July 3rd, 2023 - Valley of the Moon
Dear TNY,
This Monday it’s “Valley of the Moon”.
And I’ll get to that. For the first time ever, I’m writing this letter before I read the story. And it took me two days to write instead of one. We’ll see how it works out.
TNY, I fucked up.
I write these letters to you every week like it’s a vacuum. In fact, the reason this whole project exists at all is because sending fiction to you years ago was a vacuum. Poof, another piece of my heart thrown into the garbage can of your slushpile where it just disappeared. Want to read a story that’s a fictionalized account about how I lived on after my brother did not? No? You won’t respond? Sweet. Want to read autofiction about my divorce? How badly I hurt and how badly I hurt others? No? Straight into the black hole? Swell.
I think this led to a schism of sorts. In how I process. Because there were mostly no repercussions in saying how I felt about you to you. You don’t respond. I have been, at times, a spoiled, uppity (but knowledgeable!) baby having temper tantrums about your fiction. I say horrific shit about authors-I-have-never-met’s stories (i.e. their hearts) and your magazine’s agenda, revenue, and no one pays attention to me. This has gone on for years.
At some point along the way, what was happening in my life started to filter into these pages more and more. I began drawing comparisons to themes or details and my life. And then I began flat-out blowing the story off (to a degree) and writing how I was feeling. And mostly, I was feeling bad. I was down. Depressed. Lonely. And shortsighted with regard to, well, probably everything. And there are many reasons for that. Some of them are my fault. Some of them are other people’s fault. Some of them are also no one’s fault. But if we are all honest here in adultland, whatever happened to me, it’s totally on me to pull myself out of this fucking tailspin and fix my own shit. So if we pinpoint whose fault it is that I’m not better or wasn’t better or won’t be better, it’s me.
As these years spin out, each week a new letter, my life has changed. Moved around. Friends, family, and relationships have come into and out of my life. And this schism that I created, with regard to a mostly negative view of your fiction, well…it’s created a letter writing mechanism that’s a mostly negative view of my life. Like, it’s almost expected on my end that your story will be shit and I’ll have to write you a nastygram. And if that’s the reflex that’s setup internally, then the only thing that seems more powerful than that, as in it overpowers the will to do that each and every week, is to document the negativity in my life. And kind of gloss over the positivity.
And this has led to a fuck up. I fucked up with people’s feelings by basically having a public diary, recording how I felt each and every week (totally isolated to each week over week), but focusing mostly on the negative aspects of how I felt or what was happening to me and not the positives.
Yesterday morning the “former” partner read last week’s FTNY entry (I’m saying “former” here as that’s what I said last week because the day before I wrote the letter she said we should be done being together; the day after I wrote the FTNY letter I asked her if she would come over because I missed her (she didn’t, which is fine, we were broken up and that’s totally understandable); later on she said she needed a hug and I dropped my shit and drove over to give her that hug so we are clumsy with this shit, okay, give us a break; so…former, still, or otherwise…I don’t know how to label our relationship as it has gotten very murky; the truth is we are connected and have try in our hearts, call that what you will; and try to keep in mind that the only people who know what it’s like to be in the relationship are in the relationship, so put your sharpshooters down, Charlie). And then she skimmed about five FTNY entries back (which, as you guys would know if you read them, it’s been strugglebus time in the relationship department). And it was upsetting for her. And it’s tough to respond to that upsetness. Because this is my safe space. Which is so fucked up, you know? That my safe space is public. I mean, what kind of fucking inconsiderate asshole makes their safe space public? Like, in these pages I’m often the half of the fight with your significant other that you don’t say out loud because you know it will make things worse. But the flip side of that is worth discussing too. I have a place. And whatever fucked up combination of letter writing to a magazine about their fiction, and their lack of response being a catalyst, it’s made me try to really express what’s happening to me, it’s allowed me to open up a little more. To say some of the things through these letters that I feel I need to say. To try to define how I feel.
Is it working? Good question. She brought that up. Is it working for third party people who read these letters, who mostly aren’t in my life? Do some of these letters make them feel less alone and more seen? Yes. That’s the resounding feedback I get. That this works for them big time.
Does it work for second party people, the people who end up in these letters and ultimately read about themselves, and the negatives? I don’t think so a lot of the time. That’s the feedback I’m getting. I think the things I choose to write about, and how I write about them, to this group of people, has caused harm. An example of that harm would be said partner yesterday. But that’s not isolated. There have been others in the past that said I wrote things here that hurt them. And that hurts me, you know? Conversely, though, I asked my ex wife about this, who I have written about more than anyone else besides my kids, with published material outside of this zone as well, and she said that I spend way more time making people look beautiful than bad (in fact, she said that the things I’ve said that were bad about her were things she did that she was not proud of, that she acted badly (which I thought was a helluvan adult answer)). So maybe I’ve slacked off on the beautiful part? I didn’t think I did…but I’m VERY close to the work.
