Couldnt sleep well last night, partly bc I was still transcoding video, and partly because Genevieve was(is) mad at me about the diary. Specifically she said she was mad because I portrayed her as a vaguely inconvenient antagonist side character. The proximate breaking point seems to have been this post, but really she had much more issue with how she was represented (or rather, not represented) during our trip to europe. Its a very fair concer. She’s very understanding of my stupid online diary, and I grateful she she didn’t say what she could have said, which was that I was only in Europe because she wanted to bring me along, and I had gone along written all these ungrateful diary posts about how I was sad or about how nice various churches were or whatever I said.
What she did say was that it was important to her that we did the trip together, and the scance mention of her (and only in neutral or worse occasions) made her feel bad1. I can understand why she feels that way- its like I cut her out of my experience of our shared adventure, and took it all for myself in the retelling. First thing’s first: mea culpa. I agree with her. She spelled out the evidence2 clearly for me. She has demonstrated to me that someone reading my diary would get an unfortunate version of my lover and best friend.
I can’t do that much to rectify this problem, except for trying to do better in the future. One thing I could do now would be to go on a long tirade about how wonderful and perfect my sweet beautiful Genevieve is. That is true and it would be a good thing for me to do that, but it sort of doesn’t count if I’m just trying to get out of trouble3.
I want to work through the problem as it is, because Genevieve’s objection to my lack of positive acclaim is in part that she is hurt that a potential reader might get the sense that she’s a nagging bitch or something, but more than that she described her frustration with the disconnect between my words and actions in real life and what I write in the diary.
One aspect of this is just I mostly complain on the diary. Most of my thoughts are negative and critical, and I don’t always think the positive ones are very interesting. I also am working through little sticky annoyances and things that bother me, so a lot of the time I’m just spouting off various greviences that have irritated me in a day. If things are going well with Genevieve, which they are almost always, it doesn’t become something I want to excise by way of writing it down. My relationship with Genevieve is one of the few really good things in my life, and I’m happy that I don’t spend a lot of thought and effort working through problems.
I also know that I have never thought my way into getting anything. I’ve only thought my way out of things. If I have something I like, I try desperately to not think about it, as that would only ruin it. I fear I would either, through my various subconscious or conscious ill-advised machinations and schemes, actually deprive myself of my object of happiness, or else through my deeply honed sense of ambivalence ruin my appreciation, subdue my reverence, and phenomenologically taint whatever good thing I have with a gordian knot of cerebration, thus driving it away from my grasp psychically. This is a fear-based reaction I should work against actively.
I’m also probably not good at talking about being in love. Its pretty corny to be in love, and its also very hard to express anything that amounts to the immense sublimity that the phenomena of love feels like. I really really love Genevieve, and I like having people bear witness to it, but it seems like the observation of the two of us together expresses the particular depth and perfection of our love better than I am likely to say on my amateur autofiction substack. That nonetheless doesn’t mean I am not responsible for trying.
The thing that really surprised me about Genevieve taking me to task for being a bad literary boyfriend was that she said I had all these cerebral4 words to say about the Danube, but wrote about it as though I were there all alone. This surprised me quite a bit because in my mind, one of the really important things about going to the Danube was going there with Genevieve. It felt like the ideal place to be two people in love. I remember walking along with her and feeling like we were doing the absolute perfect thing together. I’m sure I would have liked walking the Danube alone together, but I have serious doubts it would have made anywhere close to the impression it made on me with Genevieve on my arm, and I suspect the emotional flavor would have been melancholic, rather than blissful.
I thought that I had written something to that effect, if even as a passing reference. Maybe I did and I couldn’t find it, but I certainly didn’t write anything at length about it, which makes me feel a little ugly. Genevieve said that I was in fact likely not being honest if I wasn’t expressing my love for her, or at least describing any positive attributes of her. This is interesting to me, because I would have thought I would know if I was being dishonest. Time and time again I rediscover5 doing the diary that there are many more ways of being dishonest than being honest, and it is very hard to tell which one you are doing until after the fact.
So indeed I have been dishonest. I think I have internalized a sense that my emotions are bad and shouldn’t be mentioned. It’s not unique or interesting and it is an embarrassing pathology primarilly affecting men. I think I have a particularly acute case for a couple reasons.
My WASPy nuclear family is impressively emotionally reserved.
Early in my life I had problems with explosive anger, and have learned to dissipate all emotions before they get the better of me.
I spent a lot of time in treatment during my adolescence, and felt like it was a place where emotions good or bad were effectively punished, and the only safe way to feel at all times was bemused and detached.
Emotions are embarrassing, incorrect, and are for girls.
I would like to do better in the future on this front. Not only would I like to write about my affection and esteem for Genevieve, but I think both myself and my writing would drastically improve by increasing the emotional input and honesty. Someone, in response to my post about my Tao Lin gig, said my writing was like Lin’s. I believe flexing the emotional aspect of confessional writing might fix both this stylistic problem and stop the substack from pissing off my girlfriend.
She specified that the negative emotion she felt was pissed off.
She pulled up the diary and did a name search. There were 109 mentions of ‘Genevieve’ — the fast majority were perfunctory, like Genevieve and I went to xyz and did blah blah blah, and a few were more or less positive, but these were outweighed by me complaining about stuff she did or otherwise painting her in not the best light.
I’m not actually in trouble- the only thing that Genevieve did by way of retaliation is text me to ask if ‘I still hate her’ a couple times which is funny and sort of sweet in a way.
She said this word a few times. Is my diary that ‘cerebral?’
This is also something I gleaned when thinking about Caveh Zahedi and his work. The impossibility of a pure ‘radical honesty’ seems like a blind spot when he talks about his work. I also remember that when I went to his reading he mentioned that Kathy was represented in a negative light in his diary.
I love you and this very well written and also feels honest