Glass

Ok, here’s something I’m trying to process. So I’m just going to tell the story of it.

We were outside demonstrating my fiancé’s electric skateboard to one of his best friends — I should say he was demonstrating it, I was standing on the curb with my hood up, watching. It was kind of a big moment. BFF, as I will call him, described his mixed feelings at the fact that his friend now had something they’d both dreamed about for years. He’s a much better skater than me, my fiancé said, handing over the controls to watch BFF, who caught on immediately, carve down the street — I’m not sure exactly what carving encompasses, but anyway. A grinning driver waited for them to get out of her way; people are either amused or annoyed (or, reportedly, amazed) at my fiancé and his electric skateboard, depending, I theorize, on whether they think he’s as cute as I do — though maybe this time she just picked up on the guys’ overall stoked-ness.

I see, then, in my periphery, a girl walking down the street towards us. How do I know she’s homeless? There’s something wrong about the way she’s walking. She’s shuffling. I can hear her saying something, too. I try not to hear what it is. I’m trying to keep looking ahead, as if by doing this, she will disappear.

“Can you help me?” I hear, while rejecting the words, so they don’t make it to the part of my brain that processes meaning. I look at her, though, I can’t help it. She’s wearing a bright yellow safety vest. I think about the homeless people, 20-somethings, at least one of them a girl herself, who killed a woman my age in Golden Gate Park when I was living in the Haight.

“Can you help me?” she asks again. She is looking right at me, her blonde hair is dirty, curled in loose dreads, and there’s a pained look on her face, like she’s about to burst into tears. That pained look is directed at me, and it’s a primal playground feeling I get then, that she’s a classmate I’ve unintentionally betrayed. She stops walking, maybe 10 or 15 feet away now, and asks again.

I’m used to being on my way somewhere. It’s essential that I have somewhere to be, so I can walk faster and pass by, averting my eyes. I can’t do this with her. I’m in my own front yard.

The boys, who were in the street, are now standing by me in the sidewalk, the electric skateboard come to heel like a faithful dog.

“Can you help me?” She’s saying it to all of us now. My usual response is still unavailable, and I still find it impossible to speak. I just need a minute. I look desperately back at the two of them. Maybe I’m paralyzed because they’re there, and I want them to tell me what to do. I’m grateful, but also somewhat ashamed, when my fiancé steps in.

“What do you want us to help with?” He’s using the higher and more enunciated voice that comes out in tense situations, a voice I tend to find patronizing. “Are you in danger? Do you want us to call 911 for you?”

“Yes,” she says, looking relieved. That’s not what I was expecting.

“Yes?”

“I’m suicidal,” she says, her face reddening as she starts to cry.

It’s unnervingly timely, given the recent death of Anthony Bourdain, closely preceded by Kate Spade. We had just been listening to his audiobook on a drive, his voice brave and sensitive and wounded but ultimately optimistic, and I was messed up for a few days, I wanted someone like that to believe in the world still — to be live in the world still. I followed a link and watched him on a therapist’s couch, which had been played for TV as a quirky cultural encounter in a country with “more shrinks per capita than anywhere else,” but now echoed like a plea for help, and it made me upset, the therapist seemed pathetic to me, even harmfully dismissive. That day I wrote a story, just for myself, about a celebrity suicide counseling group that serves as a kind of purgatory, where a Bourdain character, desperate to get out of there for a smoke, finds himself talking to a Robin Williams character. But I realized halfway through, of course, I don’t know anything about suicide.

I don’t know what force was working in this girl in front of us. I should say young woman, but in the same way I think of myself as a girl, I think of her as a girl. We all, as discussed later, assess her pockets for weapons, doubt their existence.

The boys briefly confer, and then BFF calls 911. No one wants to, but what are we supposed to do?

While he’s on the phone call, which seems to last forever, the girl comes closer, and I keep trying to look everywhere but her, except I don’t want to not look at her now either, and so sometimes we make eye contact, which is a deep and staring eye contact. She has almond eyes the bright, light green of seaglass, and the darker ring around the irises just makes them prettier. They shine in the rest of her face — a crooked nose, acne, some extra weight, and a tan that I somehow know is dirt.

“They’re on their way,” BFF announces.

“They’re on their way,” fiancé and I repeat to her.

