Welcome to a little dispatch from inside my own literary obsession on the erotics of reading.
I found this book in my search to help give me language for things I’ve been circling a lot this year: the way prose can seduce, disturb, excite, and make reading feel so bodily… and why.
Why am I drawn to the perverse, the psychologically uncomfortable, the transgressive? Why are you? Why aren’t you?
For me, it can be just one sentence that feels like an experience in itself, quite apart from what it is saying.
So yes, Barthes, you have my attention.
Barthes distinguishes between pleasure and jouissance – often translated as bliss or rapture. I’m still turning that distinction over. There’s the pleasure of a good book, and then there’s the pure current of a text that jolts my system, shorts my circuits, or forces a physical reaction.
I’ve talked a good deal about literary encounters, about what happens when a book triggers a chemical spike in me. But I’m increasingly interested in what’s actually happening in those encounters. The doing of language. The surge of being seduced by a sentence. The buzz I get from something repellent or utterly horrific. The total thrill of finding myself charged up by the taboo, the transgressive, the violent. And, no doubt, the pain.
So naturally, I’ve been trying to dissect this somatic frequency of my own reading habits, mapping how words/prose morph into physical reactions for me.
I’m not much of a visual reader, I know that. I don’t necessarily see scenes playing out in my head or construct elaborate pictures of characters and places. Well, I do in dark romance but I’m not considering that here. But I hear the words. There’s an internal voice, and I’m acutely aware of cadence, tone, rhythm, etc.. The way a sentence sounds, certain words, how it’s all put together. The way a character speaks, or thinks. The particular music of a writer’s prose (a nod to Lispector here of course, iykyk).
So how much of that voice do I supply myself, and how much does the writing create? Who knows. But whether I’m reading Clarice or Nabokov or Eliot, I can get caught up in the language without necessarily seeing much of anything. Do you see where I’m going here?
Maybe this is part of what I’m trying to get at with Barthes. It’s rarely what a text means, or even what it makes me feel, but the pleasure of the language itself. The sound of it. The way it moves through my head. The bliss. The rapture.
Oh shit, and I’m near halfway through Eroticism by Bataille and that’s even more exciting. Clearly Bataille and Barthes are deeply connected through some idea that true ecstasy requires crossing a line. Yes, please!
And The Pleasure of the Text has been a great companion work to Bataille because of this. It feels like Barthes handed me the decoder ring for what Bataille is doing. Bataille shows us that breaking taboos is what makes us human, and Barthes proves that language is the ultimate playground for doing exactly that. It seems they both want us to stop reading safely and start reading dangerously. Yes, please!
Anyway. I know I respond to the performance of language as much as its meaning. And I’m curious about what the hell that means and why. So any analysis of the physical, sensual and emotional ecstasy (‘jouissance’) that reading and language can provoke, I’m gonna seek it out.
I seem to have developed a taste for the perverse, the decadent, the transgressive, and the morally questionable. Not necessarily in life (project scope is creeping tho), but certainly in literature. And what began as one book has become a rather suspicious constellation of writers, ideas and things I apparently want to spend my leisure time thinking about.
On my lap now: Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and Bataille’s Erotism. And Libby has just released The Story of O to me, so naturally I’m starting that immediately as well. Because apparently I’ve decided to spend my weekend in the company of some of literature’s more morally suspect thinkers.
Sade keeps turning up, too. Barthes invokes him early on; he influenced Charlene Elsby’s Violent Faculties, which blew my fucking head off. And then there’s Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which is one particular reading night I’ll always remember. And Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher belongs in this constellation, too. Different territory, but same fascination with repression, power, sexuality, and even violence… all beneath the surface of ‘respectable life.’
Nabokov got me here, no doubt. The seduction of his prose. The manipulation of perception. The sheer, unnerving power of beautiful language to persuade me to see, feel and participate in Lolita. That complicity between writer, text and reader. The possibility that we can be repulsed by what we’re reading and still be utterly captivated by it.
So yes. Give me all the perverse, decadent, transgressive, taboo, and morbidly fascinating works. I want to get into the why of it all. The erotic power of the forbidden. The pleasure of the unsettling. This goddamn massive attraction to what violates my sensibilities, destabilizes my moral footing, and makes me question and immensely enjoy what, exactly, I’m taking pleasure in.
