# Personal essay

* Vs academic:
    * Stepping away from academic with the understanding that not everything can be proven, thus 'essay': try
    * Author will interrogate ignorance - what do I not understand and why?
    * Tries to get away from stiff voice and harness the everyday
    * more vulnerable/less formal
* Self-righteousness is the enemy of the personal essay
    * If you're critiquing others, you had better be critiquing yourself, too.
    * Not didactic, interrogate yourself
    * The writer has to come in with a little extra humility, even if it's something of a put-on
    * Self-deprecation is how to keep from alienating the reader (to an extent)
    * (If you want to not do this, satire is the path)
    * The reader forgives self-absorption in return for the warmth of candor
    * Can tilt comedic b/c of this
* Poetry and personal essay in conversation with each other
* Can cross over into fiction with reliable narrator (viz Nick in Great Gatsby)
* Writing exercise:
    * Timeline 1: Yearly highlight of writing
    * Timeline 2: Timeline of loss
    * Write for 10 minutes from that point of view:
    
        Whenever my partner reads one of my books, she tells me afterwards that she can always tell what I was thinking about when I was writing. For *Toledot*, she said she could tell that it was fallout of 2021 being "the year where all my friends die."
        
        It's become something of a habit, and with *Nevi'im*, I preempted her by asking once she'd finished, "So, what do you think I was thinking about?"
        
        We talked for a while about the way that relationships shift and settle over time, the ways that the changes in one's own life can color the people around us. How much are these okay? In what ways can they be problematic? How do we interact with the world on our own terms, and how often to we follow? Which of these can have good outcomes, and which can cause pain to those around us? We talked about how these were feeling, and how eerily accurate they are. They're not *not* true.
        
        That's not how things worked prior to that, though, at least not totally. Back in 2020, was when I published ally. That didn't start as  a book, but as a serial of sorts. Sure, it was this whole hypertext project of branching subjects, but I would come out with one subject at a time, perhaps once a week or so, until I'd amassed however many there are now. She didn't have the option of telling me what she thought I was thinking about when I was writing each of those installments; she didn't need to. Each of the installments was about a concrete thing. Each of the installments was explicitly what I was thinking about.
        
        That's the danger in memoir, I suppose.
        
        That was when I was at my most vulnerable, back in the end of 2019 and into 2020. That was when I was most willing to pull together my fears and talk about them. I couldn't talk about them one on one (a fact that led to a few disagreements with a few people, who said, "I don't like learning these things from you telling the world; I wish you'd tell us directly, first."). I could only broadcast them, because in a crowd, you're anonymous. I'm a no-one when I'm posting writing to be read by the world, because at that point, I disappear.
        
        I think that's sort of what I wanted. There was catharsis in publishing this or that about sexuality or depression, sure, but what I wanted to do was to disappear into the crowd, to stop being Madison for a little bit, and just be a person: a nameless, faceless person among however many billion other nameless, faceless people. I got depressed. I felt happy. I felt pride and shame, I was just a person, despite me wearing that mask of individuality or visibility.
        
        I posted the rest of my stuff on Patreon after that, but, with me starting to work more in long-form writing, my partner stopped being able to read stuff in installments and would generally wait until she got her copy of the book to read it through. I wonder how much of that was a defense mechanism after so many months of deafening vulnerability.
        
        I won't break the habit by telling you all (or her!) what all I was thinking about while I was writing Mitzvot. There's a lot that goes into telling a story like this. Some of it is simply wanting to tell a good tale, after all, and other parts are just inspiration striking at 11:30PM, making me pull my phone out, open up my notes out, and jotting down half a chapter on that cramped little screen. More than that, though, I'm always curious to hear what people see from the outside. What do they see that I don't, simply because they're not so close to it as I am? What does the forest look like? I don't know, all I see are trees.
        
        What I *can* say is that this will be the last book in the Post-Self cycle. I've grown to love these characters. I think about them often. I dream about them. I wonder what it would be like to have a mind split by a trauma such as getting lost. I wonder what it would be like to love someone like that. I wonder how I would support them, how I would be there --- or not --- when they asked.
        
        Still, I know how easy it can be to write oneself into a neverending saga. I know how it can lead to feeling trapped by one's own creation. I know what burnout is, and while I think I'm a ways off with the Ode and Bălan clades, I'd like to keep that from happening. They mean too much to me. I won't say there will be no more stories, but this will be the end of the saga, and, should you choose to read the book and "Selected Letters", I think you will see why.
        
        To be clear, this won't be the last you'll see of the setting! Keep an eye out for *Clade --- A Post-Self Anthology* with stories by others and myself, and perhaps I'll get around to writing *Marsh*, which is about half-outlined.
        
        A little bit of distance can be good (hell, I'll be taking a step away from furry literature for a while, too, just to explore other avenues), and the books will always be here, the stories will always be around. Until then, I hope that you enjoy *Mitzvot and Selected Letters*, and I'll be curious to hear what you think of it --- or, indeed, what you think I was thinking about when I wrote it.
