Writing Myself Home

Cait Barlowe on finding yourself, losing yourself, and finding yourself again

a favorite from my old tumblr account, source unknown

The Sunday Letter #29

Hello from beautiful British Columbia! We’re in Vancouver for a wedding with friends of nearly a decade, most of whom moved away from Saskatchewan when they all graduated. We haven’t seen most of these folks since our own wedding in 2019, but it feels like no time has passed at all, even if everything’s changed and nothing’s changed, in the best way. Thankfully, my lovely pal and paloma collaborator Cait Barlowe has agreed to write a guest letter this week. It’s about exploring the deepest parts of yourself through art, and more. I’ll see you next week for the 30th (!) Sunday letter!

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“Write hard and clear about what hurts.” I discovered this Hemingway quote as a teenager, likely on tumblr, and it became a defining mantra for me for most of my youth. I wrote compulsively as a teen, I wrote on my binder, on my jeans, on every surface I could find. I etched song lyrics into desks, I filled notebooks and notes apps. I was introspective and self obsessed, my hand calloused from holding my pen so tight. I was convinced, as most teens are, that no one had ever or would ever feel as I felt. I have often remarked over the years, “nothing is as interesting to me as my own thoughts.” You may call this narcissistic, I call it self soothing. Writing was my lifeline, my escape.

I wrote mostly about what hurt, I was a melodramatic teen who felt a pathological need to intellectualize all my feelings. I thought if I could make something out of my pain, maybe then I could finally feel it all without feeling ashamed. I had to tear it apart, searching for the hidden meaning or the artistic merit. I remember writing long, personal essays back and forth with my secret girlfriend, sending them over my childhood hotmail account. I wrote pages over the limit in my English classes, even occasionally forcing the class to listen to me read my work aloud (not much different than my current behavior as a university student). I identified as a writer, I pictured myself living a reclusive but inspired life. I thought myself to be a sort of young Didion¹, my finger on the pulse, bursting with new and exciting ideas. It was important to me that I looked like a writer, acted like a writer and thought like a writer.

And then I just stopped. I stopped writing altogether in my early twenties. At the time, I think I felt that I was just too busy living to stop and write. I spent almost ten years “living” before I started writing again. I wonder about these lost years, I wonder if I will forget them because I wrote nothing down. I wonder if that’s part of the reason I stopped in the first place.

In a class of mine, we recently watched Roxane Gay’s ted talk, Confessions of a bad feminist, in which she talks about losing her voice after tragedy. It struck me that these “lost years” might be more accurately described as the “silent years.” It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say, I just had nowhere to put down the words. If I thought I was in pain in my teens, my early twenties were laughing in my face. Writing started to feel trite to me, maybe even immature. I couldn’t escape my biggest critic, myself, so I stopped. Looking back on these years, I wasn’t myself. I don’t know this girl, at least not as intimately as I know my teenage self. My frenzied, grandiose ability to make nothing into something, the ability to find art at every turn, suddenly lost.

I started writing again last summer. I fell in love, so of course I wrote. I wrote poetry in the middle of the night even and it was like I was fifteen again. After ten years of silence, there I was once more, myself and my craft. I found myself repeating another old mantra, “I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice, of a generation”, famously spoken by Hannah Horvath in HBO’s Girls. I felt inspired to write again, a feeling I thought I may have lost forever. It’s strange to pick up writing after so long without it. I’ve been combing through old notebooks and pages and pages of poetry that I saved from my old tumblr profile. I see glimpses of myself within the words, the phrases I still reuse, the excessive use of commas.

A month ago, I went through a breakup. My first breakup since beginning to write again. The same person who inspired me to start writing again now has me writing, quite possibly, some very cliché breakup poetry. They jokingly said to me during an emotional conversation, “your art is about to get so good.” Even after the silent years, I realize I haven’t changed all that much. I still search for the art within my darkest moments. I still dissect every emotion. I still practice being honest with myself, if only on the internet.

So here I am again, writing hard and clear about what hurts, lugging around way too many notebooks, writing down one-liners and mini poems during my breaks at work. I’ve come back to myself again.

This week’s recommendations

I’ve been absolutely binging (like, four times through) Mae Martin’s Feel Good, a semi-autobiographical tragicomedy released in 2020. Martin plays themself and tumbles through a series of unfortunate events including addiction, girl problems, family drama, and the like. Watching Feel Good feels like sitting in Martin’s living room, experiencing both their joy and their sadness right alongside them. Martin tackles the heaviness of love with such levity it almost feels that you might reach out and touch it. I’d also recommend checking out Martin’s comedy special Sap on Netflix as well.

Next in rotation is HBO’s Love Life, (can you tell I’m going through a breakup?) with each episode featuring a different defining relationship of the protagonist’s life. The first season features Anna Kendrick as an aspiring gallerist with a bad taste in men and the second follows William Jackson Harper, searching for his identity and purpose post divorce. It’s funny, it’s smart and it’s sweet.

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Jeffrey Eugenides in a very interesting article for The Guardian on his inspiration behind The Virgin Suicides. He writes an interesting perspective on authoring a novel about teen girls, a voice that is impossible for him to embody. Eugenides is one of my most favorite authors and I feel as if he has asked himself this very question within the book, with Cecilia noting, “obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.”

In responding, I said that, however much I disagreed with the injunction to “stay in your lane” as a fiction writer, in this particular case, I hadn’t violated it. The collective narration of The Virgin Suicides is an all-male affair. The boys who obsess over the Lisbon girls know little about them. Their cluelessness is the point.

Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, a hypertext fiction published in 1996. This one requires multiple reads, clicking through the links in different orders, searching for the story within the story. It feels like a love letter to the early days of the internet and it reminds me of the thrill I’d get as a kid, when I’d stumble onto a strange website by accident.

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In the fall I get sentimental. I like to listen to some of my favourite albums from years past. Recently, it’s been Metric’s 2005 Live it Out. I’ve had Patriarch on a Vespa on repeat: “Promiscuous makes an entrance / Her mouth is full of questions”

New word of the week: erubescent (er·oo·bes·uhnt) — adjective — becoming red or reddish; blushing.

1. I think this may be revisionist history, at the time I was hoping to emulate Bukowski. Misguided.