Different projects, obviously. I’m not trying to collapse all these writers into one grand theory. I just want to come at this stuff from every angle. The erotic, the philosophical, the aesthetic, the psychological. What desire does to me, to us; what transgression reveals or conceals; what happens when a text makes something disturbing feel beautiful or electric. And whether we’re even aware of our own responses, let alone how we reckon with them. I’m not sure about anyone else, but I suspect some readers would rather not examine this too closely. Me? I want to analyze the shit out of it.
I seem to be developing a particular appetite for the OGs, too. The older fictions. The ones that were doing this shit before it became familiar territory. For some reason, a lot of contemporary fiction (not all… Heat… ooooo that pierced my heart and was violent AF) just isn’t scratching the itch this year.
I want to go backwards, closer to the source material. I want to know and meet the troublemakers. The ones pushing at the boundaries before later writers inherited, reworked, or reacted against them.
And ya, like all of us nerds out there, there is a growing pile of books with a very specific set of intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations that refuses to leave me alone. What a wild reading trajectory I’m on. Who knew this rabbit hole would go so deep?!
Fuck, I want to be a troublemaker.
Bataille:
Barthes:
André Pieyre de Mandiargues on Réage’s Story of O :
The fact that I’ve just read an eight hundred page novel about ordinary human beings and am suddenly feeling very strongly that I just want to be one of them is perhaps the greatest gift George Eliot leaves you with…
That I understood the very soul of this book.
I have a lot to say about Middlemarch. Far too much for one blog post, probably. There will be more. I already know that.
So before I launch into Eliot’s expansive, psychologically acute, and deeply empathetic voice; or how profound this meditation on the human condition impacted me; or Dorothea and Lydgate and Rosamond and Will, consciousness and self-deception, constraints and desire, and all the other things George Eliot has been surgically dissecting in my brain for the last month, I keep thinking about this line. A standout for me, marked early on. Who knew it would mean so much:
“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self…”
Being here. Actually here.
No standing outside your own life analyzing it to death, waiting for some more meaningful version of it to begin.
Just being a person here, among other people, with all the ridiculousness and grief and desire and loneliness and affection that comes with it.
I’ve spent all these chapters watching people want things, misunderstand things, fuck things up, justify themselves, hurt one another, love one another, try again, fail again, see each other more clearly, fail to see each other clearly enough.
And through all of it, Eliot says with all the patience in the world:
Look closer. There is always more going on inside a person.
Because the suffering that one feels when they’re navigating human relationships is so real. People trying to reach one another while trapped inside themselves is so real.
And fucking hell, it’s painful too. Because Eliot makes the interior lives of other human beings feel as tangible as our own.
And then, very near the end, my beloved Dorothea says:
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
Well. Fuck.
That line feels like the whole book somehow.
Again, Eliot sees how complicated we are. She sees our vanity and our blindness and our ridiculous little internal arguments and spirals. She sees how easily we misunderstand each other and ourselves. She sees all the ways we can make a mess of things.
Yet somehow, after all of that, or amidst it, I don’t know, she still seems to believe that other people matter.
Because we fucking do. We are here together.
Things matter. I matter. You matter.
Paying attention matters. Trying to understand another person matters.
And man, sometimes the most meaningful thing we can do is simply make somebody else’s life a little less difficult.
That’s why Dorothea wrecks me.
She wants so badly to do something. She wants her life to matter. She wants to help. She wants to love enormously. And she learns, painfully, that she cannot control the conditions of other peoples’ lives.
But she can show up.
She can see someone.
She can make another person’s life less difficult.
There is so much to takeaway from this book. But for now:
Be here. Be present at the spectacle of life. See people. Let them be real. Let yourself be real. Give a shit about them. Be free to feel. Be free to make mistakes. Help when you can. Love where you can.
And last, I absolutely broke in those final chapters and the finale.
Because, sometimes, a soul requires the full, breathtaking weight of surrendering to those eight hundred pages of Eliot’s luminous, agonizingly human brilliance to truly comprehend the tragedy and beauty of ordinary life.
This book was brutal. Violent. Excessive. Erotic. Psychological. Weird as hell. Torture, rape, fear, forced submission, forced everything really, degradation, pain, pleasure, survival. It pushed in further and further.
And that was the thing.
I wanted all of it.
No, I did not imagine a hairless boy during the reading of this novel.
