When I received the call telling me that my father had died, I cried. I cried loud, I cried hard, I fell to the ground and clutched at my aching chest and I wailed. And then, curled up on the floor, phone in hand, I tweeted.

I tweeted because it was instinct. I tweeted because it was the only thing that I could think of to do. I tweeted because I needed to get the words that were reverberating in my head and smashing against the walls of my mind out out out and into the world so that I could step back and see them/hear them/feel them and know that they weren’t just the narrative of some nightmare conjured up by that corner of my soul that holds and nurtures its darkest fears. I needed to face the words, and know that they were true. I needed to take control of the narration of the terrible story that was unfolding. I needed to speak. I needed to write.

So I tweeted.

My father is dead. My father has died. My father is gone.

Much has been said – dissected, debated, argued, asserted – in recent days about the impulse to tweet a tragedy. Some have said that tweeting during a tragedy is akin to fiddling while Rome burns, that it is evidence of a narcissistic soul. Others have said that it’s simply the virtual equivalent of calling out to friends  – by phone or by letter or over the garden fence – for help and support. I think that it’s a little bit of both.

The impulse to narrate any event, or one’s feelings in response to some event, is to some degree a narcissistic one, if we understand narcissism loosely (and perhaps literally) as focused self-regard, as a concentration of one’s attention upon oneself. It is to position oneself as author of the story that is unfolding, it is to take the first-person narrative role, it is to make the story about oneself. It is – contra Barthes – to become the source of meaning of the text. This needn’t be a bad thing. I asserted myself as narrator of the story of my father’s death because I needed to narrate that story, because I needed to assert my place within that story – grief-stricken daughter, confused grief-stricken daughter – in order to tell it to myself, and to the world. And telling the story was crucial to me surviving the first overwhelming waves of pain and sadness: I grabbed on to the story like a buoy and hung onto it for dear life. It was wet and slick and cold and I kept losing my grip, but it was there, and I kept myself afloat by reaching for it, grabbing for it, clinging to it when I could. There I was adrift, there I was battling the waves, there I was out and alone in a dark, turbulent sea with only the buoyant mass of my words to hold onto, to mark my place in that sea, to alert others – anybody, anybody – that there I was. I harbored no illusions that anyone could pluck me from the dark and save me. But I needed the world to know that I was there. I needed to know that I was there.

So: it was narcissistic of me, in some wise, to tweet my father’s death. Tweeting my father’s death made that death all about me. But it was all about me. It was my story, the story of my grief, and my tweets were the first painful lines in that story. I needed to say them out loud so that I could keep going. I also needed my community, my friends, and tweeting was my way of crying out to that community that I was hurt, that I was hurting, that I was in pain. But that, too, was part of the storytelling impulse: I needed someone to tell my story to. I needed my cries in the dark to be heard. I needed to know, I needed to prove, that the story was real, that this wasn’t just me talking in my sleep, singing myself a nightmare, narrating some terror from which I could not rouse. Is a story really a story if there is no reader, no audience? Even if I’d written the words down in a journal to read to myself, or whispered them into someone’s ear, the purpose would have been the same: to put the story out there, to get it heard. By one person, by thousands – the intent is the same. To get it heard. To make it real. To tell the story. To tell the story so that the pain and ache and gut-tearing grief become something other. So that they take on a life of their own, outside of one’s ravaged heart, as story.

The love, the hugs, the prayers, the good wishes, all of the things that come from the community when we cry out to it: these are precious, these are invaluable, these are necessary. But they are not what we are looking for – or, not the only things that we are looking for, not the only things that I was looking for – when we proclaim our tragedies, our hurts. We proclaim because we are storytellers, because storytelling has a saving power, because telling stories – telling our stories, telling our most difficult stories – saves us, or, at least, keeps us afloat. Twitter is a storytelling medium, and so it is understandable that some of us turn to it to tell our saving stories, in whole or in part.

