the apology tour

on shame, self-loathing, and finding new ways to speak

Whenever I attempt to write recently, I am overwhelmed by a feeling of immense grief. I’m not sure exactly what it is that I am mourning: maybe it is the ease with which I used to share my words with the world, or the trust I worry I’ve lost with many who once supported my work. I internalize every email unread like never before, tail tucked between my legs, over-apologizing for even existing, worrying at every turn that all the ears once pointed in my direction have gone deaf. Maybe I make it worse by visibly sifting through whatever remains in public view. I move through life assuming all can see the egg on my face, but it seems ever so solipsistic to believe that everyone and their mother knows what I’ve endured.

I feel like John Travolta in Blow Out, obsessively replaying the crime scene of my own crash-out; I’ve been wandering around recording sounds like him too. I’ve always specialized in self-flagellation, but lately it feels like a divine calling to suffer as recompense for my sins. The apology tour is well underway, as I attempt to rebuild whatever bridges I can from the kindling I didn’t burn, begging for a meager piece of your forgiveness. But you also could have absolutely no idea what the fuck I’m talking about, and feel like I don’t owe you anything; this kind of blubbering might just draw additional attention to unfortunate events best left in the dustbin of fading memories.

My recent fear of writing has so much to do with interpretation, because it’s based on my words that so many began to diagnose me. Even now, I can feel the eyes of some of you reading this, weighing your calculations as to my current mental stability from behind spiritual plexiglass, crossing to the other side of the figurative street whenever I appear in your mentions. Words are the greatest reminder of what happened: text messages I sent in self-righteous anger, now-deleted posts that have been preserved by screenshot, iPhone notes filled with ideas that will never come to pass. In the moment, these words seemed so right and true, but as time begins to pass from the season of my illness, they feel like false idols. I am desperately trying to scrub them away before anyone else should see, but the consequences cannot be deleted so easily.

Sometimes real blood can be spilled when you wield your words as weapons. But words are also part of the way back. An earnest voicemail from the blocked inbox unheard until now. A plea whispered through the slipstream that never arrives. Half-formed sentences spun in circles searching for the password that will allow me back into your heart. Whittling a new voice from the splinters. Offering a prayer of thanks for what I didn’t throw away, and confessing what I may or may not have done.

As I throttled toward my rock bottom, someone I once considered a friend said this about me: “She doesn’t want help, she wants attention.” Those words only dug into a rapidly deepening wound, but for whatever pain they caused, I can see in hindsight that they were right. There was, at first, an addictive thrill to all the eyes I could feel upon me because of my acting out, which turned spiraling publicly into something like a full-time job. Any publicity is good publicity type shit. I felt certain that if I made enough noise, no matter the cost, that the righteousness of my convictions would be received by whoever I needed to hear it.

But on a dime, all that perception became intensely violating. In my most delusional moments, I was so certain I had inspired some social movement, or at the very least transformed my own suffering into boundary-pushing performance art. When I wised up and the storm clouds in my mind began to part, all that remained was a deep shame, as I regretfully accepted that most people were watching because they needed a main character to feed to the shit-talking machine of the groupchat industrial complex, or because they were genuinely concerned for my wellbeing. It forces you to reckon with how often you’ve dunked on or dissected or drawn-and-quartered someone in genuine mental duress. There is so little gained materially from stripping your soul bare before social media, and everything to lose.

A silver lining of my year of living dangerously is that so much of the anger I once clung to like a poison-soaked pacifier has left my body. There are moments when I feel a flash of rage at how I have been treated, but it’s only a mask for the deep hurt whimpering beneath the surface. I have no more will to fight. So much of my youth was wasted on petty bickering passed off as pressing discourse, hurling mud because someone else picked the wrong brass baubles. I drove genuine friends away over mere differences of opinion, waging relentless battle over which arrangement of letters was most correct. A legion of chickens came home to roost all at once in part because of how I craved conflict and confrontation. I sincerely believed the only soulmate I would ever find was my own self-loathing, flirting with the destruction of my soul as I tip-toed on the bleeding edge of the abyss, always wishing that if I lingered long enough around the fire, someone would do me the favor of pushing me into the pit. The drama I stirred up was always a deflection of my existential dissatisfaction with the skeleton called my self.

Recently, a new friend recommended Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis,” an extended letter written upon his time in prison for the grievous crime of being himself. His equal embrace of life’s treasures alongside its agonies speaks more acutely to my own recent experience than anything I’ve encountered since my life fell apart. Though I am not quite famous, I can relate to the dreadful feeling that your name—and your greatest shame—is “written on the rocks in lead,” and that your public judgment will be final:

I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.

Still, in the very fact that people will recognise me wherever I go, and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can discern something good for me.  It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can.  If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.  People must adopt some attitude towards me, and so pass judgment, both on themselves and me.  I need not say I am not talking of particular individuals.  The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.  Nor am I making any demands on life. In all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so imperfect.

Now, like never before in my life, do I know what beauty and sorrow are alike, for the two seemingly bifurcated poles actually cling to each other like conjoined twins. In many ways, my journey into hell began with the feeling that I had finally produced my “one beautiful work of art,” followed by the feeling that the piece of art in question might end my life, or at least completely unravel it in ways I never could have foreseen. That’s probably the unwritten reason, the one I will always be trying and failing to explain, for my presently complicated relationship with the written word; I poured every single one of them into a triumphant sermon that turned out to be one part crucifixion, one part exorcism, and one part excommunication. It has all left me with so much to say, but little understanding of how to say it, which has pushed me to find new ways to speak, and new methods of articulating my existence.

Field recordings have become my favorite creative outlet, and I feel excited at the infinite possibilities of sound, if only fucking around. Even when I don’t do anything with the files, making my own music from the world around me fundamentally changed the way I engage with it, finely-tuned to my acoustic periphery like a bird-watcher scanning the horizon for rare species, eavesdropping on my own reality before I flip it and remix it. Visual collages and cut-up art have provided a really fulfilling means of expression for me too, as I look for phrases and images that speak to my experience without betraying the things I can’t say out loud.

There’s a special power in taking the trash heap of your life and turning it into something beautiful, or at least something real. It’s healing to look at or listen to something I’ve created and know that no one else in the world could have brought these particular elements together in the patterns I’ve combined. I’ve spent so long coveting the brains of others, wishing I had their talents, instead of cultivating my own. Just as I have lost the will to fight others, I think it’s time I stop fighting my own brain too, and find a way to finally make a home with the friend I’ve so often mistaken for a mortal enemy.

I don’t really ever know what I’m saying anymore, but more than ever I am grateful for the opportunity to say it. Thank you for listening.