June 17, 2020
Will you start working with hypotheticals? Will that be the way you talk around this in circles? Will you say “If I presuppose that I am in some way plural or median or this or that, what would my life look like as compared to if I am not?”
No.
So quick an answer.
Yes. If I do those things, it will not be here because even if the author is dead, I agree with Rax. It is all well and good that this is a question worth considering, and I’m happy enough to acknowledge it here like this, in a roundabout way. I think I need to, to some extent. I need to have it in words between us. But any further investigations would, I think, do a disservice to the project at hand and the roles we play, willing or not, in the endeavor. Hell, as it is, I’m torn as to whether or not I should have brought it up in the first place. The only consolation along those lines is that the book will forever stand as it is: a tacit demand that the reader take our interactions at face value.
Why bring it up, then?
By being observed, I was changed. By observing myself, we were changed. For a project all about identity, does it not fit? Still, I’m not sure that it was a good idea to go even this far.
Have you already gotten it out of your system, then?
Maybe, maybe not.
Well, no.
But you won’t explore it here?
No. Maybe somewhere, but not here. Not out loud. If nothing else, not now.
Would you have if it had come up in some way other than the way it did in the review?
I don’t know. Perhaps?
Perhaps if I had considered, “Huh, I sure do seem to talk about depressed Maddy as another person a lot and I sure do have an entire project and published book utilizing the idea of a conversation with someone who is both me and not me,” I might have dug into it.
But that’s not how it came up. It didn’t come from me. This project isn’t happening in a vacuum. I acknowledged this when I encrypted a post. I acknowledged this when I chose what to share and what not to. I acknowledged this when I embellished and obfuscated the truth.
And this is just proof of that.
Yes. This is another instance of that, and this is another choice to be made. A very specific, very deliberate choice: this is not a thing to talk about here because it would cheapen the end result by casting too bright a light on you, on me, and on the relationship we have with each other.
And that’s not the point. You are not the point, though you give the project its name. Our dynamic is not the point. Any sense of plurality, any of these strange thoughts I’m left with are, as Rax says, not worth considering because they are not the work being done. Not now. The unintentional must now become the deliberate as I make that choice to say, “Okay, it’s weird to be talking to an audience-surrogate with so much agency, but that is not what’s important here; what’s important is processing the lived experience.”
Decisions made with a reader in mind, reactions to reactions of another, even the term ‘audience-surrogate’…that review forced me to face a tangential fact, but one no less important: the knowledge that I am — that we are — not alone.