about how we each read a different book. We come to the book we are reading with expectations and with our previous experiences. It’s why we can’t really read the same book twice. It’s not the same, reading a book in your teens and in your forties. He calls the book which is a combination of the physical text and what resonates with us as we read an “inner book”. He writes: “…if it is true that the inner books of two individuals cannot coincide, it is useless to plunge into long explanations when faced with a writer. His anxiety is likely to grow as we discuss what he has written, along with his sense that we are talking to him about another book or that we have the wrong person.”
That resonated with me. I think this is what happened when people came to me commenting about a song I wrote. I felt like they had the wrong person. They thought they knew me, but they only knew a version of me that was visible in the song, not the whole me. It created a horrible feeling of being misunderstood and unseen—Bayard goes so far as calling it “depersonalisation”. I didn’t have words to describe it back then, and I couldn’t really deal with that, and I had no one I could talk to about it (or at least I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone about it).
I think the truth is, for me, as always, somewhere in the middle. Now that I’m older and have more tools (and an excellent psychotherapist), I can deal with the depersonalisation that comes with seeing something that is a part of me but is also already not mine. Like children, when we send our creations out into the world, we learn to let them go and watch them separate from us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not ours at all.
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