What’s too personal to publish?

I take back everything I said

Two weeks ago I wrote about putting yourself out there. A few days later, a personal essay of mine was accepted for publication, and I found myself wondering, Should I really put THAT out THERE?

The essay in question is quite personal, covering disordered eating, sexual assault, and infertility. Also, shopping!¹ Did I want all that in print?

Here’s how I paused and considered.

Made sure it’s my story

In Bird by Bird, Ann Lamott writes, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

I tend to agree. On principle and also based on the firsthand experience of silencing myself to keep others comfortable, a great setup to develop unhealthy coping skills like an eating disorder.

At the same time, I think it’s wise to ask yourself, what is actually mine? As I reread the draft of the essay that had been accepted, I noticed a few places where I hadn’t just reported my experiences with people, but had taken their inventory. Personally, I think it’s within my rights to describe how others have acted toward me, even if it might be unflattering. But I draw a line at issuing judgments. If for no other reason than I’m not inside other people’s heads. I don’t know why they did the things they did.

I asked the editor if we could trim or remove the passages where I felt I’d crossed that line. Not just because they seemed a bit unfair, and possibly inaccurate, but also because they felt beside the point. In writing the essay, I wanted to share my experience, not evaluate others.

To be honest, I think the redacted passages also made me as the author/narrator sound questionable, like I was on a tirade, which brings me to my next point.

Checked my motives

Why do you want to publish? For fame? Good luck with that. In the case of my essay, it’s going to be published in print with a digital excerpt. Suffice to say, it’s unlikely to make me famous. I consider this a good thing. The internet is scary.

Do you want revenge? Maybe pause on that. “Write angry, but don’t publish angry” is good advice in my experience. Anger can cloud your judgment. With time you may see things differently. Just consider the last time you rage-texted someone.

Also, as a writing teacher once told me, angry writing often reads like propaganda. It makes for flat characters and reductive stories. By all means, write to get your anger out; it’s cathartic. But then let that writing rest a while before you revise, revise again, and hit publish.

As mentioned above, my motive/goal with the essay is to share my experience. Not as an end in and of itself, but in order to express things that have caused me shame. I find that doing so releases some of the shame, provided I’ve been thoughtful in choosing my audience. Therapy is helpful in this regard, and I’ve spent years going over experiences described in the essay with a therapist, so actually I don’t feel a ton of shame about them today.

But there’s another reason I want to share my experience, and that’s to let others who have gone through similar things know that they’re not alone. I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, but I find it lovely: that sometimes the darker parts of our history can become gifts if we can use them to help others.

Imagined a few years down the road

The last time I published a personal essay was a couple years ago. I was leery about that one, too. There was a person described in the essay that I knew to be fairly retaliatory, and though I’d tried to show them as a three-dimensional human, I worried they might see the piece and come after me, say I’d gotten things wrong.

They didn’t. Instead, it was the editor who did this. While working through revisions, the editor said things like, “Well you should feel x here.” I think because they thought it made for a better narrative. But it wasn’t how I’d felt at all. Still, I was keen to publish and made compromises that I now regret.

That probably sounds bad. I suppose it is, but it’s also kind of normal: a piece of writing is never really done. Whether it’s been published online or in print, or been stashed for years in your documents, there are always things you might change. I started writing the essay that was recently accepted four or five years ago. I could probably tweak it for another four or five. This is just the nature of writing.

It’s also the nature of being human. Since my essay was accepted, I came across this post about regretting publishing personal writing, and it got me thinking: Maybe in a few years time, I’ll reread my essay and think, Hm I didn’t quite get that right. Or simply, I feel differently about that now. What’s so bad about that?

Maybe, in fact, it’s a good thing to see the shift in myself. As Joan Didion writes, “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

1. In case you’re wondering, the point is to examine my lifelong habit of trying to change the way I feel by managing how I look.