Something happened to me recently that made me consider vulnerability, a word that is applied very liberally especially to young women’s writing. I was at a film event when a man in his 30s or 40s approached me. I didn’t recognize him, but he knew me. “You’re Alexandra, right?” I nodded, slightly taken aback. The ‘film scene’ in New York is pretty small, but I was almost certain I had never seen this man before. “I recognize you from online,” he said, leaning closer to me, his drink sloshing over the rim of the highball glass. I took a milli-step back. “I read your writing,” he continued, and I feared we were verging on rocky terrain. I suffer a kind of compulsive embarrassment when my writing is brought up in public. It feels self-important even to acknowledge it here. I know that no one is ever talking about me, but in this one specific anecdote, I swear this really happened. “Oh?” I replied, preferring to keep the conversation short. “Yeah, I read your piece on the stabbing. It was so vulnerable.” I was uncomfortable, but not for the reason I expected to be. Sure, it’s pretty gauche to blankly drop “the stabbing” at a polite cocktail party, but I was more prickled by that thorny word vulnerable.
This anecdote never happened. Point in case. I made it up, because writing is at least partly construction, even when you are telling the truth. This anecdote is an amalgam of real occurrences, but it is not a real occurrence in and of itself. It is akin to reality, but all of the signifiers are changed. I am trying to make a loaded point, and maybe I am being obnoxious, but I can't stop thinking about vulnerability as an attribute of this specific type of writing. Maybe it’s because I write personal essays. I am always considering what to share and what to leave out, how to protect myself from later regrets. My issue with the word ‘vulnerability’ as a compliment is not that it’s insulting; rather, it erases the labor. Women writers are often saddled with the burden of everyone believing they are naturally more emotionally honest. We are cursed with the appearance of auto-didactism that renders our actual hand invisible. I go over my writing countless times before hitting publish — and now I must really read this piece over and over again for typos to prove my argument.
In the age of Substack, the risk associated with sacrificing anonymity is much greater than it was before the internet. Fifty or so years ago when the confessional mode really put down roots in narrative nonfiction, there was a high likelihood that no one would be able to trace your work back to you. Yes, your name was in the byline; maybe your picture was printed in a literary magazine or on a book jacket. But there was no outsourced digital paper doll version of you that your readers could interact intimately with. Now, when long-form essays have largely migrated to cyberspace, the separation between the author and The Author has become tenuous. I remember when I first signed up for Twitter at age twelve; it sounds insane, but I was allowed a Twitter account and not Facebook because my parents believed the text-based interface would grant me an invisibility that might protect me from harm. As I got older, I began to share more self-deprecating information, usually disguised as jokes. At one point, my digitally-literate relatives began to ask my mother about certain posts I had made. I was in my late teens — I wanted to speak candidly about sex and mental health, the side effect of being in high school during the height of HBO’s Girls.
I regret it now, but at the time I hid behind self-parody. I tried in vain to explain that my online presence was not me, but a simulacrum of me. It was a social performance, if I wanted to be really highfalutin about it. In 2024, this is a much easier concept to grasp. Many people don an internet persona that is a heightened iteration of themselves; there is something cathartic about it. We adopt names that hint at our identities without revealing them entirely. At parties we address each other by these monikers: “You’re ‘little miss can’t be wrong’, right?” I don’t share details of my personal life, instead choosing to refer vaguely to situations I’ve been in that my social media community might find funny or relatable. In a real way, I have met many friends on Twitter. I’m not at all ashamed to admit that it has made New York feel much smaller. But in real life, I’m accused lovingly of being withholding or secretive. “One thing about Alexandra is that you never know if she has a boyfriend or not,” my friend said, and I felt proud, but is that a normal thing to be proud of? I am very good at constructing easily destroyed sandcastles. I’m afraid to make assertions that feel too permanent. I’ve compartmentalized my life so successfully that I forget which parts of myself I’ve shared.
This feeling has accelerated since starting this newsletter, which has brought so many wonderful things into my life while simultaneously enabling me to study my patterns and tendencies under a microscope of my own invention. I think women understand everything I am saying. It is men that I wonder about. A lot of young women writers have wrestled with this topic before: the parasociality of modern patronage, AKA, what happens when men from Twitter start financially supporting your work. I am of two minds. On one hand, I am grateful. When I didn’t have a job, the small amounts of money generated by my Substack sometimes paid for groceries. But I understand that this income stream is, at least in part, predicated upon my perceived accessibility. I don’t respond to most of the messages men send me online unless I know them, but if a paid subscriber sends me a DM, of course I feel obligated to answer. It makes me queasy sometimes even though it is nobody’s fault except mine. I am promoting an image of myself that seems completely open and sincere, and subconsciously (or consciously) I am aware that this is necessary if I want readers to care about my work. When I post innocently risqué selfies, that translates to more subscribers, and more subscribers means more eyes. Every couple of months the realization that I have bound myself to a digital water cycle hits me like a ton of bricks, but I do nothing to stop it.
