Looking at My Own Face

I’m working on a book right now, and for the first time in my life it feels like something I will actually finish and not hate. I haven’t begun to wrestle with the ethics of trying to get it published. The book is about my mother because everything I write is about my mother. People are probably tired of hearing me write about her. I’m getting tired of it.

This won’t stop me, though. And though I don’t quite know where I land on the ethics of writing about someone who can’t respond, through the lens of my relationship to that person, I still want to get it published. I want people to read it. I want my mother to read it.

Sometimes writing feels like a terrible burden, and then I feel extremely pretentious for feeling this way. Sometimes writing doesn’t feel like anything in particular. It’s just a thing I do, sometimes, not consistently enough. Sometimes writing feels like the only way I can show my true self to the world – yet what does that say about my definition of true if what I’m sharing is entirely within my control to shape? 

I guess it can be true that there are things people will discover about me through my writing that I’m too close, or tunnel-visioned, to notice myself. 

Perhaps it’s true that controlling your own narrative isn’t wholly possible. There is always some element outside your ability to capture it. You can’t look at your own face the way another person can look at your face. Sometimes the thing I want most in the world is to look at my own face.

What does this say about me? 

Or another way to phrase the same question: from what am I trying to excuse myself?

Lately, I’ve been caught on the edges of conversations that themselves edge around big, philosophical questions no one has the answers to. They feel like some kind of intellectual game, with consequences made not real by the distance of privilege. I wonder about my own privilege. Am I doing enough? Who am I to say anything about anything I’m not directly affected by? Is that a cop out? Even now, with this paragraph, from what am I trying to excuse myself?

In my last year at Penn State, I wrote a short story about a working class woman who lives on a horse farm. She is also, inexplicably, a truck driver. Aliens feature prominently in the plot. An alien descends on the woman’s farm and presents itself as her doppelgänger. She instinctively feels the need to kill it. The alien who is her but not her does everything right. It mucks the horse stalls perfectly, performs chores, maybe even mends a fence (I can’t remember). But most importantly, it takes elegant, compassionate care of the woman’s mother who just happens to be bed-bound as a result of a tragic accident. The story ends with the woman cornering the alien at the edge of the neighboring farm’s pond, turning it around, and pushing it down into the water. With this action and for the first time in her life, the woman is able to see the whorl of hair on the back of her head. She instinctively feels the need to touch it gently. I think it’s important to note here that she doesn’t end up touching it. She drowns the alien and the story ends.

If I could fight my doppelgänger, I would fight it to the death. At least, that’s what I’ve always believed. But maybe it’d be braver to let the doppelgänger win. Maybe the doppelgänger doesn’t even want to fight.

I know I have more than one birthmark on my back. But how many exactly? Only you can tell me the number, and even then I’d have to trust you were telling the truth.