save your sanity for later.

I have been asked why I write about the things I write about. More than once, in fact: I have been asked this by 90% of the people I've dated, I've been asked this by my abuser and my family, especially when they were the same person, my therapists always want to know, my friends can be vaguely uncomfortable, and people—especially in the Midwest—don't want to talk about anything that could possibly be impolite, so why do I open myself up like this?

Well, they say "You're not a writer if it's not desperate." "The words need to practically draw blood trying to get out of you," they say, nearly every writer ever.

So I sit down and the words are not desperate— they are not bloody— but they do fight me every step of the way, they drag their heels in non-violent protest and stage sit-ins and Occupy Sense-Making, setting up permanent camps in the plaza of my brain. The words over-extend my metaphors until the similes get conceited, and they under-emphasize my over-riding point——and I cannot, for all evidence, tell a creative story that evokes enough emotion to convince someone to get out of a paper bag.

I cannot write my OWN way out of the paper bag. (At least according to my writing tutor, who is at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and according to multiple friends of mine who are published authors.)

But I write about my life, which is not creative or really all that interesting or different and yet I've written now for 15 years. 15 years.

I write about my life because I don't need to make up a whole new world to easily point out the magnificently absurd and laugh at it. It is all around me in the fact that the smallest dog I live with occupies the biggest bed at night, the squeakiest wheel never gets greased, and in order to take care of my mental and physical ailments (which sap my energy and motivation to dangerously low levels) I have to... make appointments, go places, and do things.

(Plus, this video exists [Ylvis - The Fox], which—if that doesn't convince you of the general absurdity of life, I don't know what will.)

I write about my life because I make some truly amusing errors and in doing so I've probably already made some fucking history; I write because otherwise I would forget some really epic fucking stories.

I write because I have something to say. I have something I want to say to all the people in the world who have ever been in this place, with these feelings, with this pain, with this endless torn nature of rage and despair. Sometimes I know for a fact that there is NOTHING I can say that will help besides I understand and so I write to say I understand.

I write about my life because I am absolutely done with being invalidated, dismissed, ignored, and abused. I write about my life so I can make enough noise that NO ONE can ever do any of those things to me again; I write about my life because I deserve to live it—live without fear, without dismissal, without shame.

I write so I can stop surviving and start living. And I really do think every writer who said that the words should be desperate to get out might well agree that writing to live is desperation enough. But even if they didn't, even if they said to my face "You are not a writer, you do not count"—just as others have said "you are too young" "you are too female" you are too disabled not white too crazy too fat too ugly too angry too sensitive too stupid too everything—if every writer I idolized told me that I could never follow in their footsteps! Still will I give them no words of reply, so that I may keep writing.

Reality makes me very sad.

I have bought many books, mostly fiction, although the one non-fiction is written by the Dalai Lama, who is so compassionate it's practically fictional anyway.

Hopefully all the books I am going to read will be overachievers in their recreations, a fortress of versimilitude, saving all of the pretty lies for a happy ending. I do find that the happy endings are where I find it most difficult to suspend my disbelief.

But this makes me wonder:

Is it better to tell the truth the whole way through, and rely on a hard right turn, a 90° angle to confound one's readers, surprise them with a pretense & hope that the shock insulates them from the falsehood?

Or should one carefully construct distortions, deceits, fables, fallacies, mendacity—tell many lies, so many one could not believe veracity if it were standing in front of me, looking like my best friend, begging me to listen, crying, pleading?

In retrospect it seems that if you are going to need to lie, you should do so either as little or as often as possible. I used to say that at the very least, I had not succeeded in lying to myself, but I no longer know that that is true.

I used to be able to divide things very easily into lies and truth, white and black, heads or tails, right or wrong, according to my moral code or even someone else's—— but I look back at a picture of myself, at 16 or 17, staring at a picture of myself as a small child— and I cannot say whether I am lying or whether I am telling the truth when myself at 16 says she/you/I deserved this.

I know that the 16 year old believed it (I think) and the 4 year old me didn't believe it (I think), but I don't know whether me, as I am now, believes it. Where is the truth? I have constructed on a foundation of hope, and it seems that I am forever stuck in a moment of realizing that hope is either an illusion, the cruellest thing in the entire world—or it is the strongest, safest, best foundational material that has ever been created.