Member-only story
Please Don’t Make Me Talk About What I Write
I write about my personal struggles because I don’t want to talk about them.
It happened during a professional discussion about possible collaboration.
“Yeah, I read your work and I read your blog”
It happened at school pick up.
“Yeah, even behind your mask I know what you look like because I googled you and read your blog”
It happened during coffee with a colleague.
“Yeah, you’re so brave because I read your blog and I wouldn’t be able to do that”
When I began to write in public forums about my personal life, and especially my struggles with bipolar disorder and chronic pain, I decided not to write anonymously. In these days of blurring personal and public there was little point. As a google detective myself, I knew that where I attended school and what I was studying (cause I wrote about that), how old I was (cause I wrote about that), how many kids I had (because I really wrote about that) — you could probably find me. Like most of us, my personal is public.
When I began to write publicly, I was a new graduate student in a young marriage, in the throes of unmanaged mental illness, parenting very young children and far, far from home. A…