We do some more staring. Some more of those weird, forced smiles at each other and her, a smile that stretches my face and then falls when I can’t hold it up, because she’s still crying and still looking at me in that intensely pained way, although now there’s also something like interest behind it. She’s looking mostly at me, or at least it feels that way. I know it’s a fantasy, but it feels like she’s thinking she and I aren’t that different — wondering how she got to be here, instead of on the other side of the sidewalk, by the boy with the electric skateboard. It feels like she’s looking into me, pulling my privilege out and turning it over in her hands.

“It’s going to be ok,” I say, thinking that at least this can’t be the wrong thing to say to someone suicidal.

“What?” she asks me, with that underlying interest, as if I might have revealed some secret.

“It’s going to be ok. Help will be here soon.”

She doesn’t look calmed by this; if anything, she’s disappointed that was all I had to say.

BFF starts to ask her some questions, with a soothing but assertive bedside manner that makes me happy he’s headed to nursing school. We learn her name, we learn she’s the same age as us, we learn she’s also from SoCal, like me, though a less affluent city. In one of the silences, I want to tell her she has pretty eyes, but I worry that might make her stare and cry again, and the moment passes.

She’s not saying a lot, but when BFF asks some open-ended questions — something wise like, do you remember a good memory from when you were a child? — she suddenly is telling us everything, and it doesn’t make any sense. There’s violence in it, sexual things, things being done to her and put inside her, closets she was kept in, a man’s name that she says without introduction, as if he were a celebrity we should know, pills that make her all spaced out. Her mother, and other women, feature negatively, she doesn’t understand why they have to stalk her, why they have to do lesbian things. It’s sort of like someone telling you about their dream — it’s not possible to follow, and the emotions that pass on her face, her insistent repetitions, draw a kind of strained sympathy that might leave her lonelier than before; there is something essential that can’t be communicated.

She relaxes, though, from the talking. She asks if she can sit on the brick edge of our flower bed. It’s a misty San Francisco June dusk, and she looks cold, and I ask if she wants a blanket, and get a nod from BFF and run into the house to get her one. She drapes it over her knees, where it keeps slipping off her and almost falling onto the sidewalk until she grabs at it, half-successfully, like a child might.

Cheered by this, I ask if she also wants a glass of water? I go into the kitchen and spot some bread I’ve made, and start to saw off a slice — who knows when the last time was that she ate — but then I remember something about how you shouldn’t give people food if they’re on drugs, I don’t know if that’s real or not, but I decide against the bread and, feeling like I’m taking forever, fill a glass of water and bring it outside. She sips and then also swings this around as she talks, the water almost, just barely not spilling.

We slowly get the impression that she thinks she’s already dead. She keeps saying things like “that’s why I suicided,” past tense. BFF tells us later that this is something he’s seen before with the mentally ill. I wondered what she was seeing when she stared at me. If she thought she was in a kind of purgatory.

The police car pulls up, and as the cops get out I almost immediately have the thought — wait, the glass, that was so stupid. As if to make my point the officer, a young man not much older than us, serious-faced and precise, moves the glass (which she’s set down by now) out of her reach in a way that is calculatedly casual, and then starts to talk to her.

The discussion hinges on whether she has a plan to kill herself, or a plan to hurt other people, a terrible thing to be talking about, and especially in such logistical terms.

“I need to know if you have a plan to kill yourself, otherwise I can’t take put handcuffs on you and take you in the police car.”

“I’m suicidal.”

“Do you have a plan to kill yourself? Do you have a plan to hurt anyone else?”

“No.”

“You can walk to the treatment facilities, there is a women’s shelter at such-and-such address, you can get someone to take you there. I’m not a taxi.” The police officer says all of this, over and over, firmly but without frustration.

Crying: “I don’t get it. I’ve already told you, I’m suicidal.”

When two more cops arrive, standing bored in the background — when they run up against her idea that she has already suicided before — we decide it’s time to go inside. I’m not sure I want to, I feel invested, but I trust the boys on this one. I already have my blanket; the cops thought it was hers, and she explained while dropping it on the ground and apologizing tearfully to me, and I took it and it left me cold, too. She kept telling the cops that we, “these people,” had been so nice to her; this was important to her but it didn’t fit into the discussion about hurting. At one point she said emphatically that we were like her family, and I felt sad for her, used by her, and afraid of her, and paralyzed again by those feelings colliding.

