I'll Be Seeing You

The Problem with Identity, Return to Sender 7/10

Dear CC-New York City,

I’ve had your winter solstice card out since you sent it. It’s beautiful. The image, the words, the design– all of it. It made my heart ache to read it, in the best possible way. You really have a way with words.

I love it, too, because it feels like a secret. Ever since we bonded over the desire to celebrate the solstices and the equinoxes instead of the christmases and fourths of july, I’ve felt so validated. Like I’m not a quack or a weirdo or just some angsty kid. You’ve made me feel like I’m reaching for something real and I’m not alone, and here’s this folded cardstock, a testament to resisting the norm and instead making meaning when and where we see fit.

The card is just the visible residue, though, of your influence on me. Despite the tiny snippets of time we’ve spent together, the lessons you’ve taught me have had an outsized impact on me. As a character, you may be scant on the pages of my life, but you remain, nevertheless, an undeniable presence in my story.

I swear I remember that hike we went on like it was yesterday. The muddy trail, the mossy trees, that rocky surface of the lookout we climbed to. I remember what we saw, but even more clearly, I remember parts of our conversation, and they play back in my mind sometimes as clear as listening to a podcast.

I remember, most of all, the way you talked about your son. I’d never heard anyone talk about parenthood like you do, like it’s this incredible adventure, full of self- and world-discovery. Not something you do for your child, your partner, or for anyone but yourself. You never got into the familiar minutiae of “my kid achieved this” or “my kid is so good at” whatever. You said things like, “my son is experiencing melancholy for the first time– isn’t that fascinating?” And it is. I’m not really one for kids myself, but I was interested in hearing about yours. We talked so much about what it must be like to experience emotions for the first time. Imagine, for example, sorrow– an emotion that feels like it’ll never go away. How scary it must be to feel that, and lack the experience to know that it will, eventually, end. Childhood, we concluded, is horrifying. How did we ever survive it?

But there was something else in these stories you told too. Something hidden in the declarative structure and the breathless tenor of your voice. A feeling like, “Isn’t it terrible, and wonderful?” A between-the-lines insistence that it's precious to see the cyclicality of life and growth, and to honor it this time around in a way we weren’t capable of doing when we, ourselves, were kids.

“Isn’t there something magical about it,” you asked without asking, “about getting to witness someone making themself?”

____

I’m not the most online person these days (and neither are you, I see), but one thing that always made me feel old and out-of-touch was the internet’s insistence that everyone publicly reduce themselves and one another to their identities.

This formal idea of “identity” is one I didn’t come upon until college. I remember doing an exercise in a linguistics class where we “identified our identities.” There were the obvious identities; race, class, country of origin, ability, gender. But this activity extended into things like preferences, ideologies, and opinions. In the end, we were told to claim our identities as “mac and cheese lovers,” “dog people,” and “swifties.” Maybe that was the point of the exercise, to illustrate the difference between immutable identity and optional identity. All I remember is how silly it seemed, and how it made me suspicious of the idea of identities writ large.

I’m not really one for claiming identities. It feels so… final. It’s the same reason I don’t have any tattoos. It’s not that I don’t like tattoos (I really like tattoos!) or that I haven’t thought of some good tattoo ideas. I don’t have tattoos because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I change a lot. How could I then, in good conscience, make a decision for all my future selves? Talking on the internet often feels like a kind of tattoo. No matter what happens, what you’ve said, done, and been never really goes away. So it always felt prudent to me to leave as many identity boxes blank as possible.

The more undefined I remain, I believe, the more space I’ll have to grow.

____

Your motherhood stood out to me specifically because it was so clear that that identity does not define you. You were candid that being a mom was something you’d been uncertain about from the beginning, that it was not a girlhood fantasy, but a sober decision you considered and reconsidered for a long time. You doubted the promises of motherhood, and took the drawbacks very seriously. There was no starry-eyed predestination to your decision, instead it was something you optimistically chose with the full knowledge of its potential for disaster. To me, your perspective was revelatory.

As I say though, motherhood does not define you. It seems to me that your dominant identity is “writer.” Me, I’m not a literary-type, I don’t move in particularly well-read circles, and I do not attend many readings or salons. But I’ve met writers before. I’ve met people who have won fancy awards and written sentences and stories that have changed my life. And I can’t really explain it, but they did not seem so much like “writers” as you do.

I hope it’s okay to confess (and that you’ll forgive me for being young and judgemental), but when you first introduced yourself to me as a writer, one with an unrelated day job, I was skeptical. I mean, the fact that I have a non-writing day job is the exact reason why I struggle to identify as a writer, let alone as an artist. You were not insistent on the title, not pushy about your accolades or your right to make the claim. You just said it.

