it is tiring

A person can get used to almost anything given enough time — personality will grow around adversity the way tree roots will grow around a rock, shaping itself in response to the immovable.

BERLANT: This isn’t giving anything away, but there’s something early on in the show that teases some kind of secret, some kind of confessional, which is a trope, sort of, of the one-woman show. This idea of a confession, or a secret, or something that’s going to be revealed, or something that’s inherently autobiographical. So there’s this secret. And the show’s very vulnerable for me, and I think that, in many ways, it reveals a lot about myself. Sometimes I’m surprised by, or just really interested in, any kind of reaction that gestures towards some kind of disappointment that I didn’t really reveal myself. Or that Kate Berlant didn’t really go there. FIELDER: And that’s the thing. Just because you’re not saying everything literally and explaining it, it doesn’t mean the performance isn’t communicating deep insecurities and deep vulnerabilities. It’s interesting that people have a certain idea of what sincerity is sometimes.

i’d like the time to get carried away

strangers inquire about my reproductive choices

how to read poetry

What had to be done was clear

this is a test

I gave myself a month. I assigned myself 50 pages a day. These were commitment devices that would have once filled me with shame. If I was reading 50 pages a day because I’d decided to, that meant I was failing to have the kind of unforced experience I’d come to fetishize as “authentic” absorption: as if the book would exert a kind of gravitational force to which I’d be utterly enthralled. But in reading those 50 pages a day, I found that any binary I might draw between absorption and intentionality was far more porous than I’d imagined: I moved constantly between rapture and effort; often these modes were entangled and simultaneous. That month of commitment ended up mattering not because I was always immersed but because I often wasn’t, and kept reading anyway — because I was perpetually recommitting myself to the novel, and because that recommitment was an act with great wingspan and grit. I was invited into a different understanding of what authentic literary absorption might look like: neither struggle nor bliss but a strange weave of the two; not completely “losing myself” in a book but feeling myself more deeply in the act of reckoning with it — becoming aware of my own attention, becoming an agent in its application. Difficulty often becomes an engine forcing intimacy between a book and its reader; that expenditure of effort and attention becomes a kind of glue. I don’t like to unthinkingly valorize the impenetrable, but I do appreciate the attempt it necessitates — the duration and density of that process. When we read a book that requires that effort — when the act of reading becomes rigorous and self-aware, rather than effortless and transparent — we get to have a history with what we’ve given ourselves to, a history etched into us by the demanding friction of its difficulty.

One of the most delicate moments between the writer of a personal essay and the person commissioning or editing it can come in the form of a request for more details. "When I think a writer is holding back, I try to find out why by asking questions,” Martin explained of her process. “Lots of gentle yet detailed questions. A first pass on an essay might be nothing but me asking questions in the comments, along with a few strategic cuts; no line edits yet.” Chung said that she tries to frame questions like these in terms of her own curiosity. “I try not to push for more personal details,” she emphasized. “I might say ‘Do you want to write more about this particular thing?’ or ‘I had [these questions] reading your piece’–but that doesn’t mean the writer has to address all of those things in the essay. I can ask more questions, but ultimately the writer has to be in control of what and how much they share.”