We’re all quiet inside. The electric skateboard rests against the wall.

I mostly feel awful about giving her the glass, and say as much to the guys. “I thought about stopping you for a second,” BFF agrees, and they discuss the best possible water delivery method.

“Would have been pretty hard for her to have hurt herself on one of our Giants cups,” my fiancé muses.

“I really didn’t think she was going to do anything though,” I say, more to reassure than to defend myself. Her body language had never been violent, right? Well, at most, cautious and wounded, the kind of potential violence of a hurt animal. I have to admit, in this dialogue with myself, that I’d never really known what she was capable of; she thought she was dead. And I’d been so focused on calming her, I’d stopped thinking, let my own guard down.

There’s something I’m trying to put into words. Something about the line between self-preservation and charity being a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, you want to live in a society where people help each other. On the other, when it comes down to it, you want to protect yourself.

“I think what you’re saying is that you don’t want to be put in this kind of situation,” BFF says, and starts talking about solutions for homelessness, and we gradually move on to other things, but that wasn’t what I was saying at all. I was trying to look at this dilemma in the face, in the seaglass eyes, and not turn away.

Now I think he’s right — there is no escaping the dilemma, except perhaps saintly transcendence that could be a kind of suiciding, and we did the best thing, minus the glass.

Out the window, we saw her get taken away in the cop car. Maybe she finally said the magic words. I want to say I hope she’s ok, but I don’t know if that’s in any way realistic, so I hope she’s better.

And I do want a different situation, one where help is less fraught.

Thanks for listening; I get it now. I’m going to start volunteering.

So You Asked About My Life Coach

I switched on the TV shortly after talking with my life coach, Kristin Brabant. A network sitcom I don’t watch was playing.

“My life coach said those are my ‘strongs,’” a woman was saying, the camera all up in her face as she smiled defiantly. She twitched like she was getting ready to enter the ring.

“Your strongs?” Her husband raised his eyebrows and ate a spoonful of cereal.

“Yeah, we don’t like to say ‘strengths.’” Why was unclear. “And instead of weaknesses, we say ‘stretches’.” (This was at least a little funny.)

“So what did she say your new career should be?”

“A…life coach!” There was a crazed look behind her glasses now.

“Your life coach said…you should become…a life coach?” Over the laugh track, her husband indulged her slowly, like he was speaking to a child. I will note that both life coach and life coach-ee were women in this scenario.

“Well, life coaches need a lot of empathy, and empathy is one of my strongs.” To her husband’s dismissive look, she said with finality, “And empathy seems to be one of your stretches.” End scene.

I couldn’t believe I’d just happened to flip on the TV to hear dumb jokes about a service I’m paying for and finding extremely useful. Except, I could believe it. I’ve been tempted to roll my eyes at the idea of a life coach, too. And now that I have one, I’ve met occasionally with judgment, and more often with my own anticipation of judgment. I try not to mention my life coach, and if it comes up, my explanations feel defensive or shy. That’s why I’m writing this post, to say once and for all what I truly feel about the matter, since I’m not great at thinking under pressure.

I found Kristin, the coach, by accident. It started with a silly video — sent via Facebook message by Kristin, the friend, about six months ago. I burst into laughter when I saw the two of us dancing like fools to “Single Ladies” in front of her Macbook’s webcam. She’d randomly come across it and been transported, as I now was, to our time as undergrads at Berkeley almost a decade ago.

Kristin and I shared an apartment for a semester, our beds almost touching because we both insisted on fulls in a room meant for twins. We sort of lost touch after she traveled to Costa Rica to study abroad and was replaced by a new roommate who was there less often. The last time we were good friends was when I went to her 21st birthday party, at a gay bar in the Castro — the most fun dancing. She was always a great dancer; in the video, it’s hilarious to watch me aping her moves. We both had long-term and long-distance boyfriends whom we cried over and eventually broke up with. We appreciated each other’s jokes. We both, I think, harbored a crush on our next-door neighbor. For some reason, I remember thinking that we were just too similar to live together — I know we butted heads over things, but now it’s hard for me to remember what they were. I’m sure Kristin cared more about the state of our bathroom than I did. My boyfriend probably visited too often. Mostly, I think we just didn’t get to spend enough time being friends instead of girls trying to figure out how to share a tiny room.