Not all of Twitter’s stories are saving stories, sure. Some of Twitter’s stories are banal. Most of those stories, maybe, are banal. But, too, some are great and some are beautiful and some are terrible and the great stories and the beautiful stories and the terrible stories – all the saving stories – live alongside the banal stories and all of them, all of them draw us ’round the fire to hear and to share and – sometimes – to survive.

And that’s all that we need to know.

(On the question of stories that hurt – stories like the story that prompted my words above, the story that suggested that telling the story of a tragedy in real-time was a terrible thing, a deviant thing, a thing that we should not trust – we can, as I said last week, choose to not listen. We can choose to close ranks and not let such storytellers in. That particular storyteller stood outside our circle and narrated her hate and at first, only a very few heard her, and she would have gone away if we’d ignored her – she was outside, she had no megaphone, no speakers, no means of forcing her words upon any more than the few whose (Twitter) ears were tuned to listen – she had no way in, until we, some of us, responded to her and talked about her and pointed our fingers and said, look, look over there! and by doing so opened our circle to her and let her in. And drew everyone’s attention to her. We have to take responsibility for this. We opened our ears to her, opened our circle to her, we listened and by listening gave her reason to keep talking. And then we began shouting, and by shouting drew even more attention, and by drawing more attention we helped her bring her hateful story to life.

Next time, please, let’s not.

If a troll farts in the forest, does anybody hear? Only if we wave our torches in that direction and spark combustion. PLEASE TO REMEMBER.)

(Title from Ranier Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Elegy 1)

I’m stuck.

I have a whole post, one that is already written, down to a word, in my head, one that is pounding against the binding of my brain and demanding to be released. It’s a post that I’ve had written for weeks, months, and that I’ve kept tucked away, unsure about whether or not to publish it. And then, in the past week, discussion began to swirl online about issues related to the thing that I want to talk about – that I want so badly to talk about – and I found myself trailing my fingers across my keyboard, straining against the urge to write and hit post, write and hit post, write and hit post. But I resisted – I am resisting, so far – and so I have been pecking at tweets and making cryptic remarks to nobody in particular because it is bothering me, it is really bothering me, and I want so badly to lay it bare upon the screen and shout, see? See? This is why! This is why! This why you need to look at this differently, this is why these discussions are wrong, this is why I have been sitting here, grimacing and fighting back tears.

Because this matters, to me.

But it’s not a story that is just about me. It’s about someone else, too, someone who isn’t around to ask whether it’s okay to tell this story, this story that involves them. And although I think that it would be okay, that this person would tell me that they’d want me to tell it – I’m pretty certain of this, actually – I worry that deep down they wouldn’t be so sure, that somewhere, deep down, they’d feel some shame. And therein lays the dilemma: the point of the story, of telling the story, is to fight back against the threat of shame and to proclaim, loudly, that there is nothing about which to be ashamed, that it’s all fine, that it’s more than fine, that I’m proud. But decrying shame requires putting shame to light, and here, I hesitate. I hesitate.

But here’s the thing, and here is what is disingenuous about this post: even though I hesitate, I am going to post that story. I am going to release it from the confines of my mind and heart, where it is, truthfully, battering me in its efforts to get out, and what I am doing here is courting opinion, courting support, wringing my hands publicly so that everyone will say, oh, honey, it’s okay, if it’s important, if you know you’d have blessing to write it, if you’re doing it to help, it’s okay, it’s okay, whenever you’re ready, it’ll be okay.

Which I hate. I hate that. I hate doing that. I also hate knowing that some will say, if you have doubts, you shouldn’t; if you have doubts, you should err on the side of caution; if you have doubts, don’t. And: why are you asking for our blessing? Doesn’t that miss the point?

It does. It does.

So I won’t ask. I’m not asking.

I’ll just wait for the story to make its way forward, to burst from its confines and declare itself, and then, then I’ll deal with it. Then we’ll see.

(In the meantime: I have been raging against the Huffington Post, and dreaming about pirates. If you’re into that kind of stuff.)