I wanted the fear. I wanted the power imbalance. I wanted the submission when submission meant attention, favour, protection, survival. I wanted the pain threaded through the frenzied pleasure. I wanted the vulnerability of being completely penetrable, completely exposed, completely at someone else’s mercy.
Oh god. Another book that switched the erotic electricity on in me.
The physical pain alone in this book really got me.
I’ve talked about pain before. I’ve tried to articulate how I feel about it, how I understand it, and how the raw and brutal can be transformed into something intense, charged, almost sublime. There’s alchemy going on in that transformation.
It was a welcome challenge to figure out why a novel like this felt like it had so much more depth than other dark romances I’ve read.
I’ve read Leigh Rivers and thought, yes, finally, something with a little complexity.
But Smith has this particular ability to get past the superficial and plunge straight into the darker depths of desire, fear and human frailty. She carefully and deliberately puts these characters into highly volatile, often forced dynamics and doesn’t let them breathe.
The scenes are violent, and ever so visceral because of the pain inflicted. I felt breathless. Frantic. Reactive.
Most of all, I was reminded how pain is sometimes the only thing sharp enough to make a person feel completely present or alive.
The psychological stuff was fucking intense too.
While the actual plot was fairly light, the graphic writing surrounding all the fuckery was unforgettable. The scenes were very well executed, written not just for shock value, and had some profound psychological undercurrents moving beneath all the depravity.
Perhaps it’s accurate to say this had emotional depth. That could even be an understatement. There were moments of suffocating anticipation. That toxic blend of fear and excitement over what is coming next. The desperate calculations of the characters. Who really has the power? Who is submitting because they want to, because they have to, because they have no other choice?
And Kane.
Kane.
What an astonishing fucking villain.
I didn’t want him redeemed.
I didn’t want him soft.
I didn’t want to discover that in some crevice he is secretly a good man. A better one.
Well, technically, he is alien.
Anyway.
I wanted Kane.
Exactly as he was.
Manipulative as fuck. Total brutality. That intelligence. That sadism. That absolute certainty. He was terrifying and fascinating and completely magnetic to me.
A surprising, softer counterpoint:
There was a parallel, slow burn romance in here to balance the horror. It edged on a desperate tenderness, on the underlying frantic need to be wanted. In reviewing my annotations, it was this part of the story that had my attention the most as far as highlighting goes. Highlights I’ll keep to myself. Some things feel too true to put on the page.
So Heat hit differently.
It didn’t feel like someone had written ‘dark romance’ and simply turned the dial up.
No.
It felt like someone had gone looking for the darkest, kinkiest, most uncomfortable corners of desire and decided to stay there.
For 650 pages.
And somehow it wasn’t even relentlessly repetitive, which is almost ridiculous considering its length and how much happens in it.
R. Lee Smith did not take a breath.
She said:
Here.
Look at this.
You wanted this.
Didn’t you?
And you sit there for a moment and decide whether the answer is yes.
Mine was yes.
Over and over again.
So that’s what I mean by knowing our dark parts.
Some don’t have them. Some of us let them breathe freely, or at least want to. Others may be very good at performing vanilla.
And then a book comes along and exposes you.
Something that makes you stop pretending and admit:
Ever build something then it starts making demands of you?
The ‘Author’ begins with an intention to create ‘Angela’, but Angela becomes increasingly full, weird, independent, contradictory. The more alive she becomes, the less he can contain or explain her.
I finished Breath of Life in two days and I am, once again, affected by Clarice Lispector in ways I don’t quite know what to do with.
I understand her. I just don’t know how to talk about what happens to me when I read her, think with her.
I started underlining and tabbing passages immediately. Thought. Language. Writing. Being alive. The moment before a thought becomes a thought. The space before language catches up with whatever is happening inside us.
That pre-instant of thought.
God.
That’s everywhere in Lispector.
It’s this reaching toward what exists before being organized into something coherent. Like an idea or sentence or formed thought. She makes the act of writing part of the whole thing too, in some urgent manner that just gets me… charged.
And her Author is thinking about thinking, writing about writing, trying to catch something that can’t be caught because it changes when he tries to put words to it.
It all feels dangerous and unstable.
I gravitate to that kind of thing.
It also feels like recording something that already exists isn’t quite enough for the Author. Because the actual act of writing changes the ‘thing’. It moves the shapeless toward shape. It makes something more real, more visible, more alive. And that’s too far… too resolved. Maybe. Do you understand? It’s okay. I don’t. Yet.
And then there is Angela.
