About the confessional Catch-22

I'm between a rock and a hard place, but both are of my own making.

Recently, I made a tremendously difficult decision. I didn’t want to make it. I didn’t enjoy making it. I had to reconcile feeling like I “had no choice” with the brutal truth that I had a choice but both making and not making it came with ugly consequences. And the only real difference was how much short-term turbulence I was willing to exchange for long-term stability.

That’s annoyingly vague, isn’t it?

Here’s what I can tell you: I cut someone off. Blocked; done; never speaking again. I am not good at this, and it takes an almost geological amount of pressure to get me to do it.

I have done this deliberately only once before, over 15 years ago. That person had done nothing objectively bad, but our continued relationship was unbalanced, unhealthy, and unfixable. It was difficult bringing to an end some four or five years of closeness that had once been good and then rapidly rusted. This time I was grappling with a far more complex situation, and difficult is the understatement of the century. I spent hours in therapy over it. It was a question of years, decades—a connection since childhood—with the seriously impaired perspective that goes with that.

Now, I could go into details here and explain and justify and unpack why I needed to remove myself from a situation that I felt had become untenable. I might feel better on one level if I did. But much worse on another.

Because here is my limit, my failure as a would-be confessional writer: I only allow myself to share my side of the story. And in this instance not only is it impossible to do that and still be coherent, but it would feel self-serving. Like I was implying a character assassination without the balls to actually pull the trigger. It’s one-sided. It’s grubby. Whatever the end of our association, I feel no malice. Anger, yes. Frustration. Sadness and anxiety. But no desire whatsoever for retaliation or drama.

So why do I mention this at all? Well, I’m interested in what’s interesting. Is pure introspection—where you might not get to know what I’m reacting to, but we can explore the reaction together—enough to a) help me process my complicated feelings and b) worth reading on your part? I mean it’s what you’re going to get either way, but I do hope I’m not boring you.

The thing is, though, lots of writers don’t make this decision. These character magpies and emotional truffle pigs sift through their own and other people’s experiences, cast judgement, and carve them into stone tablets.

Like most people, I’m fine with it as long as it’s mostly dressed up in plausible deniability (two people I once worked with have made it into my drafts repeatedly as really annoying office archetypes). Unless you’re Nora Ephron, I guess; but to get away with it you’d need to be as good as Nora Ephron, and you’re probably not. But as soon as it’s clearly a real person, not just a handful of exaggerated personality traits in a trench coat, I recoil at the idea of giving them more shape than the vaguest pencil sketch. Like taking a clandestine photo on the tube to mock someone on your social media, it feels fundamentally unfair to give only one point of view—even if it’s the only one I have.

(I mean, obviously it’s different if you’re the victim of a crime telling your story or something. Or a famous person writing an autobiography. I’m talking about if, like, Cat Person had actually been an outright confessional.)

This might leave me doomed to be half a writer, or to conclude that I shouldn’t write at all. But these are the 2am thoughts that actually call me to my keyboard. The popcorn crumbs I need to fish out of my bra.

I’ll tell you what I do know. As I’ve mentioned before, my relaxing hobby is reading the 95% made up shit on r/AITA and r/relationshipadvice and my God. The amount of people who say leave him and run and go LC and go NC like you can just do that at the drop of a hat is the strongest reinforcement I have that either most people talk a good game they couldn’t actually play or my brain really is very far from typical.

Once I’ve decided I want to, I let people in very quickly and deeply and my heart breaks to let go of them—no matter what the reason. I had a friend ghost me a few years ago and it stung like a motherfucker for a full year. The ache continued long after I realised they’d done me a favour because I didn’t actually like them all that much. Sometimes I still feel bad about it just because the process of bonding and then separating is so bound up with my over-investment and rejection sensitivity. I know that the two people I’ve had to separate from are also highly attuned to that sensitivity, which makes me feel like a tremendous gaping arsehole. Even if it’s 100% the right decision.

For me, making a call like this is not just about the logic. It’s not just about how I would like to be seen by others and what I believe it means to be a good person. It is an affront to my operating system. It is not what I do. I am built to find my people and offer them a vein to drink from. I don’t martyr myself; I get plenty back and sometimes I demand it, too. But like my mother—about whom I do now write because all bets are off now she’s dead and I learned my terrible difficulty in holding a boundary from her, so—I find a great deal of self-worth in being able to say or do the thing that will help. Setting out to excommunicate someone is, ironically, anathema.

But I did it. And I’m living with it. And I can write about it only in the most loose terms because I set myself in a narrow valley between the need to overshare and think out loud and the need to extend the same public privacy to others as I would want for myself. And I will dither over publishing this. So if I did, know that it was uncomfortable. Deeply uncomfortable. And maybe that’ll be enough to make it feel substantial.