hello,

I am feeling the warmth of your responses on the reader survey. The perspectives and ideas are insightful and honest. Thank you. It’s amazing and frankly, it makes me want to ask to hear from more of you, receive more perspectives that enable me to understand you and how the story landed. You can do the survey here. You don’t have to have finished the cry list in order to have valuable input in the survey (in fact not finishing is likely a helpful position to come from!). And you definitely don’t need to re-read the cry list, as one reader told me they felt they needed to do.

self-doubt

the hallway of copies

In the application I use to store my writing files, I have folders for different projects. I imagine each folder like a hallway, each file a door to a room.

In some folders there are dozens of different doors, duplicates of the thing I am currently writing or wrote the other week. These rooms are different: a little older, dustier - though from the hallway those differences are imperceptible.

I feel this need to make duplicates at various stages of the writing and editing process. I do this almost automatically. Probably part holdover from the “save your work in case the program crashes” era (the era in which I’d done most of my writing prior to last year) and part desiring confidence to cut something, knowing I can get it back from one of the five old versions. But rarely will I visit the rooms behind those doors. Once the story has moved on from a particular sentence, it doesn’t need to pick it up again. And yet, creating another door is the only way I know how to proceed down (up?) the hallway.

One of the biggest fears in my life is of a good idea slipping away. That because of forgetfulness, or more accurately, because of a failure to record something, I won’t be able to remember to the joy of an energising thought. But that has a weight to it. On the uncommon occasion I open up a door to a duplicate, after I’ve already sent that piece or chapter off, I can see small annotations I’ve made - like one cry list chapter: ‘add a small, emotion laden detail to show distance between them.’ I go back to the final version and I haven’t come good on the annotation. There is a sadness I experience at the idea of a thing being not as good as it could be, of sharing something before it is at its most beautiful. Maybe a better version of this story is behind one of those doors.

the apology letter

There is a moment in the bridge between releasing something, saying something, submitting something, and getting a response from another human being (talking, smiling, marking your work, whatever the context may be).

After the first letter had been out in your inboxes for an hour, I scribbled some titles for another letter to send. My internal monologue was running something like, ‘OK tomorrow we are writing the “apology” letter and are closing down the project.’

I suppose the subtext is that I may have believed people wouldn’t want to read more than one week of this. But I had no evidence for that, or if I did have evidence, it was all internal. My thought of what other people would have thought. My feeling about what other people would feel. Rather than the words or responses of others, I was interpreting based on my own instincts.

This seems commensurate with my attitude to begin this project. Oscillating between ‘this is OK!’ and ‘this is not good :(’. Excited to share spinning into wondering why I had told people about it. The imagined was worse than the reality.

And the reality was that I was glad to share with you, and your encouragement pushed me along to keep sharing.

The endpoint of all this is that it’s a risk to present an imperfect version of yourself. In a message, or an assignment, or by showing up to party, or a few words to a friend that you’ve never said to anyone before, or a story. Sharing is risky. And sharing something before you come up with exactly the right words/form to share is a kind of sadness. But the greater sadness is probably nothing being shared at all? Sometimes we need people to make it easier to take that risk. Thank you for creating a space where I could share.

themes / process / human beings

There were roughly three elements this story started with:

1. a narrator processing their feelings with music
2. some kind of list which detailed when each member of a group last cried
3. buying bee boxes despite someone else being anaphylactic to bees

And with just those elements bouncing off of themselves and one another, questions float to the surface:

• what kind of voice emerges from someone always processing their feelings with music? This is where so much of introspection arises from.
• crying is very obviously a way of processing emotions, how does this contrast with a narrator processing feelings through music? So we get interplay between the idea of crying in the presence of another person, which has connotations of vulnerability, lack of self-consciousness, with a narrator that is very self-conscious and shares their vulnerabilities only with a journal or an iPod.
• the list with the crying and the bee box incident are both suggestive of the tone of the story, and the way the plot might move. Can we try capture something of the absurdity of biological family as both our normal experience and so full of idiosyncrasies?
• what might cause someone to write the list? what if it was hidden? what if it was hidden and it wasn’t the narrator’s? how would the narrator feel if they found it and it was about them and the rest of their family?
• what might cause someone to buy the bee boxes? what are the consequences? would it be enough to make someone cry? how does the narrator interpret this sequence?
• etc.

I don’t really know how vapourisation “works”. But from the liquid particles, the elements, those questions bouncing against each other, they expand to what becomes a story.

So the cry list becomes a narrative with people, the dynamics between them, “family”, different ways of processing emotions, vulnerability, gossip, rash actions that lead to both public and private reactions, the distinction between external/internal, music as expression and yet escapism. And one of the unifying threads that came out of that expansion, (noting I didn’t see the thread immediately), was the following idea: relationships are about thinking we know another person.

Which is to say the characters are responding to their “idea” of each other. The narrator is interacting with the idea say, of brother as the kind of person who expresses emotion to gain social capital, of their parent’s relationship as one where the two of them are unable to have a “rational” conversation or make unified decisions.

And as it is for the characters, so it is for us as readers. When the narrator shares stories about each sibling, or when the list provides a particular caricature of each family member, it steers us into certain interpretations of these people. The narrator gets to set our expectations of each of the characters. It is this same misrepresentation the narrator is (probably) trying to avoid. But even in the act of attempting to avoid misinterpretation by his family, the narrator will be misrepresented. The dialogue for brother, mum, and dad all reveal they have the narrator pinned as a certain person: cagey/quiet, a “gamer”, unloved (or in need of romantic love).

We can’t wait until we accurately know someone in order to a) interact with them; and b) make decisions with/about them. When we are with a person, we are interacting with our representation of that person, or more kindly worded, who we know them to be. We need to work on a project with someone we just met, so we rely on what our colleague says about their working style; we see an old university friend and we talk about our memories of the situation we were in together; someone messages us saying they were rejected for a job they dearly wanted and we simply acknowledge their feelings because we know they don't appreciate looking to the next thing in the middle of their sadness.

We need this aspect of social interaction in order to function, but there can be ways this binds us. We are disappointed that someone, one of the most extroverted people we know, says they want to stay home tonight. We refuse to initiate an honest conversation with a family member about a pattern of relating we find hard, because we “know what they’d say”. Or on the other side, we feel we can’t ask for help because we’re seen as strong. And when we start to think about taking a few traits or experiences of another person and making those our interpretive lens for them, it’s not hard to see the relationship between this way of representing people we know and stereotyping, using one or two aspects of a person to auto-fill everything else about them.

I think deep relationships involve a kind of slow accumulation of information across contexts which allow people to be different to who we “know” them to be, perhaps to be less consistent, or more complex. To be both different to and similar to us. Through interrogating the list, the narrator sees different shades of each member of his family. And ultimately the silence between him and sister after 2018 is a silence of misrepresentation. Of seeing increasingly little of each other across the contexts they lived in. Of assuming who the other person was becoming. The ground between them where words, actions, or risks could have been planted instead grew into a valley.

Knowing each other takes time. Allowing that to happen involves risk. Our inconsistencies can be alarming to ourselves, so inevitably the thought of others knowing them is scary. And (maybe) we’ll be misrepresented along the way. But that risk also opens us up to the beauty of seeing that other people are as complex as we know ourselves to be, and to see the ways their complexity takes a different direction to our own. I suppose this story was my opening argument for openness towards knowing others more fully, and allowing ourselves to be known.

next week

One more reflection, and some kind of signpost as to what will come in the future.

: )