Oh gosh.
She comes to life.
She becomes full and whole and complicated and contradictory and increasingly impossible for the Author to hold. I immediately felt she had become too whole to fit his container. His limitations.
That arc completely got me. Because?
Limits. Invisible tripwires in my experience.
Because isn’t that one of the possibilities of creating anything? You begin with an idea that belongs to you. You think you are going to build something. And then, if it becomes alive enough, it starts exceeding the boundaries you gave it. Maybe even the boundaries you retroactively give it.
And this is where Lispector gets me personally. She keeps pressing against the limits of what can be said, what can be known, what can be contained, what can be acted upon.
I don’t think I want things neatly contained.
Well… I don’t want me neatly contained. Drives me bonkers.
And perhaps that’s a reason why she gives me so much fucking voltage.
There is nothing conventionally erotic about Breath of Life. Nothing particularly spicy about it. And yet I experience her writing physically. It has charge. It gets underneath things.
It peels back my own layers. I get to peel them back.
She be like, let’s dig into the psyche.
I say, let’s fucking go!
And then instead of putting everything back or not facing what is there, I let some of those hidden things breathe. Give life to it. Not always. But as much as I can.
That feels important to me.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what is underneath things. My obsession with excavation has yet to let up.
What are our wants? What do we feel? What don’t we say? What exists before we have language for it? What is truth? What’s the lie?
There’s nothing really sensible about it, but it gets to the honesty of stuff. And boy, do I love honesty. Lispector gives me permission to stay with it for a while. Love that too.
Do you write something you already know? She doesn’t. She writes until she knows something.
So this is all leading to me trying to understand consciousness. Learn it. Not in some grand way, definitely not ‘an authority on it’ (because half the time I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about), but because I know what it feels like to have something exist inside me before even I know what it is. From Agua Viva, it’s the idea of existing in and before the ‘is’.
What a beautiful thing. I want to write the ‘is’.
Sometimes I feel something and try moving toward it with words, and somewhere in there I figure out what I actually think. I want to become a better, more intelligent writer, and I think this is part of what I’m chasing. Lispector seems to do this at a level I can barely comprehend. She gets so close to the thing before it has become a finished thought, and somehow the writing itself discovers it.
I want that. I hope all that made sense?
That feeling of not quite manufacturing the sentence, but letting it come. Flow, I suppose. Surrender, maybe. Again, that’s an Agua Viva throwback.
And then there is:
“I am free to feel.”
It’s burned in my brain now. Forever.
Freedom to feel before understanding. Freedom to contradict yourself. Freedom to be me before the edit.
Now back to our vibrant Angela. She gets to be open too.
Too large. Too contradictory. Too alive to be completely possessed by the person who created her. The person who is threatened by her agency.
So Breath of Life gave me the feeling of watching consciousness become. A becoming that can’t be contained.
Obviously there is no stopping me thinking with Lispector. I’d rather do that than try to explain her.
I started and finished Story of the Eye tonight and I fucking loved it.
French. Erotica. Bataille. Orgasms, urine, semen, blood, eggs, eyes, bullfighting, churches, murder, Simone. A lot of peeing. Maybe too much peeing.
And yet.
What got me wasn’t simply how extreme it is. It was the specificity of the desire. The complete lack of interest in making these wants respectable or explaining them away. Bataille takes sexuality and fetish into places that are strange, grotesque, frightening and sometimes ridiculous, but he doesn’t flinch. And I wasn’t embarrassed by any of it.
There is an urge here. An edge. A willingness to follow desire past the point where it is supposed to stop. It’s aggressive too.
And I admired the hell out of that.
Oh and Simone and the narrator’s match. THIS. THEM. (And dear Marcelle.) Their sexuality isn’t something one of them has to translate into acceptable language for the other. They understand the same strange impulses. Right from the start. They want what they want together. Things that might otherwise remain hidden because of shame… are met.
That hit. I loved it. Beautiful. Artful.
Frick, my whole life I’ve wanted that kind of match. Someone who understands my needs and my sexuality and the things I have never said out loud. Not necessarily someone who wants every single thing I want, but someone who can hear it without recoiling from it. Feeling weird about it. Someone who understands that desire can be strange and specific and difficult (and terrifying) to explain.
(Did I mention I’m a Scorpio?)
