There is a sommelier talking about the silkiness of the wine.

Great juxtaposition to the abrasiveness of the city. Things taste better when someone says they will.

I stare into my glass of liquid ruby—so red it looks blue—and think of how something has changed.

Many people in my life these days don’t know I have a blog. They don’t know I just published a book. They don’t really know me.

Ironically, if they read my book, they would know way too much. I have never written anything so vulnerable or honest or uninhibited in my life. Which is really saying a lot if you’ve been here for a while.

But it’s gated behind having to buy and read it. I think I have done so on purpose, with the quiet intention of avoiding criticism. The way I write in that book is not the way I write on this very public blog, but it used to be.

Someone reminded me recently that if you never do anything that someone could make fun of you for, you will never do anything that someone could really admire you for, either.

I used to know that.

When I was a teenager and all my friends were fake and all my feelings were enormous, I didn’t have the capacity to care if how I wrote or spoke was too messy. Too embarrassing.

And then I grew up and my world got bigger and I got a lot happier and real, genuine people came into my life and I used all of it as an excuse to be small. Safe. Contained.

I wanted there to be no trace of anything that could be seen as embarrassing. I was too old for that. Too far removed from the angsty years of youth that permit you to be whoever you want to be. You don’t have to be anyone else yet.

I think I have existed in that half-light for the better part of the past couple of years. I stopped sharing my life so openly. I whittled my public writing down to mere abstraction so as to maintain a barrier. No longer surrounded by poets and writers and artists like I was in high school and college, this felt like the right thing to do.

I was online earlier when I found a teenager reading her poetry out to her followers. She reminded me of myself back then. A senior in high school, she was the exact age I was when everything fell apart. The age my memoir starts at. You could hear it in her voice. That crack of emotion of a kid stuck between adolescence and adulthood, each yanking an arm. I remember that crack. I remember that tug-of-war. I remember the way the world introduced itself, guns ablaze, and how strong that final, winning yank was.

And while I could see that her page was extremely vulnerable in the kind of way that I could see kids at her school making fun of her for, nothing was embarrassing about it to me.

It was brave and beautiful and contained the essence of something adulthood has challenged me not to let go of. It made me want to write without inhibition. Without thought. Without running my words through the mind of anyone in my life who might now read them.

This girl reading her poetry couldn’t have cared less about criticism. I used to be just like her. I want to be again.

It’s so beautiful, to be bathed in that much honesty.

Love,

M