Now, for the most narcissistic first party view, as I am the one generating these tens of thousands of words, does this letter writing process work for me (because it certainly doesn’t change your magazine)? Am I healing? Am I growing? Am I becoming a continually better version of myself?
And I think the answer is complex. Yes, I’ve gotten better at expressing myself through words. I’ve gotten better at sorting my shit. Speaking the thing. Saying how I feel. Trying to get comfortable being me. But no. No it is also not working. Because I appear to mostly be documenting the negatives. About my life. About some of the people in my life. About the stories I read. About the state of the world. And I’m hurting the feelings of those I care about.
It’s been said that literature doesn’t often document happiness, as happiness is its own reward. And whether FTNY is literature or not, it seems that the underlying thrust is away from happiness and positivity.
But man, as I’m sitting here reading this over on the second day (I wrote all the above yesterday), I’m realizing that the duality is the beauty. That yeah, maybe I’m heavy on negativity some of the time. I’m human. I get hurt. I make mistakes. But I think the duality is necessary to make this real. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I often use a group of negative things to show you a positive thing when I write (see: A Sackful of Seeds entry, in which I list awful shit people have told me over the years or I have seen or done and use it to break the world down to nothing before I build it back up again as beautiful (and to be sure, while complete strangers read that and loved it because they had no skin in the game, there were other people who knew who they were in it, even though it was completely anonymous to everyone else, that were unhappy with me (i.e. connections severed); and there were also people who knew who they were in it, and how bad they looked, who told me it was beautiful and to keep writing these things because they know they aren’t perfect and that it was okay because the work helps more than it hurts (I’m digressing hard into this parenthetical statement, Nicholson Baker style, to say that I have a very, very, very fucking complicated relationship with FTNY and my writing in general in which I am rewarded and punished for what I write, simultaneously, and what I write are my feelings, so I have trained myself to believe I’m being rewarded and punished for my feelings, which, guys, it’s not hard to imagine how a fella begins to believe that throwing his negative feelings into a vacuum is healthy because it’s the only way to have them without repercussions, until there are REPERCUSSIONS))).
Anyways, using darkness to define the light. Because light for light sake is why heaven would be boring. And pure darkness is just the end, for us all. I think it’s hard to understand, fully, how good the light is without the darkness to compare it to. But, that’s just my opinion.
I’m wandering now. Back to I fucked up.
This relationship with this woman in Hawai’i began in January. And since then, I have let parts of that relationship on to these pages. They were my parts. My feelings. My perspective. My side. And I just went back and read all those posts. And I saw that outside my own happiness, attributed only to the “Hawai’i plan” working, I only wrote one or two positive things about the relationship. And especially the last four or so posts, there were negatives. She read last week’s post and was very upset by the fact that how I conduct myself here (after she asked that I didn’t write about her in the beginning of this relationship, which I did) is 1) hurtful to her because she asked me not to and 2) because it only represents %5 of our relationship. Specifically, the things that she says I don’t include are how much she tries, how much I try, and what the conditions of our relationship is/was and how that’s made it hard for both of us. That, essentially, I haven’t been providing all the information. Just the shit that makes me feel bad. And after reading back over all the entries since January, I can tell you that I was surprised at how little I wrote about this relationship at all, because it has dominated my daily life in how much emotional and physical time I have given to it (and I know how much she has given too).
I fucked up because I wrote about her when she asked me not to. And I’m sorry. I don’t know how to process without writing. I mean, I don’t even know how to process that fuck up without writing it here, where I was told not to. And I know that processing through FTNY has helped me in ways listed above, and more ways than I can list. But I also know it’s hurt others, her being a person that I love and whom I should not want to hurt. So I don’t know how to reconcile this within myself. To stop doing it. Or do it differently. I’m not sure what to do, to be honest. And if you expand past her, I mean how many other people that I care about have I hurt? How many authors would be happy with what I wrote about their stories? How about Deborah Treisman? How happy is she? David Remnick? What am I even doing here? And the question I’m left with is…at what cost and is it worth it? I don’t know.