It started as a discussion about Balloon Boy and reality television and the corruptive effects of the pursuit of fame and whether children should ever be compelled to live their lives as performances, the better to line the pockets of the entertainment industry, but it became a discussion about whether writers – memoirists, bloggers, whomever – who deal in family anecdote can be said to be guilty of the very sins that we deplore in the Gosselins or the Heenes or the Duggars or whatever slimy, child-eating producer we imagine lurks in the offices of TLC. In writing about our children, some of you asked, are we guilty of the same kind of exploitation (if, in fact, we can call televising the lives of children for profit ‘exploitation,’ which I think we can), the same kind of troubling opportunism that is displayed by the Gosselins and the Heenes and the parents of Toddlers wearing Tiaras?

I’ve wrestled with this issue before. I always come down on the side of no. Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes lay awake at night, interrogating myself about whether I am always perfectly conscientious in putting the best interests of my children before my impulse to tell stories, but it is a more or less clear-sighted ‘no.’ My children figure in the stories that I tell here, but they are not, for the most part, the main characters. I’m not writing their stories; I’m writing mine. And to the extent that they appear in that story – and, obviously, they do appear regularly – they appear as (as I said the other day) narrative constructions. Emilia and Jasper are not, like the Gosselin kids or the Toddlers in Tiaras, compelled to perform upon a literal or figurative stage. They live their lives, they do their thing, and I write stories about motherhood in which they sometimes appear – characters, sketches, reflections of their real selves.

But, but… can it not be said that living under my writerly gaze imposes a kind of (to mangle the term) performativity to their daily lives? They do not perform, but do I not take their movements and moments and weave performance out of these? Can story be understood as a form of performance, in which it is not just the storyteller who performs, but the story itself and the characters therein? In which case, does my role as a storyteller not put me in a relationship with my children whereby I view them, and the things that they do and say, through a performative lens? Do they not live under (and here I jumble Foucault and Lacan and others into a postmodern psychoanalytic jumble that I may not be able to disentangle) performative gaze? And if this is true, is it any better – any less harmful – than living under the lens of television cameras? Do I exploit my children for my own creative (and, yes, to some extent, material) gain?

Ah.

I don’t know.

That’s not entirely true: I do know that, as a writer, I view my children – about whom I write – somewhat differently than I might otherwise. I view everything differently, inasmuch as everything is potential fodder for narrative. The question is whether my ‘writerly gaze’ has any kind of troubling effect. Is that view distorted? Does it distort? Do I – in engaging with and responding to and thinking about my children – or anyone/anything else, for that matter – amplify or ignore or construct certain details in the experience to better prepare it for narrative. When I watch my children play, am I watching them play, or am I observing them as subjects? Both? Am I more attached/detached in one condition than in the other? Can I be attached to the experience while retaining my critical, writerly eye? Does it matter?

I think that everyone imposes something of this gaze on their lives and the experiences and people in those lives, inasmuch as we are all conscious of what other people think. We are all, after all, bourgeois in the sense that Rousseau meant when he criticized modern, Western man for being constantly preoccupied with the judgments and opinions of others. We think about the stories that we will tell our friends and families about this incident or that, we are alert to what any given experience looks like to outside observers (my children are behaving badly in this restaurant; do people think I’m a bad mother?/my children are behaving so well; does anybody notice? doesn’t this reflect well on me?/I wonder if anyone has noticed how awesome my shoes are?) and in that way, arguably, we are constantly viewing our lives through a critical lens, imposing narratives, editing the details, worrying over the visuals. But is there something different going on for writers, if only because those narratives make it out of our heads and onto the page?

I don’t have a good answer to this question. I worry about it, sometimes. I worry about thinking too much about story when I watch my children strut their lives upon the figurative stage. I worry about how my own narrative impulses impose a certain form and structure and feel to my life and the lives of those around me, not least when I consider writing about the most difficult things, like depression and anxiety and grief  – have I written myself and my loved ones into a story that is all about sadness? Am I turning my struggles into spectacle, and to what effect? (I turn off comments on some posts – some posts about my father, for example, some others about my children – when I want to remain clear with myself that I am writing for myself, and not for reactions, when I want there to be no mistake that I am not writing a given story for attention or positive reinforcement. Why, then, not close comments on all posts? Because the dialogue that emerges from commentary is important to me, as is – obviously – the community. Turning off comments sometimes is just a reminder to myself that I do not write – primarily – to generate vocal response; it keeps me honest about why I’m writing about certain things, i.e. because the story demands to be told, and not because the story will yield tons of comments.)

