I’m worried my musings will be less Richard Gadd and more Martha.

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Dear Hera,

Last year I left a relationship with my ex-girlfriend to date someone else. This decision, as she had predicted, was the wrong one; at the time I stood by my decision but recognised that the way I went about it wasn’t the greatest. My ex fairly and understandably blocked me on social media.

A couple months ago, someone let it slip that my ex had been making music, and despite avoiding looking into it in the past, I let them play the music for me. There was one particular song that stood out to me in that I could see myself in some of the metaphors and musings, catching a hinted potential for some lingering fond feelings. 

My issue is that I’m a writer and want to explore and pick apart my feelings in a creative essay and add it to my site of self-published works. To really delve into the politics of being perceived, of watching and reacting to art that people make inspired by events you witnessed or took part in and reactions in turn. However, I worry that my musings and reflections won’t come across like Richard Gadd’s critically-acclaimed reflective mini-series and will instead be more like an obsessed, self-absorbed email from Martha. 

I can’t even Sabrina Carpenter ‘All because I liked a boy’ my way out of this one, I can’t turn my potential essay into a song filled with vague metaphors. It’s especially awkward because I might be making a big fuss about nothing and reading too far into a song I wasn’t supposed to hear. But maybe that’s my medicine to swallow, to know a little but not enough and expose myself as some vapid person who can’t let the past go.

I just want to know, should I write my personal essay and pick this apart, or will I give off Martha from Baby Reindeer having pried where I shouldn’t have?

Sincerely and dramatically, 

Mini Martha

Dear Mini Martha,

I spent the morning “researching your letter” by watching a long and complicated explainer about Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and Joshua Bassett by a young woman holding a big red leather handbag, and periodically advertising gut health supplements, and it was an enlightening and enjoyable part of my morning, so thank you. Prior to this, the entirety of my Sabrina Carpenter knowledge came from the Joel Golby tweet: 

sabrina carpenter: so what’s the joker?

barry keoghan: he’s sart of like an evil porson

There’s a lot going on in your letter. But I’m struggling to figure out what you want out of all this. Do you want to get back together with your ex? Do you want to write a fascinating and nuanced essay on forgiveness, loss, desire, forgiveness (again) and the haunted mirror which is memory? Do you want to get back together with your ex by writing a fascinating and nuanced essay about forgiveness, loss, desire, the fallibility of etc, etc. 

First off, is your ex’s music publicly available? If it isn’t, don’t publish a piece of writing about it unless you want to completely torpedo your relationship with that person. But if it’s out there on the internet, whatever. Once you publish something you forfeit the ability to control what it means to other people, and that goes for the both of you. 

Just because you broke up with your ex for someone who didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. Unless it was the wrong decision, in which case it was totally the wrong decision. Leaving someone for someone else doesn’t have to “work out” to result in an accidental net good. Either way, you’re blocked. The best way to recover from accusations of love-rattery, is just to shrug handsomely and cop to it. 

It seems like what you’re really asking is how to make a good and emotionally revealing piece of art based on your own life, without being perceived as embarrassing, and boy do I have bad news for you. Being willing to risk humiliation is the price of entry. And the only way to mitigate the harm is by making something which is better than it has any right to be. 

I think you should just write it and see what happens. Not necessarily with the intention of publishing it. But you should always write anything you’re interested in. It’s the best way to become a better writer. 

If, after you have written and workshopped it, you decide that you’re proud enough to publish it, you can start to overthink the consequences. If you’re worried about hurting someone’s feelings, that’s reasonable. You also have to prepare for your ex to turn around and say “that had absolutely nothing to do with you.” But like capitalism, a good personal essay can subsume all critiques into itself and profit from them. You can make your feelings of trepidation a literary feature, not a bug. 

If you want to know whether this essay will bring shame or glory upon you, all I will say is there’s no way to tell until it exists. When it’s all down on paper, you can give your critical ear free reign. You can interrogate an emotionally insincere confession, or cut a self-important anecdote. You can change your ex’s favourite drink to “grape blast” if it improves the cadence of the sentence. You could also share it with a writing group, or a friend, and seek some impartial feedback. But it’s hard to productively worry about the future of something which is only, at this stage, a concept. 

My advice is to do the work, for your own enjoyment, with whatever cognitive dissonance you can muster. In this scenario, cognitive dissonance means trying as hard as you can not to think about the possibility of it ever being read. Write it for yourself, with as much vulnerability and intelligence as you can bring to the page. I stopped watching Baby Reindeer after the first episode, but from what I gather, the thing that people who liked it liked about it was the emotional honesty and the willingness of the creator to expose himself, in addition to Martha, and his own unresolved trauma and complicity in the unfolding situation. Or at least that’s what the reviews seem to suggest. 

After you’ve finished writing it, and sat with it for a few weeks, you can begin asking the awkward questions. Does this bring harm to anyone? Have I said anything criminal or stupid? Am I in a hurry to publish this, or could it use longer to cook? In short: are these the words of a evil porson? Above all, you should trust your own taste and judgement, because that’s a skill to be refined, just like any other. It’s also not the end of the world if you publish something bad. But take an evidence-based approach, and see what you’re working with first. 

Best of luck, 

Hera