And the other thing I fucked up is that I gave you, TNY, a foreshortened and narrow version of something happening in my life. It’s not my life. It’s just a week after week, a snapshot, of whatever is happening at that moment I sit down to write the letter. And in some ways, that’s amazing, right? Because it gets the full magnitude of the Richter scale of one’s life. The granularity, for better or worse, is there. Some weeks are meh, some are spectacularly beautiful, some sad, some depressing, some joyous, some negative. Some positive. It’s the full spectrum of detail that, if I waited ten years to write about, would get leveled out in a median version of the story.
But in other ways, it’s an almost bombastic emotional account of existence, subject to my emotional flare ups, someone else’s flare ups, opinions, news, depression, and any other number of factors that push me around and make me feel. So each week’s letter might work for a subset of people, touching on how they feel. But they cannot accurately capture who I am. What my relationships are. Who the people in my life are and what they are like. I don’t think going back to the first entry in 2018 and reading until now could capture who I am, let alone the others that are mentioned (just so we are clear, that’s over 250 letters…fuck my face is this an ambitious digression of oneself).
So what is the point? I don’t know. I feel compelled to do this. Because this treats me how I want to be treated. In a vacuum. But I also don’t feel compelled to hurt people. Because hurting people is not how I want to feel or how I want others to feel. I don’t know how to reconcile those things. I fully recognize how this hurts people. I see it. I have heard about it. I’ve watched the tears, guys. And I sit down and write. And then I cry. Because I don’t have anywhere else to do that and feel safe I guess. But I seem to be doing it in the least safe place possible for myself and the people closest to me. How the fuck do I fix that?
I asked her how I could fix this, though. And she said, essentially, round it out. Write the other stuff. The 95%. So I’m going to try.
BREAK BREAK BREAK EDITING HAPPENED HERE BREAK BREAK BREAK
In the first version of this letter there was a list of positive things she and I had done. And as I was making the list I found myself weighing one person’s effort more than the other by each entry. Not cool on my part. So I cut the list. Because there’s no way to document all the intricacies of a human relationship. It’s a million points of light, day in and day out, each decision being a miniscule-to-unfathomable weight on a balancing scale. And then, when it inevitably tips over and comes crashing to the ground, will those two fuckers pick up that scale and reset it? Or not.
So I cannot list what she and I did. What I can say is see how hard she tries. I see how hard she loves. I see how many times she could have left and didn’t. I see how she holds my hand when I’m crying. But I also see when she is inconsiderate. And when my emotions don’t have a place because hers do. I also see that I’m needy and overly sensitive and damaged fucking goods and when I buffalo my emotions over hers, but also that I’m loving and tender and making the sausages and coffee and trying so hard to make her happy.
I see Us.
What you’ll never see, TNY, is Us. You’ll never see the two people who have been barenaked, an Adam and Eve of sorts, who are both trying and failing some of the time. I see a couple of treehouse buddies who try really hard not to let adult shit get in the way, and then those treehouse buddies let adult shit get in the way all the fucking time. I see way more positives that I can write here because I don’t even understand them all. Haven’t been processing it, which I guess is kind of the point of this essay. I don’t know how to process positivity as well as negativity.
But I see that I hurt her. I see that she hurt me. And I’m sorry for my part.
But I also see that she loves me and I love her. And for that I’m not fucking sorry.
I also see that we are looking at that scale. Toppled, for sure. Are we going to pick it up? I don’t know. It’s a Tuesday in a string of days that piece together years of time in which I thought I knew most of the answers but time told me that I didn’t actually know shit. Regardless of what happens to that scale, guys, she tried really fucking hard. And I see that. And I thank her for doing it. And I want you to know that, too.
So this fucking story already…
It’s not good. Here’s a summary. Guy escapes tyranny, makes farm, is happy and hidden, man comes to farm looking for passage, guy murders man, buries him, two kids come to farm, guy semi-adopts them, everything is weird though, another man comes looking for previous man, guy nearly kills him too, guy beats boy kid up, boy kid runs away, girl kid runs away, has complete boring summary life, comes back when older and guy is dead, so she digs down by the river for bones and muses about the layers of life.
It's 7200 uninteresting words. Narrative is poor. Nothing is engaging in the story, really, at all.
So I’m supposed to not focus on the negative. Well shit, guys. You aren’t helping.
The author got published in your magazine. That’s pretty cool, I guess.
See you next week, in which…man, I just don’t fucking know, you know?
Nick
P.S. I kept one of the list entries because it’s fucking awesome and I wanted it recorded here as it kind of sums up who she is vs my relationship PTSD neurosis:
She said this was not the type of relationship that would end with one bad conversation, to which I have consistently believed that it was ending with every bad conversation, but she has not given up, true to her word, no matter how much her feelings were hurt.