End of the day, I take the temperature of my integrity by appealing to my gut: why am I telling this story? Do I tell it out of love and/or joy and/or enthusiasm and/or fascination? Out of sincere concern or worry or heartfelt handwringing? Will my children read this someday – or my husband or mother or sister or friends read it now, or my father read it on whatever iHeaven app they make available in the great beyond – and recognize and appreciate the feeling behind it? Will their reactions be informed by (so far as possible) a clear awareness that they appear in my stories because I love them, because they are important to me, because I wanted to remember and understand every moment with them, because I wanted to share all of this, because I wanted to the world to know? Are the stories that feature my loved ones gentle in their treatment of them as characters? Are they – so far as is possible in narrative construction – true? If I can tell myself – honestly, as honestly as possible – that the answers to these questions is yes, then that is the best that I can do.

I hope that it is enough. Is it different enough from what goes on in the cruel and shallow money trench that is reality television? I think so. My writerly gaze, as it falls upon my children and my family and my friends, is a loving gaze. This cannot be said of the gaze of a television camera, and that difference, I think, is key. It is, in any case, enough to help me sleep at night. Mostly.

(What do you think? Do writers invariably exploit their subjects, and if so, are parent-bloggers guilty of exploiting their children? Are we all just Gosselins now?)

(Excellent discussion on this very subject can also be found chez Mom-101. And she doesn’t trip over her words as much as I do.)

My Dad, in another time, some time ago when he was still here and we could sit together and talk, or not talk , or (as I am doing in the background of this picture) read the paper and just not care about the passage of time because time always seems infinite until it’s gone and when it seems infinite you feel no need to fill it with words.

I don’t know whether this is the blessing or the curse of time, that you pay it no heed when you have it but feel its loss so keenly when it has passed. Had I known, the last time I saw my Dad, that our time was almost gone, I’d have filled that time with words, so many words; I’d have struggled to pull out all of the threads of our story and make them count, make them heard, weave them to some meaningful close. But I did not have that, and so I’m left now with a story that is at loose ends, that is demanding to be woven, and I think that that’s a blessing, in a way, because it allows me to yank time back and clutch it and fill it with words and images and moments of breathing, and to contemplate, now, in the sober light of grief, the wordless time that was then and to treasure it for its silence and to allow silence its place in this story, my story, our story, and to look into that space without words, between words, and be comfortable, or comforted, there.

(I’m still struggling to come to terms with the call that I was dreading – the call finally taken and muddled through and filed under Things I’d Rather Not Have Faced But Needed To Anyway, Conversations Edition – and am trying to figure out how to put that struggle – and the closure of that struggle, if it comes – into words. Or not. Until then, I need some quiet.)

Now that the whole bizarre, decidedly non-Roald Dahlian saga of The Boy Who Sailed Away In The Balloon has been examined, investigated, and revealed to be a hoax – a hoax designed for the seeming purpose of securing a reality television deal – we can get down to the important issues. For starters: finally admitting, as a community, that putting families on reality television is a bad, bad thing. If the allure of getting cameras into one’s household compels even one deranged parent to fake sending their kid into the stratosphere in a duct-taped helium balloon aircraft, can’t we say with some confidence that this has all gone a little too far? Can we now start calling for an end to reality TV shows that feature families with children?

Richard Heene, apparently, wanted so badly to be Jon Gosselin that he contemplated launching his kid into space in a homemade aircraft. Thankfully, he settled for just pretending to launch his kid into space, but still: the fact remains that the allure of the lower-order fame and wealth that attend reality television notoriety proved so irresistible to this man (and, presumably, his wife, although the extent of her complicity remains uncertainty) that he recruited his children to participate in a scam that would make hardened grifters shake their heads in disapproval.