“I am a writer.”

I chaffed, thinking “why does she get to call herself a writer when I don’t get to call myself a writer?”

It took me most of the week, hours and hours spent together, to understand what you meant when you said, “I am a writer.” Uncreative me, what I heard was, “Writing is my job. I’ve put in the work, I’ve had success, and I’ve earned the title.” But that’s not what you meant at all.

I think what you meant was something more like, “to me, everything is a story. Every space is a setting. Every word, a spark of meaning worthy of discussion and debate. Every sentence, a chance to move, devastate, or to leave wanting. Every story, a living, breathing world. I am a writer in the same way that I am a mother and wife. I am bonded to it by love, and choice.”

____

When I met your son, he seemed just as cool and multi-dimensional as you had described. I could tell that he's not just “your kid,” he’s a compatriot, collaborator, colleague, and a person unto himself. Until I met you both, it never occurred to me how much children probably need this kind of acknowledgement from their parents, that they are separate and unknowable people. That they are worthy of not only a parent’s unconditional hope and faith, but also of the much more fragile but genuine experience of being believed in.

For a kid or anyone else, to be believed in is to be acknowledged as imperfect. Belief imbues the recipient with worthiness, but doesn’t raise them to infallibility. To believe is to have too little evidence to be certain, and to make up the difference with desire. It is to conclude optimistically, but to acknowledge the possibility of being wrong. The wild thing about belief is, if we truly believe in something, it is indistinguishable from knowing. True belief requires that we change our thinking, our hearts, and our lives.

This transformative nature of belief is one of the reasons why the words “I believe in you” are infinitely greater than “I have faith in you” or “I have hope for you.” The power of hope and faith are external. But the power of belief flows from inside us– it is not a power that exists, it’s a power we create. “I believe in you,” acknowledges that you may not be worthy of my belief, but I’m giving it to you anyway, because it’s mine to give. I believe not because I know or hope you will succeed, but because I want you to. I want for you, so much so that I will imbue you with some of my inherent magic, my belief. The subtext of “I believe in you” is, “I know you may well fail, but I feel you are worth the risk.”

“I am a writer,” then, I think, is another way of saying, “I believe in me.” Not because it’s predestined or preordained, but because I want this for myself, and so I chose to believe.

That’s what you are, both a writer and a believer. Belief, unlike hope and faith, is neither all-powerful nor indestructible. Belief is as mortal and human as we are, and it is only ever exactly as strong as we make it. To believe, after all, is to know full well that one day, you might have to stop.

To me, allegiance to belief, rather than hope or faith, is an indelible mark of wisdom. It acknowledges that things change, and when they do, we will have to change as well. To choose to believe in someone or something is to choose the real world and her inhabitants, with all their imperfections, their pain and beauty, their melancholic days, over some perfect, imagined utopia that’s just beyond the horizon. To believe is to look clear-eyed at life and to say, “gosh, this sucks, but aren’t we lucky to be old enough to know that it won’t last forever?”

____

I’ve been thinking about you, and all of this, and about identity and belief. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that recognizing my identities (and attendant biases and privileges), and the identities of others is a critical part of operating in the modern world. I’m not arguing against the idea of identities. I’m arguing against identities as confines, keeping some out, others in. I hate the “I am THIS, so therefore I am this way, and can do this but not that.” Isn’t this exactly the opposite of recognizing that people are, well, people? Complex, silly, unpredictable, melancholy-for-no-reason people? Would it not be more liberating to everyone to move away from obsessively putting ourselves and others into these predefined categories?

I’ve been thinking a bit too, about how I’ve allowed identities, and my belief in their importance, to inform my writing. For one, I am a non-fiction writer. The word “novel” has always been a scary one for me. I’ve always thought that there’s nothing easier than writing a bad novel, and nothing harder than writing a really good one. And even then, plenty of beautiful, epic novels just aren’t published in the right moment, don’t hit just the right emotional, social, or cultural note, don’t have the marketing push behind them, and despite their beauty, languish in obscurity. Non-fiction feels comparatively much safer. When you write a book about agriculture, at least people who search “books about agriculture” are likely to find it. You can’t google “good but obscure novels that I would love.”

I don’t just write non-fiction, I write non-fiction about agriculture. So I’ve also wondered in what ways I am allowed to stray beyond those bounds, and in which ways I’m confined? I’ve thought a lot about this rule-of-thumb in politics– that the mark of a great politician is that they can imagine a glorious future, but are aware of exactly how far to advance their constituents towards it before they start to resist. A great politician, in other words, knows there are natural limits, and seeks to stretch them just shy of the breaking point.