This is something I’ve been thinking about specifically because of the Substack Boom that I’ve noticed over the last year or so. I looked around and everyone was posting their writing online. It’s like a confessional renaissance. It has never been easier to circumvent the gatekeeping institutions of the literary world and go straight to the source. In 2022, I started writing on Substack with no plans, though I have been actively writing (with many, many dry periods) since I was very young. Now, two years later, I’ve become extremely protective of my personal life. While I write about the emotions I might be experiencing, I try to avoid specificity, not only out of respect for myself, but out of respect for friends and lovers. It’s so simple to hit ‘publish’ and send anything into the digital ether, but there are consequences to this immediacy. At the risk of sounding extremely elderly (I am 26), I feel so nervous for younger women, women in their late teens or early 20s, who overshare the conditions of their immediate present rather than refracting those events through reflection later. You have to keep something that is all yours, otherwise your entire life becomes centered around whether you can churn the ecstasies and agonies of your days into art, content, writing. And when you have ‘patrons’, the burden increases. When I was 21 or 22 I often joked that every misfortune was just personal essay fodder. My friends who were only slightly older never laughed — because they knew I was serious, and they knew I was misguided.
I say all this because I have been there. I have displayed my emotional wounds online before they scabbed, and I regretted it. A couple of years ago I was withdrawing from Zoloft after two years of taking it consistently. I quit cold turkey, which is highly ill-advised. Every single doctor cautioned me against it, but stubborn thing that I am, their warnings bounced right off of me. I missed my first pill exactly one day after a break-up, and my focus narrowed to a pin-prick. I stopped drinking coffee, I stopped sleeping, I had no appetite. And yet, all of the sensations that I thought I knew so well had been dialed up to 100, like a photo so sharp that the individual pixels become visible. Due to some combination of these factors, my writer’s block disappeared entirely. I am not endorsing the sudden cessation of your SSRI; I’m a girl in your computer, not a medical professional. It just so happened for me that, incidentally, my desire to write returned. I scribbled in my diary and believed that every sentence was piercing and brilliant like a jewel. I wrote honestly about the break-up, baring my hurt for the world to see. I transcribed the incoherent scrawl from my diary and then hit ‘publish’. One year later, circumstances changed. It was the most ‘raw’ thing I have ever written, but it needed to be taken down. I quietly deleted the post.
In 1964 Yoko Ono staged her first iteration of the Cut Piece performances. Now considered a landmark for both Fluxus and feminist art, Cut Piece involves a fairly simple premise that has haunted me since I first saw archival video footage of the work in high school. As Ono sits in the center, pre-selected members of the audience are invited to snip off fragments of her clothing with scissors. They cut her jacket, her skirt, her bra. They cut until there is nothing left to destroy, leaving Ono completely exposed. Those who removed articles of her clothing were permitted to keep them, a sort of souvenir from the experience. Thus, what was hers becomes theirs, belonging not only to those specific audience members but also to anyone viewing the piece either on video or in real time. There is something extremely violent about it, and yet Ono still feels completely in control. Despite how much she has revealed, the piece is imbued with a cryptic ambiguity, a resistance to interpretation, like an anagram that you can’t decode no matter how long you stare at it.
There is a line that you can cross that brings you from writing into performance art, and when I published that regretted essay, I had crossed it. I was bleeding all over the stage, begging people to gaze openly at the viscera. I surrendered my agency because I hoped that someone might identify; I couldn’t talk to the one person I really wanted to talk to, and so I addressed everyone in the room. I’ve learned over the years that when my essays start to feel like direct address, it is time to zoom out. And if I can’t zoom out, I put down the pen and I wait. In “South London Forever” Florence & the Machine writes, “Everything I ever did was just another way to scream your name.” I believe almost all creative writing is epistolary, once you strip it down to its essence. We are writing to someone or something, even if it is a very displaced and nebulous someone/something.
I aspire to be like Yoko Ono in almost all ways, but especially when it comes to Cut Piece. She is revealing everything without losing anything. She is displaying emotional honesty without sacrificing intricate construction. Ironically, I thought about scrapping this piece many times in the middle of the writing process because it felt too blunt, too honest, too diaristic. I was afraid that by speaking about the craft I would perform some sort of demystification ritual that would make everything somehow less interesting. But I think more writers should write about writing, even if we are writing to an audience of ourselves. I don’t think there is any shame in admitting that there are layers to what we are willing to share. This isn’t to say that I am never writing about anyone specific. I sometimes get a little guilty enjoyment out of crafting cyphers of people I know or once knew; but I want you to have to fight through the thorns like Prince Charming in Sleeping Beauty in order to decode all the signs and symbols. Then, if you see yourself in the words, it’s like a secret we both share. Or as an anonymous Tumblr post I reblogged in 2014 once wisely said, “Dedicated to everyone who wonders if I am writing about them: I am.”
I loved this, put into words lots of things in the air on here rn. there’s a great yoko ono retrospective on in London rn - she was a master of revealing & concealing both the body and its intentions. which makes the paper doll cutout version of her in the public imagination both more sad and interesting.
loved this one. cut piece has been a constant reference for me too, both as a cautionary dynamic on the political significance of masochism and a sort of mythical allegory for what it is i feel myself constantly drawn to doing - u get it!!