Heene is an outlier, we might say; an extreme example of what can happen when people get caught up in a desire for fame. And his children didn’t really get hurt or anything: sure, they got caught up in their dad’s scheme, but no-one actually sailed away in a balloon, and end of the day, all that happened was that they were induced to lie.

Well, no, and also, no.

Heene’s escapade might seem extreme, but is it really? Nadia Suleyman got herself fertilized so that she could have bucketloads of babies, the better (apparently) to emulate Angelina Jolie and get herself a TV deal. Jon and Kate kept the cameras rolling as their marriage disintegrated, broadcasting the dissolution of their family – children front and center as the walls came crumbling down – so that the TLC cheques would keep coming. Is there really so much difference between enjoining one’s kids to participate in a helium-balloon ruse and compelling them (because really, this is compulsion, given that young children cannot give meaningful consent) to live their lives as performances for television cameras? When our children become props for performances, can we ever call it anything other than exploitation?

It might be asked whether memoirists – among whom, bloggers – do exactly the same thing, and this, I think, is a reasonable question to raise. My children are characters in the narrative that I construct in this space (and this one), and to that extent, I can be said to be exploiting them inasmuch as I am using them for my own creative purposes. But – and this is a very important but – my children as they appear here, on the screen, or elsewhere on the printed page, do not appear as their whole selves. These are written characters, shadows of my real children, sketches, interpretations, flickering, contrived images upon a makeshift screen (there would be, if I had infinite space and time, a long digression here about Plato’s Cave, but I resist). My children live out their actual lives in the sunlit lifeworld that exists on this side of the screen, and it is a lifeworld that you cannot see. I provide here – among other things – a curated, edited, honed collection of stories about that lifeworld, and the movements of my children within it, as I observe these, but that is all.

There are no television cameras here, there is no stage, and that makes all the difference. My children are not forced to be actors. It is the compulsion to act that does the damage, I think: regardless of Kate Gosselin’s insistence that she and her children are just ‘leading their lives’ – the trailing TV cameras just a nuisance, a buzzing distraction that sometimes gets in the way with its wires and microphones and bits – there is no ‘just living’ when an all-seeing lens (and sound-recording system, and director, and producer) commands performance. Where there are cameras and crews and directors of photography and make-up artists and production assistants and Craft services people and producers and lights! camera! action! there is performance. Where there is a stage, there is performance – and putting one’s children on television puts them on a stage, full stop. Putting their lives on a stage puts their entire beings into the condition of performance and this, I think, is a form of abuse.

Everyone is appalled that Richard Heene compelled his children to lie – who wasn’t sickened by the news that little Falcon Heene repeatedly vomited when asked to repeat those lies? But there’s an argument to be made – it was made best by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Letter to d’Alembert on theater – that all theatrical performance (and reality television is, make no mistake, theatrical performance) is lying. Rousseau argued that actors compromise their moral development and integrity by making their lives’ work out of a sort of lived falsehood – they spent their working hours pretending, being inauthentic – and so they can never really develop virtue (as Rousseau understood it, at least). Rousseau makes the extreme case (and, for the record, as someone who once pursued a career in theater, I don’t agree with him entirely), but he has, in his broad strokes, a point, and one that must be taken seriously when we’re considering the case of children: in compelling children – and again, this is always compulsion with small children who cannot understand the implications of what they are being asked to do, and so cannot meaningfully consent – to live their lives in the mode of performance, are not we not risking corrupting them in some important way? In compelling them to act their lives – rather than really live their lives – are we not causing – possibly – some important existential (if not moral, qua Rousseau) damage? Falcon Heene vomited when he was made to lie – it made him physically ill – but what of the kids who don’t know that they’re lying? That significant portions of their lives are (or might be) series of performative falsehoods?

