Conversations With Friends
Until I Am All Talked Out...
The idea was to write something over the weekend. I don’t quite know where Saturday went. All I remember is the video call I had at 16:00. Sunday was a non stop chat show.
Recently I got back in touch with a friend from grammar school. I was twelve when we first met. He quickly became my safe space. The one I would scan the school yard for as soon as I stepped outside during a break. To stand next to in the bicycle shed, smoking roll ups. Sometimes the conversations ran deep. Other times it was wordless support. Like the time my boyfriend ended up in the intensive care unit of the local hospital after a car crash. My friend would quietly take the tobacco from my trembling hands, roll me a cigarette, light it for me and stick it in my mouth. He never judged.
The last time we had a proper get together was around thirty years ago when I invited him and a mutual friend for dinner. Then we ran into each other a few years back. It was the first high school reunion I attended. We chatted for a bit and laughed, as I automatically leaned into him. I felt that instant safe space again.
This summer there was another reunion but as I had my house and hands full of dogs and cats I couldn’t attend. I arranged with a group of friends to at least have a video call while they were there. Mid conversation my friend hijacked the phone and ran with it.
I showed him the beginnings of the vegetable garden, the forest behind the yard, the pups running riot in it. “I have been reading your work” he said. I was puzzled as I hadn’t published anything in a long time. My eloquent “huh” was countered with “yes on Substack. And I really enjoyed reading it.”
“I get a feeling you are sharpening your knives. When is your book coming out.”
At the time I was working on my first fiction endeavor, and had a few more ideas on the shelf. My Trello board contained a rather ambitious list including a revisit of my cancer memoir All Day a Good Day, another fiction novel about a woman with a hidden past, and I had been thinking about inviting the car crash surviving high school boyfriend to write a joint memoir about that period.
But all I actually managed to get out was my weekly newsletter. And that’s what my friend meant. He was one of the 30 odd subscribers I have. It comes up again in conversation. It’s strange he says, because in a fragmented way he knows about my life without speaking to me. He has read it. When I finally managed to squeeze out some writing the Sunday before last, it was mostly down to him. Ever since the cancer recurrence fiasco he had been gently nudging me towards writing.
There is always talk about writer needing a niche to find their audience. My current niche is an audience of people who already know me. Naturally I long to branch out and meet more people, but I am not consciously investing in that. I write without a filter, without conscious thought even sometimes. It just flows out. I barely edit. All I do is check for spelling mistakes (and be comfortable with not catching all of them) and make sure it makes sense somewhat.
I am pretty invisible online and with that comes the risk of being lured into a false sense of obscurity which might allow me to get away with things that a larger audience of strangers might call me out on. Not that I make it a habit of spewing sweeping statement but I do have my personal perspective on sensitive topics.
My ironic tone my friend says he appreciates. He pauses for a minute before he continues “come to think of it, you were always like that.”
Later through one or two WhatsApp messages we adres the conversation. How easy it is to talk to each other. No question or answer feels awkward. I think it’s down to a basic trust established during a volatile period of my life. He wonders “is it because basically we haven’t changed since then?”.
Trauma has erased some of my high school years but there is a lot I do remember. I am the same and I have changed. Some of those changes I would like to revert. Ditch some of the bad habits I picked up since then and retrieve some of the good ones that got lost along the way.
It makes me think about “authentic self”. Audience respond to authenticity. But do I believe in such a thing?
I think about the boyfriend and the cat crash and the traumatic brain injury that changed his life for ever. Changed him forever. Joe Dispenza is another repeated point of reference for me when it comes to the idea of self and the neuro plasticity that allows personalities to shape shift. Or the non dual Buddhist perspective that the self is an illusion.
As a writer I think in stories, profiles, biographies. Do I exist, create myself, through writing my personal narrative? I wonder who I would be without my memories. I keep reconstructing the story based on puzzle pieces that may not hold any truth.
Most of my memories are false. As are yours. But they still shape us, good or bad, true or false. I heard a TV host being interviewed about a recent documentary he made. It’s about a brilliant young Dutch man studying at Harvard, Jur Deitmers. During spring break in Cabo San Luca he contracts a brain infection that wipes out all his memories. How do you become a person again after that? What do the people who have loved you your entire life mean to you when you don’t remember them?
You can’t erase your past and the documentary is a testament to unconditional love and tremendous resilience. It also makes you realize you shouldn’t want to erase the past.
Meet me in Montauk to me has become synonymous with embracing all experiences and not wish your life away, not in the past not in the present, however painful or bitter sweet they may be. Michel Gondry taught me that through Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
I don’t want cancer to be my story, my niche. I am not that.
Who am I if I am not in part the stories I write. My interests, observations and way with words say something about me. How I move in the world.
There is no healing without transformation. So who do I need to become to heal from cancer?
Who am I?
I end up sending my friend a link to a story in the New Yorker: Becoming You. How much do we change and what are the origins of us?
I had wanted to write all of this Saturday or Sunday morning at the latest. But life got in the way in the form of countless calls and messages I did not want to ignore. Communication these days exhausts me. I am literally all talked out then. Which is what happens Sunday after two more long phone calls and around 120 WhatsApp and Facebook messages (I need to start putting my phone away for most of the day). Every step in the cancer journey changes direction, leads to new crossroads. My friends and family, understandably, want to stay in the loop.
My friend nudges. “Write. You don’t even have to publish, but if writing gives you something then use it. For yourself.”
I told him that it’s ok. That I don’t feel pressured by it, but encouraged. I have given myself a solid weekly deadline calling the newsletter Sunday Brunch. I want to publish. I just have to come to terms with flexible deadlines, writing that makes no sense and a few more spelling mistakes.