It’s easy to read Story of the Eye as transgressive erotica, cuz it absolutely is. But underneath all the fucking madness is another familiar thing I noticed: the desire to find another person with whom you don’t have to hide. Ugh. Felt.
Bataille gives the characters a bit of terrifying freedom to follow the thing they want.
He doesn’t sanitize it. Clearly.
No pretending it isn’t there. It’s full on exposure of himself, his characters.
The last thirty percent was read in a hunting blind with my son, and honestly, I can’t think of a better way I could have finished it.
It’s been a tough week. I was tired. But I was invigorated by this. Sitting beside him, watching and waiting, Kindle in my hands.
Keith Rosson is ridiculously delightful to read. Like Coffin Moon, his writing grabs me immediately and just moves. It’s earthy and wild and fucked up; and completely unburdened by any ‘trying too hard’ vibes. This story has grit, and the prose has that same vibration to it. It pulled me along with ease. Somehow, he can describe a completely “…batshit supernatural thing…” happening and make you see exactly what he means.
And of course, underneath the dirt and insanity is a story about what people will do for the ones they love, and how badly we sometimes need answers. Daughter. Father. Parenthood. Life. Rosson keeps the story tethered to things that actually hurt: family, addiction, loss and love. We all know these matter so much, and they increase the emotional stakes of the story, especially in a world that has gone completely off the rails.
So there I was, sitting in the woods with my son, smelling moss and the damp rot of the forest floor, reading electrifying horror about people hunting for clues, answers, justice, peace.
There was something about that combination that made the whole experience feel… big. Maybe it was the woodsy atmosphere of the whole thing, witchy story included. Nothing particularly dramatic happened. I suppose it was a rather small thing. We were just hanging out there. He was hunting. I was reading. We were together.
But I loved it.
And yes, I’m grieving it.
Oh, the things we have to hold at once as a parent.
Maybe that’s what I want to remember about this particular reading experience. That Crone was fucking awesome. That it spoke, in its strange and terrifying way, to raising a child from infancy to however long we get to have them. That Rosson continues to be an author whose books leave me craving the next one.
But no. It’s not that at all. Not even close.
I simply want to hold tightly to this moment. To the few hours spent listening to heavy drops of rain while watching deer pass by with my son. That’s it.
Horror in my hands.
A kid beside me.
The woods growing dark and cool, the slow decaying earth around us.
A really great Friday night.
“Everything matters.”
I received an advance e-copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Last night I was playing music I used to associate with Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, and my mind went… somewhere.
I remembered her.
Me.
The woman I was then. The reader.
I was fucking obsessed with this series.
I made reels about it. I had a music playlist for it. I thought about Hadrian Marlowe constantly. I was completely gone. I loved being inside his voice, his memory, his contradictions, the way he was always telling me a story (his story) while trying to understand the man he had become inside it.
Hadrian was one of the first narrators who made me realize how much I could love inhabiting another consciousness. I didn’t even have that language then. Don’t know if I’m really using it correctly now. I just knew I was completely gripped by the design of it.
So thinking this has to be the beginning, right? Ha. Funny that Sun Eater itself starts with an ending.
I also think I underestimated how much of that experience was about language. Vocabulary. The arrangement of words on the page. Ruocchio can fucking write. There were phrases and paragraphs I tabbed and tabbed. Philosophical passages I underlined. Sentences that could take such an enormous, sprawling story and make it beautifully intimate. And I was so attached. But not only attached to Hadrian’s consciousness; I was attached to the mind that had built the language through which I encountered him.
And underneath all of it was Hadrian’s humanity. God, the humanity. That was always the thing I kept coming back to. For all the scale of the series, for all the history, philosophy, violence, horror and cosmic machinery, there was this man trying to save humanity while being forced to confront almost everything that makes humanity difficult to love.
Then Kingdoms of Death happened.
Fuuuuck.
That book cracked something open in me: horror.
Not “I like scary books.” Not heebie-jeebie stuff. I discovered that I wanted literature that could make me feel deeply uncomfortable. That could trap me inside a psychological and bodily experience and make me stay there. Claustrophobia. Suffering. Pain inflicted on the body. Fear. Suffocating loneliness. The near unraveling of a mind. Someone’s world becoming unbearable and there being nowhere inside themselves to escape to.
I couldn’t stop reading it. I was sweating. Walking. Walking and talking to myself about what the actual fuck I was reading.