I’ve argued before that there is some good that can come (alongside the indisputable bad) of watching shows like Jon & Kate Plus 8 – such shows can serve to remind us that we’re not the only parents, the only families, that struggle, that we’re not alone in finding this gig so hard. And they provide some opportunity for us to interrogate, collectively, the challenges of parenthood and marriage and family, and to discuss, publicly, what it means to be a family, and how different and similar and strange and familiar and fascinating families can be. Parenting and family should take place, to some extent, in the public – we all suffer when it is tucked away behind the veil, in the private sphere. But keeping discourse about parenthood and family public doesn’t require that we turn parenthood into performance, that some families compel their children to strut and fret their lives upon the stage until they heard only by their therapists. There are other forums for such discourse – *cough*blogs*cough* – and so we don’t need the Live Extreme Family Show. We don’t need it, it doesn’t serve us, and the cost is too high. It should just stop.

So why don’t we call a stop to this? Why don’t we demand a moratorium on reality shows involving children? Why don’t we just say no? Do we like to watch just too much to turn away? Is fulfilling that desire worth the potential cost to the kids involved?

I’m just saying no from now on. Join me.

You need to get over this.

I hope you’ll get over this and start writing about other stuff again soon.

It’s terrible what happened, but you need to remember that there’s worse. You didn’t lose a child.

Some people get hate mail. I get hate mail, but I also get mail of a slightly different strain: well-intentioned mail that aims at constructive criticism but lands somewhere in the area of a belly punch.

You need to get over this.

There are worse things.

You didn’t lose a child.

I don’t know if the authors meant for their words to hurt, but hurt they did. I can no more make myself get over my grief than I can make myself stop loving my husband and my children, nor do I want to: my grief over my father’s death is part of me now, part of the emotional landscape that undergirds my whole lifeworld. But my critics – if I can call them that – didn’t mean that I should resolve my grief. They meant that I should stop writing about it. Because, it seems, the death of a parent, while painful, doesn’t warrant long-form narrative consideration. It might be sad, sure, but it’s not the death of a child.

Which, no, it’s not. Nothing compares to the death of a child. But then again, nothing compares to a tsunami, or genocide, or terrorist attacks, or, for that matter, suicide or murder or accidents in bathtubs or long painful illnesses or being struck by a meteor. Tragedies shouldn’t be compared. Anything that causes the human heart to shatter so utterly should not be analyzed for comparative purposes. Facing the pain of loved ones, facing the loss of loved ones – these can cause unbearable, immeasurable pain, irrespective of the who and the why and the how. Such pain can’t be ranked on a scale, weighed against other hurts, other griefs. It’s just pain. Its weight is infinite.

I’ve seen enough Disney movies to know that the Death Of A Parent is just part of The Circle Of Life, and that I should be approaching my own personal tragedy philosophically, that I should be learning from this and embracing my role as my father’s legacy and marching bravely forward and Moving On. But life isn’t a Disney movie, and I’m struggling, because my father’s unexpected death knocked the wind out of me, literally and figuratively, and some days all I can do is sit, gasping, overwhelmed by the pain, the shock of having the landscape of my life so suddenly and irrevocably altered, of having lost, in such a sudden and terrible way, this person who I loved so much and wanted so badly to protect. That pain defies my narrative abilities, and yet narration is all that I have, is my only way through the pain. To be told that I should just get over it, that I should stop struggling to tell the story, stop working through my grief on the page and understand the lowly place of my tragedy in the greater scheme of All Possible Terrible Tragedies and adjust my narrative attitude accordingly  – because, really, this story is of very limited appeal, is it not? Where would Disney be if Bambi had spent the whole story in mourning? – hits in a very sore place, a place that I was only dimly aware that I had, a place where all the vulnerabilities of the heart meet all the insecurities of the ego. It hurts there.