Sometimes I imagine that this is the challenge I’m faced with. I may not be a novelist, but maybe I can stretch the limits of essays and nonfiction to somewhere just shy of “novel.” I may be an agricultural writer, but maybe I can stretch the bounds of what “agricultural” means until I find a space that feels more satisfying to occupy. In other words, maybe I can have my identities, and I can choose what they mean to me, regardless of what they mean to anyone else.

Calling myself a writer is still something I struggle with, even now that I recognize the fact that claiming the identity of “writer” when it’s not my full time job is not stolen valor. When I do work up the courage to call myself a writer, I mean the kind of writer that you are. You, for whom writing is a sacred practice. You, who wakes up at 4am to write when the world is quiet, because that’s the time you have for it. You, who writes not primarily for money, fame, or awards, but for yourself. Your work is an end in itself– an act of creation, belief, and love.

That’s the kind of writer I want to be.

____

I scanned an article recently that I think you would have appreciated. It was a summary of a celebrity interview– I couldn’t tell you who it was– but she was asked, in the end, whether she thought she might yet become a mother.

“I’m already a mother,” she said curtly (I’m paraphrasing here). “I mother all the time. I mother my friends' kids, nieces, and nephews. I mother my dogs, my garden, and my house plants. I mother my siblings, sometimes even my own mom. So many people and things in the world are in need of nurturing love and care, not just children who come from our wombs. Honestly, the fact that we’ve limited people to only mothering their own offspring, that’s probably why we have so many problems in the first place.”

This idea resonated with me– it felt like something that you might say. You are a mother, obviously, but your mothering is certainly not limited to your son. Whether you meant to or not, you mothered me too.

I think (and correct me, if I’m wrong) you would also tell me that “mother” is an identity I could choose for myself. Not only by getting pregnant or giving birth, but also by taking on the responsibility of believing in people and things, nurturing and caring for them as true belief dictates. If I’m really brave, I think you’d say, I could mother myself. I could mother ideas, stories, characters. There is no limit to what can be mothered. That’s the thing about identities, they only have the power we give them. They only lack the power we deprive them of.

So I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for all the book recommendations, for the cards and the visit, and for letting me learn about you and your beautiful family and life. In the post-Lean In world that we live in today, I feel like the idea of mentorship has become fraught, and I can’t say I’ve had much in the way of formal mentorship for a while now (an occupational hazard of choosing the career path less traveled by). But I’ve come to think of you as something of a mentor. Not necessarily because you offered me a lot of formal advice, but more because you are just the kind of person I would be proud to be like, and watching you move in the world offers a kind of blueprint on how that might be done.

I still don’t know that I’m much for biological parenthood, but I think I’m growing more used to the idea that motherhood is more than just biological procreation. If parenthood is in part about creating something, growing it, shaping it, loving it, believing in it, struggling with it, having your heart broken by it, well, isn’t that what being a writer is? Every story we write requires belief. That’s the magic we put into it, and as often as we believe in one that grows up to be strong, smart, and likable, we believe in one that grows surly, disorganized, and unsatisfying. There’s no hedging your bets at the beginning either, when it’s just an egg of an idea. You either believe, write it up, and see how it turns out, or you don’t believe, and even if you do put words on paper, they’ll be lifeless and bereft.

So thank you again, for reminding me with every letter and text about the magic I possess to shape the world and the people around me. Thanks for teaching me about the expansiveness of words, sentences, and stories. Thanks for sending me a solstice card and reminding me that the structures that seem to constrain me are only as limiting as I believe them to be. And most of all, thanks for reminding me of the invaluable lesson of many great childhood stories– that hardship is the mother of magic, that looming disaster can make for good adventure, and that yes, sometimes even melancholy can be wonderful.

Holding on to your hand, always,

EQ-Albuquerque

(Assistant: Sarah K Mock)

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A couple of programming notes. First, as a desert creature, this newsletter will be taking the next week or so to power down, rest in the shade, and cloud-gaze. It is important to reduce effort during the peak of summer season. The siesta of the year, so to say. I hope all of you get the chance to do the same, at least for a moment. Look for our next missive mid-July.

Second, with just a few copies left, this will be the last chance to request a copy of MAFIA CORN SALAD:

We hope you’ve enjoyed this collaborative epistolary series where we explore the tensions between living and working in the social media/internet age and writing in our overlapping focus areas. My collaboration with EQ does not end with this series. We’ve recently published our first pamphlet together, a WAAL Histories Collection entitled MAFIA CORN SALAD: An American Cookbook. It is a 36-page booklette featuring four original essays about food, farming, and land that will never be available online. If you are interested in learning more or purchasing a copy of this pamphlet, please fill out this form and you will be contacted about next steps.