your silence will not protect you

reflections on a summer of not writing

I didn’t write this summer. I went to yoga on Mondays and the farmers market on Saturdays. I made homemade pesto. I started taking Spanish lessons. I went on a long trip that ended at the ocean, which I walked into timidly, bravely, until my shoulders were fully submerged.

I read a lot. I started doing what I call “microdosing” books – which is just reading multiple books at once instead of restricting myself to one book at a time. Each morning I would just choose whatever book from my bedside table interested me that day, until slowly but surely I made my way through each of them.

I didn’t write this summer but I read a lot about writing. I was encouraged by Gloria Anzaldúa’s admittance of her tendency to do anything to postpone the act of writing, and the list of reasons she chooses to write anyway:

“By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit. To show that I can and that will write, never mind their admonitions to the contrary. And I will write about the unmentionables, never mind the outraged gasp of the censor and the audience. Finally I write because I'm scared of writing but I'm more scared of not writing.” - Gloria Anzaldúa in her essay, Speaking In Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers (Thanks, Nicole for the rec!)

I attended a bi-weekly summer writing workshop (which, I guess, should count as writing) put on by Writer’s Club NY and Bed-Stuy Book Club. Every other Saturday we’d met up in person, read poems and then we’d write in response to the poems. It was my first time really engaging with poetry in a conscious way. During one of our workshops, I expressed that sometimes writing in a poetic way is difficult for me, because I am so used to writing essays. To which Danialie, one of the facilitators, responded: “Every essay is a poem.”

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During one of our workshops we read Audre Lorde’s Poetry Is Not A Luxury, which inspired me to pick up a copy of collected essays and poems by Audre Lorde in a bookstore on my trip to London. The first essay, after which the book is named, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, feels like something to meditate on.

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, and made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” - Audre Lorde in her essay, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

Those words “bruised” and “misunderstood” stuck with me. It reminded me of how, whenever, I’m writing something, whether it be an essay or a text message or birthday card or even this newsletter, there is a voice in my head constantly asking, “Is this what I really mean?”

I want to make the reader understand what I mean, exactly as I mean it. I know this is possible, because I’ve done it before. I wrote an essay in my zine last year about my experience working at a small publication in LA where I was the youngest and singular employee of color. During the nearly two years that I worked there, I was often silent about the discomfort and unhappiness I experienced.

It was scary to write that essay because I knew that my ex-coworkers would potentially read it. I was worried that they would feel betrayed by this honest exploration of my feelings and the ways in which my feelings related to them. As fearful as I was about what their reactions would be, it didn’t feel like an option not to write the essay. To this day, when I think of what I want to achieve in my writing, I think of that essay.

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

Ultimately, after a summer of not writing, I realized that I want to start taking my writing seriously. Whatever, that means. I’m figuring it out. I think a part of “taking it seriously” means, actually writing lol. Hence why I’m reviving this newsletter. I’m not sure what form this newsletter will take quite yet, but I do think this is a valuable outlet that I want to invest in, in some way.

Also there are 700 (!!!) of you subscribed, which feels like a big deal. I would love to hear about what you wrote or didn’t write this summer, what you read, what you ate, where you went, if you’ve read the essays I mentioned in this newsletter, what your thoughts are.

Until next time. <3

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