permission
I wasn’t always a writer, or I mean, I didn’t always think I’d be one. Whether I thought of myself as someone who writes—that’s different. But I was always a good student, and for a long time, everyone wanted me to be a scientist. I liked most of it, the math and the pipettes, the deep, marveling detail of how the world worked. I liked the metaphors of chemicals and acids interacting, the way a cell’s membrane selectively repels water, though I didn’t understand how the proteins of a cell could want anything—it wasn’t want the way a human wanted, or even the way an animal did.
Anyway, it seemed clear that I should be a doctor, with my big heart and my small hands and my good grades. It was what my mother wanted, and everyone else knew to want what she wants. These days, I’m afraid of blood, anyone’s and especially my own, but I wasn’t always like this. At fifteen, I watched a dermatologist biopsy a mole off my leg, without anesthetic, without looking away.
There are certain choices in life that seem to make moral sense. Like voting Labour, or helping a turtle off a highway. Most other choices are more complicated. What I’m saying is that it was easy for me, on the surface, to want to be a doctor: healing helps people, and I wanted to be the kind of person who helps people. I still do. But there was always a part of me that couldn’t live with that choice—a part of me that revolted against the path that had been outlined for me. It wasn’t in my constitution; it was never going to happen. I fought it for a bit, internally, and then I gave up.
And, well, here we are. I’m glad I’m not a doctor, but I often wonder if I should have gone that route. Or if there’s something else that I could be doing with my time, something more generous, more meaningful, more true. I’ve always been one to think about alternate lives, to consider the future I didn’t choose, and sometimes it sneaks up on you, the gravity of choice, when you find yourself questioning the life you did choose.
I don’t think making art is selfish, but sometimes me, making art, feels selfish to me. Writing is lonely—you spend so much time sorting through the refuse of your experience, trying to spin it into gold. Who am I to say that I’m writing anything that someone would want to read? Then again, no one asks the mitochondria why it does what it does. It just is.
*
Two weeks ago—sorry I didn’t write, I was thinking about stuff—I was back home, in the town I grew up in. Whenever I’m there, I go to Powells, the giant bookstore where I spent most of my formative years. If you work in or near the publishing industry for long enough, you learn how the sausage is made—who worked on which title, whose deal was how big, which editor is secretly (or not so secretly) a jerk. It makes going to bookstores a fraught experience, now that I know these things. But this last time, for whatever reason, I didn’t think about numbers or deals or agents. I pointed out some titles to my mom, ones I thought she’d genuinely like to read. And then I browsed, really poking through the shelves, the way I used to as a kid. I found two short story collections and took them to the café (1).
And something happened then: a little thing awoke inside me, a feeling I’d thought I was too cynical to keep alive. I almost didn’t recognize it, that simple joy of discovery, of remembering why I loved reading. Outside of the prizes, the lists, the reviews—the trappings of my literary life now that, for the last five years or so, I have chosen to professionalize—there was and is still something so hard and pure and lovely about reading. About the worlds a book can describe. About the way you can feel, despite differences of geography and experience, absolutely spoken to by a voice reaching across space and time. Nothing can take that away from us, I thought, it’s like a pebble clenched in a fist.
I left the store feeling elated, carrying something of my teenage self with me. It’s her I write for, her heart and her specificity. So much seemed possible. I wanted to believe in words.
*
I have a book deal now. My manuscript is due this May, in anticipation of a spring publication in 2021, a year that feels impossibly far away. I’ve written much of the text, but I’ll need to write much more, and all December I’ve been hedging, trying to find excuses not to work on it. It’s not as though I’m not grateful—in fact, I am grateful, and more to the point, I’m terrified. I’m scared of finally having this platform; I’m bowing under the terror of being believed in. I’m worried that nothing I write will be good, or useful, or interesting.
On the phone with my therapist, describing this dread-inducing fear, I landed, accidentally, on this idea of permission. That’s what I craved: I was waiting, desperately, for someone to tell me to go. But there’s no one to say the word, no one to fire off the starting gun on a crisp winter day. Only I could give myself permission to write—I couldn’t wait for something else’s credentials to summon me. After all, if not even selling a book could make me feel ready to be heard, then what else would open the door? What else could possibly set me free?
So that’s where I’ve been. Cleaning the room of my heart, and making it ready, and making myself ready in turn. To allow myself to write, to allow the text to be what it is. I am trying to give myself permission: to be here, and make, and spend time with small things, remembering all the times that I’ve found a home in other people’s small things. Maybe, if I’m lucky, in time someone will find a home in mine.
Today, I give myself permission. And if you need permission to write, I give it to you too.
xo
LP
1: The two short story collections were Homesick for Another World, by Ottessa Moshfegh, and Evening in Paradise, by Lucia Berlin. Berlin’s writing singlehandedly changed the direction of my December, and for that I am grateful.
2: While we’re here, I wrote a review of the slow, exquisitely beautiful Vija Celmins show at the Met Breuer, which I recommend seeing.
The header and icon for this newsletter was designed by Chris Rypkema.
Hi, you’re reading intimacies, a relaunch of the original, occasional diary letter I sent out from 2016-2018. You’re getting this email because you were previously subscribed to its first iteration, and you got those emails because you were probably subscribed to Cum Shots, my previous letter at Nerve. If you liked this letter, please click the heart. Thank you for reading. I really appreciate you.