Don't Vanish

If you spend any time on this platform, you undoubtedly saw or participated in the backlash over Substack allowing Andrew Tate to be here. Platforming a sex trafficker is a bad look for a community that’s built so much good will, but the debate over whether to stay or go is troubling. There are better ways to protest than to remove yourself.

This weekend I’m at a writing retreat and I’m writing—like really really working on my memoir for the first time in a long time. I did the Memoir Nation writing challenge in January, but it was much harder for me than I’d anticipated. My mom ended up having emergency surgery on December 31. A few other life things happened that thwarted my best intentions to write every day in January. I didn’t get into my writing the way I’d hoped.

So, when a friend emailed to invite me to a weekend writing retreat in Tahoe, I leapt. But even in these beautiful most perfect of writing conditions, darkness seeps in. I’m here with a group of women, and we’re writing and we’re sharing, and so there are stories of rape, abuse, abandonment; there are stories about our bodies, motherhood, aging, people who’ve hurt us and who we’ve in turn hurt. Personal writing often takes us into our darkest corners. For many writers, that’s the point—to shine light onto things buried and unspoken because buried and unspoken does not mean dead. Our stories are alive inside of us, and sometimes the longer we live, the more desperately what happened to us needs to be processed, needs to find its way to the page. This act of creation, and setting our stories free, is the power and the magic of this form. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that memoir saves lives.

On Thursday morning, just before I made the three-hour drive north from Berkeley, Mark Nepo* taught a class for Memoir Nation. And because I’ve heard him speak often on the subject of why we should keep writing during difficult times—when there’s war, when human cruelty is on display everywhere you look—I asked him for his thoughts.

“The world is always falling apart and coming together at the same time,” he said, “so we must always acknowledge both the goodness and the suffering.” He ended his answer with a plea: “Don’t vanish,” he said. “Don’t vanish.”

Working with writers in the capacity I do, I see it all. I see the writers who commit and toil and insist and strive. I also see those who vanish, oftentimes to resurface later, but sometimes for good.

I thought about “don’t vanish” when I saw all the posts from people threatening to leave Substack because of Andrew Tate. Oh, how quick we are to turn over our power.

Before Substack, I wrote for HuffPost for a lot of years, and I remember well a comment in my feed that came during Trump’s family separation policy and all the trauma and heat that erupted from it. Whatever I’d written about, this anonymous commenter was putting me in my place: Meanwhile, babies are being separated from their mothers!

The implication was: Your words don’t matter. The message was: People are suffering, so shut up. I’ve never forgotten that comment from nearly a decade ago, which surely took her three seconds to dash off before she was off to her next detonation. She wasn’t someone I knew, just a faceless person in a crowd with her pointer finger on her lips: Hush!

Online spaces are so full of shaming. To put your work into the world in any capacity is to subject yourself to other people’s thoughts and opinions. Too many people spend too much time policing and virtue signaling and telling other people what to do, or what not to do. Others choose to spend their time online elevating others, engaging their communities, and sharing things that are truly meaningful.

Mark said that things are always coming together and falling apart. Similarly, things are terrible and beautiful, outraging and nourishing, tragic and life-affirming. We have to hold these paradoxes if we commit to the practice of showing up with our words.

In the opening circle at this weekend retreat, our small group of women shared why each of us is here. Several of us, myself included, spoke to overcoming the narrative in our minds of why any of this matters. Sometimes I think the writer’s great challenge is to fight back the overgrowth of defeatism that threatens to smother our creative garden.

Defeatism is leaving a platform that brings something positive to your life just because a terrible person coexists there.

Defeatism is surrendering to these questions: Why bother? Who cares? Why does it matter?

And so, after disclosing all the ways that these questions gnaw at my mind, after considering how much easier it would be to not write, to just pack it up and put it all away, I opened a document dated January 2023, four months before my dad died, right around the time I lost full momentum for this project.

The document was labeled “The Memoir_Jan 2023” and I’d written:

The goals of this story are:

1. To give voice to the experience of being in a partnership that gets hijacked by mental illness, and how, for so many of us, the metaphoric death that ensues has no model for how to grieve.

2. To use my own teaching as a container for the work. In other words, to write a memoir teacher’s memoir—to claim my own stake in the genre.

This book is an offering. This book is a love story. This book is a grief journey.

This book is also a story of a great love, and why we couldn’t make it last.

I read those words and immediately found my story worthy. It was as if past me was leaving future me a message to come back to—and I thank her for planting this reminder.

Our writing matters. The world may be burning. Our country may be destroying itself from within. We may be falling apart, but not exclusively, and not forever. And as Mary Oliver’s poem reminds us, we only have this one wild and precious life.

Tell me, friends, why do you write?

*I believe this is my fourth reference to Mark’s work in my own Substack this year alone. He and his words have a beacon for me in this dark time. I hope you’ll follow him on Substack.