I didn’t come away from Kingdoms of Death simply thinking, I love horror now. I think I started to understand what horror could do as a way of studying a person. What happens to humanity when almost everything humane is stripped away? What’s even left? Who will Hadrian be after this?
And then, somehow, I launched into a bizarre and unexpected reading path that doesn’t seem to stop unfolding:
A lot of horror. Really fucking good horror.
Then, the lit happened:
No Longer Human.
The Trial.
Lolita.
The Collector.
The Piano Teacher.
The Vegetarian.
The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Blind Owl.
Agua Viva.
Notes on a Scandal.
The Book of Evidence.
Good grief I love that list.
So I look back at all of these and see something I couldn’t see at the time.
Hindsight. Ugh. If only. Argh… gotta keep it going forward…
I am or have been (or both) searching for a particular kind of reading experience for a long time.
I want to be completely inside another mind. Always. I don’t want to be in mine. It sucks there sometimes.
I want the consciousness, the language, the contradictions. I want the physical experience of being in someone else’s reality, especially when that reality is difficult or disturbing or completely unlike my own. I want to be made uncomfortable. I want to follow a thought somewhere I would and wouldn’t have gone myself.
And Sun Eater was already doing some version of this. Just at a massive cosmic scale.
So maybe Hadrian really was my first encounter with this particular kind of readerly obsession. A man telling his own story, living inside memory, reflection, contradiction, regret and history. A consciousness trying to make sense of itself, of the choices and decision, through the story it is telling.
I just loved it so much. I keep saying it but it’s true.
Point is, I think I want a little more of that woman back.
Not all of her. I’ve changed enormously, and I don’t want to go backward. But I miss some of her edge. Her confidence in speaking her mind. Her spirit. Her ability to get completely absorbed in something because she fucking loved it.
Maybe even some of her capacity for absorbing the tough stuff in life too. The armour. That centre of gravity she had… I admire it all.
I think Sun Eater belongs on a shelf here for those reasons. It belongs there as an origin story. A little artifact from an earlier version of my reading life that turns out to have been pointing toward the reader I am now and becoming.
And fuck me, I gotta reread this series.
‘The Scientist’ by Coldplay, Valka, and Ashes of Man are forever faves.
What happens to interior freedom when you become conscious of being watched?
You know what sucks?
The whole books/Instagram thing.
I hate even saying it like that because it sounds so fucking small. Instagram. Bookstagram. A social media account. Who cares? There are bigger things happening in the world. Real problems. Real life.
And yet I am genuinely sad that a place I loved feels contaminated.
It was a place where I went to be myself. Honest as fuck. Reading experiences. Vulnerable posts. Raw thoughts. Real engagement. Real friendships. Intelligent conversations around books.
I brought my books, my brain, my humour, my weird little observations. I brought the things I was thinking about while reading and put them somewhere other people could encounter them. Sometimes someone would recognize themselves in what I had written. Sometimes they would disagree. Sometimes they would say, YES, THAT.
There was a healthy ecosystem there.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically in the vague social media sense of “community ecosystem.” I mean ecosystem in the environmental sense, which is probably inevitable given that my degree is actually in Environmental Toxicology and I’ve worked for an agency that protects ecological integrity for over twenty years.
Agency. Integrity. Remember those words as you read this.
So, yes. I know something about contaminated ecosystems.
I know that contaminants can change the conditions of a place without becoming the whole place. I know that exposure matters. Concentration matters. Persistence matters. Pathways matter. I know that some contaminants break down and some persist. I know that remediation can be possible, but that it is rarely as simple as making something disappear.
And I know that sometimes the most appropriate intervention is not pretending the contamination isn’t there.
It is reducing exposure.
That is what changed for me.
The books are still there. My writing is still there. The people who genuinely connected with what I was doing are still there. (I love you guys so much.)
But my relationship to the environment changed. Because I am not there.
There is something uniquely unsettling about knowing that someone is watching you when you did not invite them into your space. Something changes when someone’s surveillance becomes part of the conditions under which you participate.
You notice who is looking.
You notice yourself being observed.
You have to block fake accounts.
You can’t let blog metrics and certain daily repeat state viewers affect your every move.
Because suddenly the space that once allowed you to be expansive makes you smaller. You start thinking twice before posting something or sharing a story. I won’t say how many times I thought about publishing this… but goddammit… agency.
You edit yourself before anyone else has even asked you to. You decide not to share, to post, because of someone else.
That is the part I hate most.
