your piece on Salon today and ended up captivated by your diaries, reading most of your journal in a few hours. I think that perhaps women who write to you wishing to be you may not mean it in a literal sense, at least not consciously. The way that you write, the feelings that you express are universal to our gender and our species and you do it with such poignant melancholy that it breaks and reunites the pieces of a person’s heart simultaneously. Maybe it’s the courage to act out all your roles for your clients that they envy, maybe it’s your ability to provide something intangibly essential to the life of another human being, even a stranger to you. It would be impossible to guess their real motivation for wanting to share your experience, but if I had to base it on anything I would begin first with my own reflections on your words.
There are some of us women who do desire nothing more than to pursue reading, writing, the art of being ourselves. We are, in a way, stuck within our own identities: small towns, monogamy, socio-cultural expectations. My envy of you lies in the desire to act upon the observation of the human condition in the way that your work captures so explicitly. I can write a hundred, a thousand poems. I can hold the man that I love at night and be what he needs when he needs it, but I can’t walk away in exploration. My life is a linear perspective of love, loss, and a deep overwhelming desire to experience everything, to soak it up like a sponge and write it down with hurried passion before it drains from memory. But in many ways I am running in place; not unhappy, not concerned about money, but entangled in my own personal life. I can’t put on a new identity like a dress or seek out to heal another person in the same way that you can, even though you might not call it healing I can imagine that for many of the clients you see that it feels that way to them.
Just food for thought… But I do want to say thank you for allowing us the window of your words to look into your life from an anonymous distance.
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