Permission to be publicly wrong
Or, why I’m in a fight with Zadie Smith
Mixed Company decided last week to be more prolific — we’re going to produce shorter “blog” pieces more frequently, while continuing to work on our take-months-to-write essays. So here we are. Kalonji questioned patriotism. Natalia will soon write about teen drama Atypical.
And here I am. I’m writing about how hard it is to write quick turnaround pieces about whatever is on my mind.
I have so much on my mind: Puerto Rico is ravaged and neglected; sportsballers are taking knees and their stand against police brutality is being co-opted; maybe there’s an impending nuclear war; what will we eat for dinner?; why won’t the clothes fold themselves?
Weirdly, Zadie Smith, with whom I have a decade-long one-sided feud*, recently expressed why she stays off social media, and why I find writing and quickly posting online so challenging:
“I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind. I don’t want to be bullied out of it…I’m wrong almost all the time. It’s OK to be wrong. It really is OK, you just have to sit in the feeling and deal with it. I never feel that certain in the first place, so this kind of succession of mistakes is just what I call my novels.”
Like Zadie**, I’m never perfectly certain about what I’ve written. This lack of certainty is why I love feedback from editors, why I ask family members to read drafts, why I need temporal distance from my work before publishing. I’m often impatient with myself for this — it feels so good to have a piece out in the world and for others to engage with it — but I want my probably-wrong ideas to percolate.
Unlike Zadie, I’m not so much concerned I’ll be bullied out of my ideas, but rather that I’ll be bullied into them. If I haven’t had much time to take a prismatic view of my own thoughts, I’m much more likely to react defensively and without empathy when questioned. I will dig in my heels over some of my own poorly wrought nonsense. I suspect others are quite like this, as well, while skimming and taking silent-but-righteous pleasure in others’ Facebook and Twitter arguments.
And yet here I am. I’ve committed to writing more frequently because I need a habitual writing practice and because I don’t want to let Natalia and Kalonji down***. But please, accept that my words are possibly probably a bit wrong. Disagree with me with empathy. Expect me not to back down if you respond with some of your own poorly wrought nonsense.
Until next week, friends, enemies, Zadie…
*In On Beauty, she introduces a minor character from Kentucky, which she calls “the deep South,” which it is NOT. Then she has the gall to write his dialog with what she seems to think is a Kentucky accent but is decidedly NOT a Kentucky accent. Uff. Mark Twain took the time to include three different dialects and four variations in Huck Finn; Zadie picked a place she likely ain’t never been and projected a Southern drawl onto a man who by rights should have spoken with a twang. To be fair, Ann M. Martin did a same thing with Mary Anne’s boyfriend Logan from Louisville in The Babysitters Club series.
** Because in my mind we’re on a first-name basis.
*** I have no feud with them, so far as I know.
