Long read: is it mine to tell?

Two summers ago my best friend cut me off. So now I describe her as my ex-best friend, and I have to scroll really far down my WhatsApp to see her name. I’m blocked on Instagram, neither of us have engaged with Facebook in years, but she still haunts my phone. Just this weekend Google photos slammed a selfie of us on that resting page where you get memories. It was called ‘TOGETHER, over the years’. Moving piano music overlays selfie after mirror selfie of us, in some, we are dressed up with lipstick and pouts, some are pyjamas in the old flat, some are holidays. On the whole we look much younger and it’s notable to remark that even three years ago my eyebrows were nothing of what they are now. 

It’s a similar feeling to the feeling I get looking at photos of me and my ex boyfriend, but I don’t engage with that kind of behaviour, and somehow Google has the memo that we broke up because no such montages of us exist. The ex boyfriend pictures only happen when I’m looking for them to show someone what he looked like (looks, he’s not dead) and that happens about once every 10 months. The feeling is of vague recognition. Because I don’t know her or him anymore, seeing a record of our closeness is alienating. I know how close we were, and have memories that are fading because even though I remember everything that’s ever been said to me, my memory of things that have happened is strangely distant. But I also find it hard to connect because the relationship ended and I don’t know where we are without the relationship. Different now. 

This is the strange thing about connections, they might burn somewhere in the ether, but out of sight out of mind feels truer than absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s more like it’s on ice. Frozen in time. If I ever see a glimpse of her now through the one active mutual follower we have between us, I feel stunned. It is alarming to think she’s continued to exist. 

Whenever I cycle through or run around Hackney Downs I think I will bump into her. In two years, we’ve collided once and I’ve seen her from the other side of the zebra crossing once. It wasn’t even a collision because I was behind her so I had the time and the chance and the choice to engage or avoid. Naturally I choose to engage, holla her name and have 75 seconds of nervous conversation. We were both nervous. She didn’t want to be in the conversation, and me, after attempting a couple of threads, I let her go, again, and cycled home. Feeling poignant, emotional and ok. The detail I hung onto was that she was smiley, uneasy, but on some level happy to see me. 

I had another chance encounter earlier this year with a man I used to be in love with who gave the impression of not loving me. Once it was too late however he did protest love but I was gone and he was left reeling and clutching his remorse. Upon seeing him on the other side of Dalston Lane, I ran almost into traffic to get in front of him. Again, he wriggled and tried desperately to get away until I got the hint and let him. I always think about the scene in the break up with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, right at the end of the movie, they bump into each other on the street and without all the noise and the baggage and wrong doing, they are happy to see each other. I can see clearly now the rain has gone plays out with the credits. It’s moving. I always hope for that moment. That moment with C last year, for a few seconds we were pleased to see each other. And even with him earlier this year, there was something ok about it all, there was a sense of look at the sky and take a big inhale about it all. 

Nothing exists in a vacuum and there’s eight years of history to account for, but the straw that broke it, the match to gasoline, was my words. She read words I’d written about her and we haven’t had a conversation since. End. But also, beginning. 

Last summer, the day we had that chance encounter was the day I was going back to the flat we moved into together years before to pack my things. It was a Friday night and I was on my way there to meet Beth and be ruthless about my clothes once and for all. It turns out I was a little too ruthless and not a week goes by without some regret for those brown boots I threw away. I thought the timing of us meeting was auspicious to say the least. On my cycle back here to the flat I live in now with Tom I thought about how any version of me who had existed before that point would have sent her a text. Would have tried to re-establish a connection or open a new conversation, an old conversation - any kind of conversation for that matter. And I felt the appearance of growth because I knew there was nothing to say. 

And then with him on Dalston Lane, I scrolled back through our messages and realised it had been a year to the day since we’d seen each other for the last time. I couldn’t help but feel more auspicious and moved by the Universe. And I even sent a friendly text to see if he too felt some spooky satisfaction from it all. I didn’t get a reply and slightly regretted the message. Sometimes things are better left unsaid, I thought to myself and wrote in a notebook somewhere else. 

On one of the last editions of my Hinge profile it said ‘you should not go out with me if you don’t want me to write about you’. I felt it was best to state it from the top, enter at your own peril - and if you can’t handle the odd poem, essay or 90,000 word memoir then best side step this profile. I have a feeling that most people didn’t truly take this on board. And I have a feeling that we don’t know what it will feel like to read about ourselves until the one fateful day when it happens. One of the less proud moments of my life was the conversation (horrible shout fest) C and I had the last time we were in front of each other in a proper way. Upon realising the reason for the slamming cupboards was because she’d read my book we ‘had it out’ for less than 2 minutes before I had to leave. The last word of that interaction was from me, yelling up the stairs, ‘look up what a fucking memoir is’. Still - not proud. But I didn’t think that’d be the one and only time we had to discuss the matter. 

In Girls season one, Ray and Charlie find Hannah’s diary and perform it at a gig in front of her best friend, Marnie. After offending everyone, Hannah says to Marnie, ‘but from what you heard, did you think it was well written?’ And I get it. If you are a writer, there is not a lot that you care about more than your words. And if you are a writer, it’s likely that you are in some ways insufferable. And it doesn’t mean I standby burning down that relationship, it just means the act of creation was something else, bigger, not actually personal. It’s just hard to say that to someone who has read their name 65 times in ink. 

It might be your name, but it was nothing to do with you.

This is the question, this is the riddle, this is what I am yet to understand. For the jury, it’s worth saying, I didn’t actually ask or say she could read it. But I also sent it to her gmail so you can see who the real villain is here. (Me, but also not on purpose).