Not the drama. Not even the behaviour itself. Because that reveals character. Really immature, unintelligent, toxic character.
It’s the cause and effect.
The fact that I started feeling like I can’t move through that space freely.
Reduce myself.
Go private.
Step away.
It feels like I’m being cornered and that choice is taken away. Like there are now terms and conditions built into it. All because someone is monitoring me. And I feel I can’t stick up for myself.
Well, maybe this is what they intended. To be that anthropogenic threat to the ecosystem.
Well, fuck that. Nobody puts baby in a corner, amiright? I don’t want to spend my time thinking about spies and stalkers. And why they are doing it in the first place. I don’t want someone else’s attention to become a condition of my participation.
And it pisses me off that I have allowed other people’s behaviour to make me question whether I am allowed to breathe in a space I helped build.
That playground-mean-girl bullshit cuts off the oxygen.
And yes, the ecosystem is much bigger than the pollutant, the contamination.
There are good people there. Genuine friendships. Interesting conversations. Plenty of oxygen for everyone. There are still books. There is still that part of me that wants to show up and say, I read this, and this is what it did to me.
That hasn’t disappeared. But neither has the reaction. I’m writing a blog post about it FFS.
On resilience and exposure
I think what I’m struggling with is the dynamic between resilience and exposure.
I keep treating my ability to tolerate situations like this as evidence that I am resilient. As though the goal were to absorb it, recover, and carry on as normal.
But resilience isn’t an unlimited capacity to absorb pollutants without consequence. Exposure changes the system. Enough of it, over enough time, can change what the system is capable of tolerating. There are some things I am still capable of. And some things not.
So yes, this affects me. I don’t need to pretend otherwise. I’m a sensitive person. I also don’t need to prove that I can tolerate it. Because it destabilizes my own nervous system too.
Ugh. I don’t know what to do.
But what about reclaiming the space? Posting anyway. Showing I am not affected? Well, that would be pretending. I’m just too honest for that.
And really, that’s not reclamation. That’s just the exposure with better branding.
Ya, I’m rambling. Almost done.
On mitigation measures
Jesus Christ.
Who would have thought I needed mitigative measures to survive Bookstagram?
Oh, Robyn. Naïve woman.
Reduce exposure. Control the severity of adverse impacts. Protect what matters. Give the system time to recover.
I could add IDGAF and be done with it, but that’s not me either. I give all the fucks. I like that about myself. It is care. It is empathy. It is who I care about and why.
I can’t simply restore some imaginary pristine version of the ecosystem. I can’t pretend it hasn’t affected me. But I just don’t want one contaminant determining the conditions of the entire system, friendships included. This blog included.
Because there are still things there (and here) I value: the books, the writing, the conversations, the people who know how to show up, and the part of me that still gets excited enough about a sentence to need somewhere to put it. Above all, there are real people with real feelings involved.
Those parts are worth protecting.
And maybe that’s why the books I’ve been reading have been getting tangled up with this too. Ya… making a sad attempt to weave in the books here.
I’ve read a lot about who gets to look; who gets to tell the story; who gets access to another person’s interiority; who is claiming territory over someone; who is controlling the pen. The Vegetarian, The Piano Teacher, Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, Notes on a Scandal, The Book of Evidence. They have all, in different ways, made me think about the power of observation and what happens when you become aware of the person doing the looking.
So I don’t want to live inside someone else’s gaze.
I don’t want to make choices according to who is watching. And the reasons why they are. And I don’t want someone else’s access to me to become the condition under which I think, write, or exist.
So maybe that’s the thing I’m actually reclaiming. Trying to anyway.
Not the account. Not the ecosystem.
My agency.
I get a say in who gets access to me. I get a say in what I do with the exposure. I get to decide what I can absorb without losing myself. And I get to decide what I do when the conditions change. That’s good environmental management, isn’t it?
Idk. This all just feels shitty. Crazy how people want to and can make others feel this way in what should only be a beautiful, supportive environment.
Anyway, I’m going to spend some time breathing the oxygen freely in my own life. Not in someone else’s territory they’ve marked as their own. Where they have staked their claim. And have implemented monitoring controls. That ain’t for me, or my heart.
I have kids. A job. A plane ticket. Books. Friends. An enormous heart filled with people I love. And a world that is considerably larger than one particular bizarre little ecosystem.
I keep saying it because I still don’t quite believe it.
