No One Will Read It, Be Honest

Everyone has a shop window, and the window is no sin; the danger is believing it ourselves first.

Open the photograph of yourself you like best on your phone. Now answer honestly: does that frame resemble you, or the person you would like to resemble? Choosing it from among hundreds of photographs, what did you choose by; the one closest to the man, the woman in the mirror, or the one furthest away yet most flattering? I accuse no one; I choose the same way. A person makes the same choice when telling of themselves: in a job interview, in a new acquaintance, even in their own inner voice, they put their best frame forward. Everyone has a shop window, and the window is no sin. The dangerous thing is something else: our being the first to believe the window.

Writing your expectations is half the work; knowing what you seek in a partner is good, is necessary. But the other half is harder, and most people never get there: writing yourself. Sit down and write. Your education, your temperament, your terms with your anger, whether you listen or not, your relationship with money, your order or your disorder, what you can stand on, what you cannot stand; your weaknesses and your beauties; all of it. If you do not know where to begin, begin with questions: What do I do when I am angry; do I go silent, do I shout, do I hoard? Can I bear criticism, or do I count every criticism an attack? Am I uneasy when my money runs out, or even while I have it? When someone speaks, am I listening, or waiting for my turn? What becomes of me when I am alone; do I rest, or do I scatter? How many of the promises I give are written into the calendar, how many into talk? The answers to these questions are you; more you than your height or your profession. The rule is one and is set at the start: no one will read it, only you will. Be honest.

It looks easy; it is not. Because in his own case a man is both witness and judge, and his testimony is partial, his verdict bought in advance. The narrative we keep about ourselves is polished over the years; with every telling one more rough spot is erased, and at last what remains in our hands is the official version of the story. Another’s flaw we see in three seconds; when the same flaw comes to us, its name becomes “what the circumstances required.” An acquaintance of mine describes himself as “a calm person”; within the same conversation he recounts being aggrieved at three people, his reply to two of them long since prepared. He is not lying; he is reading the official version. In the official version he is calm; it is events that keep straining him. We all have such a version, and we read it most of all to ourselves. That is why paper is essential. Inside the mind every sentence finds a hole to escape through; on paper it cannot. Writing is the most honest court a person can set up for themselves; provided the minutes are kept true.

Two kinds of forgery are committed in the minutes; know both, so you can catch them. The first is embellishment, and its favorite costume is the sentence with “but.” “I flare up quickly, but it passes quickly.” “I am jealous, but not without cause.” “I am a spendthrift, but out of generosity.” Look: what comes after the “but” is not testimony, it is defense. Strike it. A weakness is written plain: I flare up quickly. Full stop. The hand that wants to add a justification is in truth the hand that does not want to confess. The second forgery works in reverse: blackening oneself. The sentence “I am not someone to be loved anyway” is not honesty; it is a sentence passed without a hearing. You will not show yourself favor, true; but neither will you slander yourself. Honesty is not treating yourself badly; it is weighing rightly. For this reason, not writing your beauties is also a kind of lie: leave one pan of the scales empty and the weighing still goes wrong; this time against you, that is all.

Let me tell you a few aids; from those who try them I hear they work, and I do the same myself. Write yourself as a third person: the sentence that begins with “I” leans toward defense, the sentence that begins with “he” or “she” leans toward description. To write “criticized, he first raises his voice” is far easier than building the same sentence with “I”; the ease is not a trick, it is a door ajar. Second: write with verbs, not adjectives. Do not write “I am loyal”; ask “when did I last fail to keep a promise,” and write the answer. The adjective is a claim, the verb is evidence. Third: ask yourself this: if the person who knows you best were to describe you to a stranger, how would they tell it? The part of that telling you would not like is, in all likelihood, the part you have not written on the paper. And the last: after writing, put it away, let a few days pass, then read it. When the ink cools the sentences speak otherwise; some lines will strike you as too merciful, some as too cruel. Correct both. And when reading, read aloud if you can; the eye slides, the ear does not. If a sentence your hand wrote without trembling catches in your throat when read aloud, you have drawn near the truth; catch there, do not pass, stay.

And why this torment? When the talk is of love, what does a person gain by keeping minutes on themselves? It gains this: the one who does not know himself cannot give a description. The one who cannot give a description gives a wrong address; and to a wrong address comes the wrong guest. There is worse. If a person is loved on wrong information about themselves, the one loved is not them; their mask has been loved. And the mask tires. The most tiring state of a relationship is to keep trying, every morning, to be loved as someone you are not; no lifetime endures that shift. The day comes and the mask falls; it always falls; for the attention that holds the mask up will loosen somewhere, with fatigue, with anger, with illness, with time. And the one across from you says: “you have changed.” You have not changed; you have been seen, that is all. The painful part is here: the love accumulated until that day was credited not to you but to the mask; when it falls, it leaves together with it. The honest inventory protects you from this: you consent from the start to being seen in the state you are, and when the one who wants you in that state arrives, you do not open the door with a mask. It has one more use; do not belittle it: a person who has written their own weakness with their own hand cannot be governed through that weakness. Before the one who can say “I know” to the flaw held up as a weapon to his face, the weapon ceases to be a weapon. Look at what most quarrels are won with: not with new information, but with the spilling out of hidden information. If you have no secret, there is nothing to spill; on the table remain only things to talk about. This is called openness, and openness is not, as supposed, weakness; it is leaving no place to be stepped on.

Let us set one thing apart too, so the paper does not become a place of fear: this inventory is not a death sentence, it is a survey of the situation. Part of the weaknesses you write are not your fate but your uncared-for sides: listening never learned, order postponed, patience never once worked at. A person is not found, a person is built; that list is at the same time a repair plan. But repair begins with the right survey. The builder who plasters the crack that is not there misses the crack that is; the harm of slandering yourself is exactly this, as the harm of favoring yourself is the other.

I seem to hear one more objection: “If I pour myself onto paper, will the spell not break; does a person not grow cold, looking at themselves so much from outside?” You do not grow cold; you become acquainted. With the one whose every day of your life you share, whose every decision you are partner to; with yourself; you will for once have sat down at the table face to face. Most people postpone this acquaintance until life forces it; but life’s method of showing is rough; it shows in the middle of a wrong relationship, on the morrow of an irreversible resentment. Paper is kinder; it gives you the same lesson without striking. One of the two will surely give it. Which one you take it from is the only thing you can choose.

Try it tonight, I say. The excuses for postponing have already formed their queue, I know; the summary of them all is the same; I am not ready. No one is ready; paper exists precisely for those who are not. One paper, one pen, one hour; the phone in another room. No one will read it, you alone will; give yourself this word and keep it. My question is this: on which line will your pen linger longest? And that line; wonder about this above all; from whom has it been hidden most, until today?