This is partly, I suppose, a problem of genre. I am a mommy-blogger, and so some would expect that the lens through which I view tragedy always be adjusted according to the terms of that genre. For a parent, there is – at least according to the literary conventions of written parenthood – no greater horror than the loss of a child, and so as a writer who writes, mostly, about the experience of being a parent, I might reasonably be expected to measure any tragedy against that most dreaded of tragedies and to realize – and, I suppose, to publicly proclaim – that I haven’t suffered the worst tragedy that one can suffer and to be thankful for that and then – of course – to move on. But I am not just a mommy blogger, nor I am just a mommy or a mother or a mom. I was and am and always will be, too, a daughter.

A daughter who just lost her father. It’s going to take me some time to work through that.

Husband: “So, that whole thing, earlier this week? That made you a little crazy, didn’t it?”

Me: “Yeah. Kinda.”

Husband: “Why? Why did it bother you so much?”

Me: “——-?”

Me: “——-.”

I tell stories for a living. Mostly, I tell my own stories, the stories of my motherhood, and reflections on same. I do it because I love to do it. I do it because it has become, in some ways, almost like breathing: automatic, unavoidable, necessary. I do it because I believe in it: making public the lived experience of motherhood is, I think, crucial to empowering mothers, because it allows us to share, out in the open, where everyone can see, what motherhood is really like, once we’ve stripped away the glossy magazine covers and the laundry detergent commercials and the longstanding cultural insistence that family be private, that mothering be private, that we just hush, and not talk about how hard and how terrifying and how utterly, confoundingly, gloriously complicated this whole experience is.

I also do it because I’m vain, and because I crave approval.

Someone (actually, more than one someone) commented on the post of the other day that if I’m committed to telling my stories publicly, to mothering publicly, then I should just accept that I will face criticism and judgment. Moreover – some commenters added, here and elsewhere – since I am semi-well-known for what I do (I never know how to talk about this semi-sort-of-little-bit well-knownness. Being well known in any capacity on the Internet is, I think, kind of like being well-known in Korea for that one karaoke video that you “acted” in that one time: meaningless to anybody outside of a micro-specialized niche of aficionados, and so very probably meaningless in any broader socio-cultural context. Which is to say, nothing to brag about) it is disingenuous and/or hypocritical for me to claim to be bothered by criticism or judgment or whatever slings and arrows get hurled my way. I blog because I’m shameless, right? And I’ve earned some recognition for being shameless, right? So what’s the problem?

The problem is that I’m not shameless. I sometimes wish that I were: Socrates described himself as shameless, and argued that any true philosopher is by definition shameless, because the true philosopher loves wisdom/truth above all else, and certainly above any concern for social approval. If you’re going to interrogate social mores to the fullest extent possible, you need to be above them, at least intellectually. Shame (understood classically) is what we feel when we cower under some disapproving social gaze. It is not – contrary to what someone asserted in comments the other day – what we feel when we know that we’ve done something wrong (although we might feel shame under those circumstances); it is not necessarily associated with guilt. One can believe whole-heartedly that one is entirely in the right with a given action or behaviour, but still feel shamed by the disapproving reaction of some portion of one’s community. We can feel shame for living in poverty, for loving a member of the same sex, for breastfeeding publicly, if any measure of social disapproval is directed at those things. It doesn’t mean that we feel guilty for those things, that we feel in any way blameworthy – it means that social approval matters to us, and that social disapproval stings.

I am vulnerable to being hurt by social disapproval. It doesn’t matter whether that disapproval comes from one person, or a hundred, or a thousand, or more. I’m vulnerable to it. I fell vulnerable to it earlier this week. (All please note: what follows is not an invitation to direct further opprobrium against anyone who expressed such disapproval. These are my feelings, I am owning them and trying to make sense of them, nothing else.)

