Can Writing Be My BFF?

Maid in a Landscape (detail; 2021), Cecily Brown. (Photo: Genevieve Hanson)

One Sunday this past September, I went to the Met to see an exhibition by the painter  Cecily Brown. She’s British, she’s 52, she’s a fellow Gen Xer. She lives in New York City, and for expediency’s sake let’s call her an abstract painter.

In the middle of the exhibition, I noticed that she’d titled a painting BFF, which made me laugh. She was ironizing the concept and sending it up, but it was also a sincere acknowledgment of a guiding principle. According to the card next to it, one of Brown’s mentors told her to make painting her best friend, because, like a best friend, it would always be there for her. In other words: the challenges of working out a vision could provide reliable comfort when all other comforts proved disappointing.

I tend not to have blindingly acute site-specific realizations, but standing in front of that painting I found myself sitting spiritually upright and in possession of possible insight.

I’ve been writing as long as Cecily Brown’s been painting, and while I’ve asked my writing to be many things, I’ve never really asked it to be a friend. Maybe it was, sort of, back in college, when the page was one of my favorite places to be. The papers and poems and stories I wrote for my classes helped me to become a person I really liked: confident, razor-witted, brilliant, charming. Crafting a self on the page transformed me the way spending time in the company of people you really, really love and trust can transform you. 

But I wasn’t truly capable of treating the writing like a friend back then. It wasn’t possible because I’ve never been able to separate the act of writing from my hopes for its acclaim. Even then it was tied too tightly to my ambitions for it. My affection for the writing was far too dependent on the praise it could bring me.

Still, the writing I did in college helped me find my footing in the world. It gave me the confidence needed to try to write for websites and magazines when I moved to New York, and showed me I had the perseverance required to write books. (I’ve published three of them.) Even though I knew this city loved to fry all the big fish leaping here from small ponds into a keening, smoldering crisp, I thought I was too level-headed and pure-hearted to get that scorched. But get scorched I did. Not immediately, or theatrically, but very gradually, and not by the city but by my own insecurity. Some of my goals transpired, but I was never satisfied with what I’d achieved. 

At the peak of this dissatisfaction, which was around five years ago, my ambition started to feel like an enemy.

Ideally, by this point in time, people—you good people!—would have known my name whenever they heard it and would trust it to bring them sharp sight if they saw it on the cover of a book. I wanted this more than I wanted children or perhaps even romantic happiness, and sometimes the pain of not having achieved it has roared so loud within my mind I could not see that the rest of my life was pretty okay if not very good, or hear anyone when they tried to convince me that things were pretty okay if not very good. 

At the peak of this dissatisfaction, which was around five years ago, my ambition started to feel like an enemy. Like something I might need to kill off or betray in order to feel free. I’m not so sure that I won’t need to kill it off at some point in the future and go find some other things to want. Like a dog. Or community involvement. People seem to have good things to say about their dogs and their community involvement. Really what I think I should do is become a lady hermit who resides in the kind of darkness on the edge of town glimpsed by Saint Bruce Springsteen in one of his visions. 

But not just yet, because Brown’s painting has gotten me thinking.

I can see now that I was asking my ambition to be the boyfriend who would save me — by which I mean I was asking it to be the thing that would finally make me believe I was as smart as I suspected and pretty in a way I didn’t think possible. It has taken me a very long time to understand that you should not ask this of any human being — and you should not ask this of your ambition. I see also that I have been desperate, needy, and clingy with my ambition in the way I have absolutely refused to be in relationships with men. Second wave feminism taught me well. (I’m joking. Am I joking?) 

The desperate desires fueling my ambition burnt me out, and thanks to a pandemic, the loss of a parent, and the glacially-paced magic that is the passage of time, the pain I just described has dwindled to a private, ritualized, and amused recitation of Ouch whenever I go into a bookstore, hand over my debit card, and the cashier fails to explode into delighted surprise when they read the name spelled out on the plastic. 

And I am much more able and willing to look at writing differently. Currently I’m curious, just like our therapists encourage us to be, to see what will happen if I experiment with treating it like a friend.

If I saw my writing as a friend, I would of course forgive it for not saving me. You don’t expect friends to save you—you expect them to support you, but without being a crutch or a cross. If I saw my writing as a friend, I’d be grateful, too, that it was still more or less a refuge after all this time, and after all my neglect and betrayal. And I’d be thrilled to know it was still willing to show up and listen to me say what was on my mind. Where we go from here I do not know. I am trying my best not to care.

We're honored to have Carlene join us at TueNight's Birthday Bash, where she took the stage to share her incredible story.

ICYMI: Watch TueNight’s Birthday Bash in full, here — we’re also sharing a few of our fave photos taken at our event, here.