The Risk Of Being Read

The young, old, accomplished, jobless, intelligent, married, flirtatious, and lost tell me that because I am nineteen, I should be taking a lot of risks. That I have nothing to lose. That my bones are young, and they’ll grow back stronger and longer if I break them. My friend’s dad told me that risk-taking, as a skill, is scarce and in high demand. That taking risks has everything to do with your character.

When I moved to college, I dropped my life (mostly clothing) off in plastic snapware bins in New York City, the riskiest city in the world. Glancing into the night from the tiny rooftop of the neighborhood bar in the August evening fog, I wondered if I had been living too safe a life. Most people in cities come from tiny corners of the world. I was raised where everything was continually frosted in undisturbed dew, and lichen grew in secret, unseen. My town seemed to be stuck in the valley of the past, and I think I liked it that way. It was like a baby blankie, patched-together with scenes from my childhood: the forest where they held the Revolutionary War re-enactments on the Fourth, the home bursting at the seams that my family was beginning to outgrow, the school where I knew by heart the rainbow of Ford Broncos in the parking lot.

I don’t blame myself for not taking big risks. I had what my youth ski school instructor once called “great self-preservation instincts,” and I was proud of it. Besides, the so-called risks I could take (fast go-carts at camp, kissing boys, rambling near poison ivy) were so small, they hardly seemed like risks at all. I wasn’t evading risk, and I certainly wasn’t chasing it—I was just stepping to the side of it.

Something I never considered dangerous, however, was the impact of my own words. I never had trouble reading out loud what I had written in English class. After all, it wasn’t my identity that was on the line, nor was it some representation of my intellect. Writing always felt like this thing that was oddly separate from myself, like some wild offshoot from my hands that I had pinned down like an iridescent specimen with a pen.

Byline is one of the only places I’ve ever had my work published. My classmates and my mom read my articles in the school paper, but Byline was my first time getting a taste for being read. It didn’t feel like a risk at the time, but maybe it should have. My first published article got me into some hot water the last week of my junior year. I wrote about something deeply personal and important to me, but I was shamelessly critical, pointed, and unfavorable to a lot of the people around me, and they knew it. It was official: I had finally fucked up for once. My words had finally gotten me in trouble.

Carrie Bradshaw never had an issue airing her dirty laundry in the public eye, and I certainly don’t have a Bradshaw-sized readership. Regardless, writing about the self in a public-facing way does two things. On one hand, it strips away the veil of skin and flesh that conceals thought. You don’t need to unfold the scrunched distortions of my face when I speak. The wall between the reader and writer feels so thin, mystical, and invisible. Hot off the press, from my screen to yours through some beautiful 5G ether. The mystique that shrouds the individual mind is suddenly presented to you on a (literal) silver platter.

There’s a flip side to this, though. Words give you immense control over the narrative of your life. You trust that I’m telling you the truth, or at least that I’m trying. The power lies in the words at my disposal, the ones I use to describe the way my hookup walks past me in the library (not embarrassed or awkward, but maybe dismissive). I can change names, colors, dispositions, and tastes. But the sentiment is there like the small, flickering glow of a Girl Scout twig fire. Give it some air, and it becomes a little more than obvious: I wrote about you.

When I was fifteen, and everyone was reading Ocean Vuong, the panacea for personal ambiguity was autofiction. These fictionalized memoirs, in theory, let you flirt with the truth instead of boys, and plausible deniability was a kind of reprieve. Did I do that? Or was it the version I cleaved from my tween womb, the one I mutilated into something more stunning on the page? Did I talk right into the conch shell telephone of your ear because the bar was just sooo loud, or was it because I wanted your phone number, like, yesterday? Either way, you’re not really supposed to ask which it is.

The problem lies in the fact that, despite what I once believed, the self and writing are entirely inseverable. My Victorian Poetry professor lectures that writing has always been about the self. Everything from navel-gazing lyric poetry to dense criticism and theory isn’t written for the good of others. Every writer writes for themselves; the readers are just an added benefit.

In one of my favorite poems, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass writes that words will never be enough, that each time we say the word “blackberry,” the word is all at once not specific enough for the individual and too particular for the whole. The risk of both writing and being read is that your reader will not see the connection between your blackberry and theirs, or even that they find your version of a blackberry objectionable. They might hold it against you. They might think it tastes bitter, or sour, or spoiled. They might read about your blackberries before they meet you, they might misunderstand you. Writing will always betray us a little. We put ourselves on low ground and lay ourselves down. It’s a pathetic endeavor. But nonetheless, we need to try.

I still drive the roads of my hometown in my sleep. My car doesn’t stray from the path, but my thoughts wander beyond the treeline to where my words are etched on the fragile underside of leaves and on falling birch bark. I pray they’re still there when I wake up.