To be a writer and to identify as a Writer capital W is, like I said, an insufferable position to take. And half the time I’m romantic and all Sylvia Plath about it (“I write only because

There is a voice within me. That will not be still”). And the other half of the time I wonder why this lady doth hold onto it above all sanity, personal relationships and else. 

After breaking up with that significant boyfriend nearly six years ago, I went to the Isle of Skye alone for two weeks and wrote 80,000 words of a novel I’d started six months before. The idea was there, but whilst I was with him I couldn’t write. Part of the dynamic of us that I willingly participated in, was that he had intellect, and I was good at cooking. Within us, there was only one spot for tortured artist and it was his. Ironically, during the almost six years of our relationship, I still wrote more words than he ever did. They were just my silly little blogs though, his pen was for short stories and big things. So, we broke up and I wrote a book. It quite literally poured out of me and it was the most romantic vision of a woman writing a book that you could find. Long wild walks in the wind and the gales of the highlands, my hair whipping around my face, my thin eyebrows stunning every selfie. Solo one pan dinners, little sleeps, bleeding sunrises over the water, cold water, crisps and hours and hours at my desk typing. I’d get the next part of the story on walks, there was no plan, it just came to me.

I got on a six hour coach to Glasgow misty-eyed with a complete manuscript and enormous excitement for becoming a best selling author. I didn’t think twice about sending him the book as an attachment to an email in early summer. And the unravelling that came in response to what he read stunned me. And the funniest thing is I didn’t learn my lesson with the large scale email attachments. I’ve pretty much blocked out this memory too because I hated it so much. Hurting someone’s feelings so much they unravel is actually not nice. And this book was fiction…just wait until he reads the memoir part of me thought. But seriously, a year later when I wrote the first heartbreak memoir someone said to me, it’s amazing, but think about whether it’s worth destroying this person for. Luckily no one wanted to publish an unknown author’s whimsical heartbreak memoir. But I gotta say a lot of them said it was well written.  :)

In my stubborn frenzy I rewrote the whole book and took the character he saw himself in - because to be fair it was a direct replication of him with a different name beginning with the same letter. I rewrote the entire thing without that character, and you know what, it made the book better. It actually set the character I called Sadie, who was handfuls of me, better. Him and I repaired and un-repaired continuously over the years that came next. A few times I thought we’d really cracked the friends with an ex thing, and then it fell apart again, and I grew into a version of me so far from the one who loved cooking as much as I did then. 

When it all kicked off with the book and him, I spoke endlessly to C about it and she fiercely said it was my story to tell. Years later she felt what it feels like to read and to not like someone else’s story. And the loop goes on. 

I wrote about my parents too, the fictional leads were based on them. When they read the book my Dad graciously acknowledged that even though he knew I was imagining them, it would never be it or be right. He saw the separation and lived there and let me do my thing too. My mum said she couldn’t believe how much of what I’d been told I remembered, and I thought hehehe I have an insane memory for emotions and things that have been said. So we circle back to the start of the story, and what it means to feel the world by writing about life, by writing about people.

Now I hate to sound this way, but I don’t feel a huge amount of choice with what I write about or why I write. And I don’t want to sound like the worst asshole in the world, but I have to do it, it is the thing that compels me to exist. Tom knows I write about him and luckily has no interest in reading in general so on the whole it passes him by. Occasionally I corner him and sit on the edge of the sofa and read passages out loud, and he listens, tells me I’m good. I know last year when I wanted to share about my miscarriage, it wasn’t his favourite thing and it’s not his style to open up to the internet. So there’s an unspoken agreement between us that I can write about my life, but there’s a line. And perhaps what I’ve been learning by crashing through it several times is where the line is. 

C told me once that it was my story to tell and self righteous parts of me hung onto that, and then, grey area began to emerge. But what if it is our story and what if it becomes hurtful and unkind? What then? Worth being an artist for that? Sometimes yes, sometimes still yes. 

I am only writing about other people to write about and understand myself. And I liked to think as long as I threw myself under the bus as much as I let the wolves feast on them, then, like, fair game. But what if someone writes down the thing that you fear most about yourself or the thing you fear most about how you come across in the relationship? That is gnarly. That is worthy of extra therapy sessions. 

I never got to have a conversation with C about what she read that created such a dramatic chain of events. That I wrote something that caused her to pack her life in boxes, leave a house she loved and never speak to me again. But it must have been quite bad. When I tell people they ask me what it was and I say I don’t know. I have a few ideas, but I actually don’t know. Was it where our relationship was always going? Was it the act of writing? Did it feel too true? Did it feel completely untrue? I was defensive to begin with, angry too, my very own lawsuit. It’s easier to feel angry than sad. That comes sometimes, but mostly now there’s acceptance. There is an ok-ness with not knowing. Like I said at the start, it was the match, the gasoline had been leaked by us both for years. 

Earlier this year, I had an article published in the Guardian and it was actually a big deal. I marched home with the paper under my arms with enormous giddy pride. I spoke about other people in the article, they were coded A, B, C and D. If they read it, they’d recognise themselves. And I got a bunch of messages from people guessing who was who, mostly they were right. I got one message from someone who freaked out that she was A, and only realised she wasn’t when she confirmed I didn’t do my teacher training with her. In all the messages I got, there was no backlash. I was surprised. I was publicly brave and no one publicly wanted me burned. 

I won’t stop writing about my life so I won't be able to stop writing about other people. I’d love to write a disclaimer though, for it all, it would say: I know we are all terrible. I don’t think you are more terrible than me. I would prefer to never hurt someone as much as I hurt C, or rattle someone as much as I rattled him. I don’t know where this puts my moral code, my black heart or likelihood for going to hell. But in a million ways I know I am good, and in a million ways I know I am flawed and amongst all of that, I write it down.