There is a plane ticket. There is an approved ETA thing in or on my passport, however that works. There is a date on the calendar and a route that, at least for now, includes Edinburgh, the Highlands, trains, side quests and most likely rain.
But I am going.
This feels like a surprisingly large thing to say. Rather simple for others, I suspect.
Travel has never been simple for me. I’ve leveraged some really great work trips across Canada, but it has most definitely not been a fuck it, let’s go thing for me.
For years I have been very good at postponing myself.
Very fucking good at it.
There were trips I almost took. Trips I planned and then talked myself out of. Potential trips with my sisters, my mother, friends. Places I wanted to see that could wait, because there was always something else that seemed more necessary.
Obligations. Priorities. Practical reasons. Others before me.
It’s easy to build a whole life out of putting everyone before yourself.
So I bought the ticket.
And then, because my nervous system can’t seem to deactivate these days, I panicked about the ticket. Then some travel authorization thing. Then luggage. Checked bag or not checked bag. And now accommodation, and all the other tiny logistical details that suddenly seemed capable of becoming evidence that I had made a mistake.
But I want to go.
And so I am.
And that’s it.
I don’t think I need a better reason.
My dad didn’t make it to retirement when all his travel was planned for. It’ll be ten years this November since I last held his hand. That’s also my birthday month. And I guess that’s the little push, not reason, I needed.
And I do think Clarice Lispector gave me a little boost too. She said to flow, and so I’m trying. Really doing the best I can with that.
Because I want that. But keep failing. Hurting myself, others in the trying.
Fuck, I’ve always wanted to be like the cool people out there and just… flow.
So it’s not some trip to heal me or transform me or prove anything. Or find myself.
I simply want to exist somewhere else.
Feel alive.
Breathe.
Flow.
And maybe keep building a life inside me. A home that includes a trip to Scotland.
So I am going.
I get to cross that massive fucking pond for the first time.
And I like the idea of arriving in Edinburgh one morning, carrying the exhaustion of an overnight flight and knowing that for a little while, no one needs anything from me.
I will have nowhere I absolutely have to be.
I will walk outside and hear voices that aren’t familiar to me. I will look at buildings that have been standing there long before I arrived and will continue standing there after I leave.
Gosh, I want to see old things.
I’ve never really seen old.
Not like this.
It’s exciting to think I’ll get to see old stone darkened by weather. Castles. Ruins. Ancient places. A landscape that has held people for thousands of years.
I need to see the evidence of that.
And I want lochs.
Forests turning colour.
Cold air.
Rain.
Maybe the sea.
Maybe mountains, although I am not sure I need them. Seen them lots. And I have those earmarked for the future.
I want to find a pub and be warm.
I want to read somewhere I didn’t expect to read.
Performatively, of course.
I want to walk and walk and walk.
I want to have a day or two that isn’t particularly productive.
I want to stand in front of something ancient and say, Jesus fuck.
I predict I’ll say that a few times.
I might even get a tattoo while I’m there.
Ha.
My first tattoo, in my forties, in Scotland. My one boy would love it, the other hate it. So it seems appropriate.
There is something about travelling alone that I find both frightening and intoxicating.
I can walk into a bookshop.
God, the bookshops.
I can stay.
Leave.
I don’t want to disappear from my life.
Maybe this is a way to step more fully into it.
Because there has been a lot of looking backward lately. A lot of trying to understand. A lot of trying to hold things I can’t. A lot of examining what happened and what it meant and what I should have known and what I could have done differently.
Mistakes.
Regrets.
We all have them.
Perhaps… what even is that word? I say it a lot. I need to think about that sometime.
Perhaps I will sit in a café and read for an hour while rain taps against the window.
Okay, I recognize that sounds a little romantic.
Perhaps I will feel scared.
Perhaps I will feel free.
Perhaps these things will be the same feeling.
I am trying not to make Scotland carry too much meaning.
But alas, I am a meaning maker, so it naturally will.
Maybe I’ll meet someone who wants to hear my rambles. Like this one. And the many others I have stuck in my head with no one to tell them to.
And it’s okay if I don’t.
Because maybe that’s part of what I am going to find out.
That I can take myself somewhere.
That I can want something and simply go after it.
That I can be frightened and still get on the plane.
That I can walk through unfamiliar countries, alone, with no one waiting for me to make myself useful.
That I can stand somewhere ancient and feel very, very small.