As it goes, the shame that I experienced earlier this week had – at least at first – little to do with my writing or my public persona. I felt shamed (note the distinction here: I did not feel ashamed of myself – I felt that I had been shamed, effectively, by the exercise of social disapproval toward some action on my part) for an action that I took in real life, that took place in the arena of lived space as opposed to written space. I did something and was observed and my actions were held up (in a misleading manner, which, as everyone knows by now, bothered me to no end) for interrogation and judged. Which, if that interrogation and judgment had occurred in some private space, or had remained unknown to me, might have been no big deal, but it occurred in a public space and was made known to me and so I felt – in a way that was different from how I would feel, have felt, about being judged for my writing or my online persona (I usually take that in stride. I’ve had lots of practice) – shamed. My real-life self had been observed doing some real-life thing and that real-life self was judged, publicly, and so that real-life self felt shamed.

My online self, my written self, was, of course, not completely detached from this experience. I made public my act, by Tweeting about it. I fully intended to blog about it. I had most of that post already scripted in my head. I was a little bit in love with it, to be frank: it was going to sort through all of my complicated feelings and ambivalences and reflections about what had transpired. I was going to tell the story as I wanted to tell it. It was not going to be a story about whether nursing another woman’s child was the right or wrong thing to do – there was no doubt in my mind that there was nothing wrong with it, even though I knew that it was not something that everybody would do, and even though I knew that some people, even people that I love and respect, would find it off-putting – it was going to be a story about what the experience was like, and about my complicated feelings surrounding it (for example, that it was an act that was both intimate and not intimate, that it felt both ordinary and extraordinary, that I initially felt a little afraid to do it, etc). But I was not able to tell that story, because sometime in the late hours of Monday I heard word that I had already been judged for my actions and I made the mistake of seeking out that judgment and reading it for myself and becoming upset by it and the rest, as they say, is history.

Part of my upset, in other words, was that I felt robbed of my story. It had become someone else’s story, told in a different way and with different and misleading details and I no longer had any control over it. It took on a life of its own and my feelings about it changed and I felt that, in addition to having been shamed, I had been robbed of my experience and my ability to define the terms of expressing and sharing that experience. I don’t necessarily have any rights to those things, but still: the deprivation of them hurt. Had I written about the experience myself and received shaming comments (by which I do not mean comments that expressed disagreement, but which attached moral judgment to that disagreement, i.e. it is wrong to do that, you were wrong to do that, women who do that are disgusting, etc.) I could have addressed them directly, on my own terms (or, yes, deleted them). I could have incorporated them into the larger story – which was not, as I originally imagined it, about mothers being shamed, but about trust and intimacy and support and community in motherhood, and also, maybe, about eros in motherhood (not in the sexual sense, but, rather, the classical sense. What of our profound physical and emotional connections to our children? How are these disrupted or affirmed by something like nursing another child?) – and controlled the impact of that shaming upon, and its place within, the story that I was telling.

That, obviously, was not to be. And so the story became something else entirely, and I struggled with and against the experience of feeling shamed and with and against the feeling of having lost control of my story, and it made me, yes, a little crazy. A little crazy and a lot exhausted. But beyond that crazy there was reflection, and reflection is good, right? I know now that I’m not as thick-skinned as I thought; I know, too, that I am – rightly or wrongly – possessive of my stories – told or untold – in a way that is much more intense than I understood. I learned more than I wanted to of the personal experience of shame, and I know that I have no desire to revisit it. But I am a writer and a woman who remains committed to sharing, publicly, the experience of her motherhood and of her life, generally, and so I know that critique is inevitable and judgment is inevitable and, probably, some further experience of shame is inevitable. The first I will embrace, as best I can; the second I will tolerate, as best I can. The third, I hope to continue to fight, however weakly, however awkwardly, however ineffectually, because although criticism is good, and judgment to some extent inevitable, shaming – when it is directed at any action or behaviour that is (and I realize that these are fluid concepts) well-intentioned and/or harmless and/or necessary and/or none of anyone else’s damn business regardless of how public the action is or how well-known the actor is (Salma Hayek, call me!) – is neither of those things. And the only way that I know how to fight that kind of shame is by continuing to tell my stories as if shaming didn’t matter. As if I was, in fact, shameless, in the best sense of that word.

That, and I’m going to make sure that the next time I go traipsing down the Internet rabbit hole in pursuit of stories being told about me? That I just don’t.