Writing and Vulnerability Hangovers

finding my voice, how long will it take?

Sometimes I write about ghostwriting and sometimes I write random essays. Last week was ghostwriting. This week is a random essay. In two weeks, I plan to tell you about my work as a book coach.

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I had an entire post loaded and ready to go, an edited version of a talk I gave at my childhood church as it was on the brink of folding. The post was all about church.

I deleted it.

Church is mighty complicated for a lot of us. It is especially mighty complicated for an expatriate who spent 21 years in a Muslim-majority country and has now returned to the USA. The essay wasn’t about the church and politics. It wasn’t about church hurt. It wasn’t about false teachers and troubling leadership styles and the redeeming mercies of good people. It was just a fun, remembering post. But I erased it. It felt personal. Instead, here are other places where I have written about church:

Our Bodies Groan for Unity, in Christianity Today (beautifully, this article was recently read in its entirety by a pastor during his sermon and a friend of mine attends his church and told me about it. As a woman who has been told that women should not preach and yet I preach anyway, that’ll preach!)

Welcoming Broken Christians Back (2019)

Dear American Church (2019)

When Hospitality Isn’t Cozy, in Plough

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Why did I delete the first post?

It felt too personal, too vulnerable.

I used to share all that personal, vulnerable stuff. The articles above are pretty raw, though I refrained from linking to the most tender article of them all. Once, I published it. Now, I’m not sure I would.

I wrote a book that cut close to the bone, my second with a traditional publisher. My first literary agent constantly told me she wanted to see “blood on the page.” That second book didn’t have blood on the page, but it definitely had tears and caused tears and left the bone exposed.

I haven’t written that way in a while. Partly due to being in school again. Seminary papers about general revelation versus natural revelation and Muslima theology and decolonizing research methods and Ricoeur’s Interpretive Arc don’t make space for blood and tears on the page. Partly, it was due to a vulnerability hangover, ala Brene Brown, from exposing so much of my heart. Partly, it was due to other parts of my life that intersected with the book.

Feedback to that book has been, and continues to be, incredibly positive. Of course, there was also negative feedback. Every author expects that, or ought to, and I know how to handle it and grow through it, most feedback can be swallowed constructively and most of the time is fair and useful. Some of the negative interactions, though, cut pretty close to that bone that was already raw and has been a factor in rather life-changing decisions. Decisions that have improved my life immensely but that did not come without pain.

Even writing that much, publicly, feels borderline too vulnerable.

I’m not sure I will get my old courage back.

It feels better to hide behind big words that I have to google to define (welcome to seminary doctoral studies). Or behind theoretical concepts or other scholar’s claims. But I don’t want to lose my creative writing bone, that tender bone that still feels exposed. So I will nurture her and call her forth to join me in my private journal and sometimes summon her onto these pages. Other times, she may hibernate. During those times, know that I am sustaining her with books and books and books.

Last week I attended an author talk at the University of Minnesota. Free author talks are one of the best things about being back in the USA (after family and libraries, naturally). This was Jia Tolentino, writer for The New Yorker and author of Trick Mirror, a beautiful and complicated and challenging book. I have read it three times (again, just that personal bit feels too close. I have been burned for the books I read. Trick Mirror isn’t for everyone. Know yourself. Know I read widely. I hate that I still feel the need to defend myself and couch my words. See? I’ve lost my voice.).

She talked about how Trick Mirror felt so vulnerable she hasn’t been able to write that personally since the book came out in 2019. She still writes researched pieces about other people and other ideas. She is only now, five years later, starting to wonder if maybe, maybe, there is a twinge of courage poking up to write personally again. Maybe.

My point about Tolentino is that I am in good company. This vulnerability hangover thing is real and it may last a long time. So I deleted the other post and ended up with this one, maybe even more vulnerable.

Now you know one reason I love ghostwriting. It keeps me writing, keeps me fostering that tender creative bone, and brings so much joy as I usher other beautiful, powerful, compelling, interesting stories into the world.

I’m not sure how to wrap up a post that started with church and deleting posts and jumped to vulnerability and ended with Jia Tolentino, so I will share a photo.

This is me during a family vacation to Greece in 2022. We are at the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill, where Paul preached in Acts 17. My husband snapped this photo of me pretending to preach. I keep it in my desk drawer in a place where I will see it every time I open the drawer to remind me why I am getting a PhD, why I work to elevate other people’s stories, why I continue writing even if for only my own consumption.

I do not want to be a preacher but I do want to know, own, and use my voice. It has been stifled and constrained and shut down for decades and it is learning to listen to itself and to find its way.