Doing Laundry With Strangers
or, why the hell do i do this?
I’m trying to publish a book.
It’s a travel memoir that tracks my internal journey through despair, doubt, and trauma, against my external journey through India over several years. It’s deeply personal, and there’s not much I don’t reveal in its pages.
I talk about how a personal trauma shattered me to the point where I was nearly agoraphobic. How, for months, depression and anxiety fought over the shards and splintered leftovers of the confident person I used to be.
Anxiety whispered, “What if you never get back the person you were?”
Depression responded, “What does it matter anyway?”
I talk about how abandoned I felt by the God who had been so real in my childhood. And how, when I opened up even a little bit about what I was going through, people speaking in His name gave me reductionist, dismissive, bumper sticker answers.
“God works all things together for the good of those who love Him.”
It was like sand in an open wound. It burned and it was abrasive and it did nothing to validate or bear witness to my suffering. It made me angry because, deep down, I felt like this God they were foisting on me, this absent entity, was the same one who had lured me into a boxing ring to face an opponent I never agreed to fight.
Eventually, I got to the point where I was fairly certain all my prayers were being marked “return to sender.” There was nothing on the receiving end.
No one was coming to save me.
It was at this point that my husband turned to me and said, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if we went to India?” For the next two years, I would stumble headlong through a foreign world that aggressively rubbed against some of my most tender wounds.
I don’t want to give any more of it away. Suffice it to say I’m exceedingly proud of it. It’s the closest thing to an actual-piece-of-my-soul that exists.
But I’ve now reached the point in the book-birthing process when I have to do the hardest, most excruciating thing:
Put the manuscript in the hands of the people who lived it with me.
Friends. Family. The people mentioned on the page.
People who knew me during this journey, although they knew almost nothing about the turmoil that was swirling around inside my soul. But they’re about to know it all.
And there’s something uniquely terrifying about that.
Tons of writers give advice on the importance of writing honestly about what you’ve experienced:
Erica Jong said, “When you’re a writer, you can only write what’s really true. If you try to protect the people you love, it’s almost impossible to write.”
Anne Lamott said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
But not many give advice about how to tell people that you’ve written about them. Almost every modern memoirist interview centers on this moment: when the writer had to break the news to people. And in nearly every one I’ve read, they’re just as clueless and scared.
We’re all out here shaking in our boots and walking ahead anyway.
The most recent distribution of my manuscript rocked me so thoroughly that for more than 24 hours after I hit ‘send,’ my hands couldn’t stop shaking. I felt sick and dizzy.
And the whole time, I thought,
“Why the hell do I do this?”
Why do I wrestle words and pin them to the page in such a public way?
Whether it’s in my manuscript or here on Substack, it’s not my job. My mortgage doesn’t rely on my transparency.
I try to remind myself:
I do this in the hopes that my words give other people a chance to see themselves a little bit clearer, with a little bit more self-love, and a little bit more hope. And that their loneliness is sent running. At least for a while.
But for every stranger who says, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way, thank you for putting into words what I could not.” Another reader (often someone who knows me in real life) misunderstands or misconstrues or takes it personally. And usually has to let me know about it.*
And listen, I’m very comfortable receiving feedback on my writing. That’s 60% of my day job (maybe more), and I’ve actually come to enjoy it. There’s a difference, though, between giving someone feedback on how they write and how they interpret their own unique lived experiences.
It’s never the same person sliding into my DMs, and it’s not always rooted in hate. Sometimes, it comes from people who know and love me deeply. And even if we end up agreeing to disagree, I will always welcome feedback from this very small group of people.
Sometimes, though, it comes from far-off acquaintances and self-appointed keyboard warriors who can’t tolerate the idea of a differing opinion existing in the world.
But it happens with almost everything I write. So I know there’s got to be hushed voices I’ll never hear and private texts that I’ll never see:
“Did you see what she wrote? Why would you put that out into the world? Does she not own a diary? Yikes. Someone buy her a journal.”
That’s the trade-off when you write and publish these kinds of words: if anyone can read them, anyone can read them.
That means strangers who might need them, yes. But that also means used-to-be friends who have cast me as a villain in their stories (because sometimes that’s exactly what I was).
It means ex-boyfriends and estranged family members. People who have no right to know my heart so intimately, and yet I throw wide the doors and bare my chest every time I publish.
Is this crazy? Is this foolish? Do I have some unexamined, deep-seated need for attention or something? Do I just think so highly of my own opinions and discernment that it demands an audience? Am I sick?
(Alright, maybe I should’ve left these questions in my journal.)
The electric clothes dryer is not even 100 years old.
(stick with me)
That means that, for nearly all of human history, our freshly washed laundry had to air dry at the pace of the breeze. We would hang our stuff on a line, or fence, or tree branch, and there it would sit. Visible to whoever happened to be around.
I wonder how often someone accused of airing their dirty laundry (I’m speaking literally here) was actually hanging up clean laundry that was just very profoundly stained.
It had gone through something that no amount of scrubbing and suds and hot water could lift.
No longer laundry, it became a tapestry that spoke of struggle. Of deep, dark blood. Of how things went horribly wrong.
But the casual passerby screwed up their nose and wondered how someone could just air their dirty laundry like that for anyone to see.
If we were to look under that passerby’s bed, though, we might find something balled up and festering. Something in desperate need of bright sunshine and clean air and strong lye. A lot of people would rather live with rot than do the work to clean it and be perceived as airing dirty laundry in the process. I used to be one of them.
Tell you what: I’ll hang up my deeply stained linen (fresh from the washboard of journals and years of therapy), and you hang up yours. We’ll find a spot under their billowing masses to lie down, and you can tell me about your stains. How they got there. How hard you worked to get them out.
I want to hear about when your focus shifted away from desperately trying to restore things to their former state and toward the realization that this was going to be your new normal.
Maybe that passerby might see us. And maybe they’ll feel empowered to finally scrub out of their own mess.
They might not opt to line dry where we can see it. That’s okay. Not everyone’s going to want to hang on this same, very visible line as me. The goal is not exposure for the sake of exposure. That can actually cause more damage in some instances.
No, the goal is not exposure. The goal is for each of us to find healing and ease in the perfectly imperfect way our stories are unfolding. Stains and all.
That’s why I do this. It’s hard work, and some people won’t understand. But there’s something special about laying under clean linen with the kindred spirits of strangers and, together, finding a way to reframe our stains.
*If you know a writer who is fearlessly, consistently putting good things out into the world, odds are they are also experiencing some blowback. You can support them by liking, commenting, and sharing their work. All these things cost nothing, but they are profoundly impactful for fledgling writers.
I’m always looking for new writers I can link arms with. Drop your favorite rising voices (or sound off yourself!) in the comments below. And tell me how you approach writing about other people or about things that you know will bother people.