In any case, I was glad to hear from Kristin, as I always was — we’d found ourselves living in the same city after college, and occasionally caught up over a drink. I went to her beach bonfire birthday one year and had a great time with her crew, singing and laughing and drinking, blanket-wrapped in the warm glow. I once invited her to a party because I thought the crowd was weird and wanted company (come to think of it, this type of behavior might have had something to do with why we weren’t closer) — she actually came, and made such an impression that a few people fell in love with her. Kristin is beautiful and charming, with a sassy, smart energy. Every time we met, she’d make me laugh buckets; she’s a natural storyteller. And she’d always leave me high on the energy that comes from being well listened to.

That old video Kristin sent me — both of us wearing sunglasses indoors, mugging for the camera — spurred another one of our infrequent meetings. As usual, we had loads of updates for each other. I had gotten engaged only the weekend before, to the guy I’d just started dating the last time I saw Kristin. Now I was visiting her beautiful new apartment, she was a vegan (I thought this was new, but she and so many other people around me had always eaten so healthily that I couldn’t be sure), and she’d made a big move to start her own life coaching business. I was impressed. I didn’t know much about life coaches; about as much as the average sitcom viewer, I guess. And while I might have judged someone for having a coach at that time, I (perhaps irrationally) wouldn’t have judged someone for being a life coach — and definitely not Kristin. I remembered her work in college, supporting underprivileged high schoolers. She’d done a project (ahead of its time, I think!) where she gave away free hugs on our campus’s main thoroughfare. And her previous jobs were in teaching and mentorship.

I came back from that dinner and told my fiancé about Kristin’s new endeavor. In his typical wise and plain-spoken way, he remarked, “Well, it’s nice that you already know someone who’s a good life coach.” He never suggested I look into it — he’s much too polite to have even been thinking that, and anyway I’d adamantly refused the slightest suggestion of “seeing someone” when I was having anxiety issues at my former job. But his comment stuck with me.

Thinking back to our dinner, I realized it had given me a taste of what it would be like to have Kristin as my life coach. I’d told her about my recent departure from my job as a product manager in tech, and the options I was looking into: law school, finding another product management job, and trying to…“become a writer.

“Your body language completely changed,” she told me after I was done talking about how maybe I could make another PM job work. She pointed out that my shoulders were hunched, my body turned inward. With writing, though, she instantly perceived and returned my own excitement. How amazing that I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid! She encouraged me to reach out to acquaintances who are writers (something that we ended up having to work on for six months, since I was terrified). She recommended a few books — You Are a Badass and The War of Art.

I bought Jen Sincero’s book the next day — I’d noticed it on my fiancé’s audiobook queue, so I figured it had two stamps of approval — and I devoured it before the week was over. It was exhilarating, and a balm for the feeling of ennui that had surrounded me in the past few months of playing video games and wondering what could possibly come next. As I read Jen’s writing, I kept hearing Kristin’s voice — they’re both funny, sharp, and spiritual young women. Jen explains at the end of the book that the best thing you can do to continue to invest in your growth is to get a coach. I remembered Kristin told me she had one herself, who was helping her as she struck out on her own and built her new business.

I thought about my fiancé’s comment. What did I have to lose? I had some savings in the bank, and in the worst case of it not working, Kristin and I would go back to rarely seeing each other. As I guessed, and as it turned out, I had so much more to gain.

I could tell you very specifically about the things Kristin has worked on with me. She’s helped me realize what I want, and set goals to get it, goals which have become, through her gentle help, more realistic over time (“writing a novel” became “submitting a short story to a few contests for unpublished writers”). She’s taught me about the different energy levels (basically, states of mind) that we can access when dealing with stressful situations. “Energy leadership” set off my skepticism at first, but it quickly made a lot of sense to me, in theory and in practice. We haven’t really talked about strengths and weaknesses — and even to my untrained eye that doesn’t seem like the best thing to focus on. Instead we’ve talked about my core values, and how I am or am not living in integrity.

I could also tell you what she’s helped me achieve: the time that I wrote 10,000 words in a week because the consequence was having to donate $200 to a political cause I don’t believe in. (It feels like ages ago that we had to resort to such medieval methods.) The short story that I did submit to several contests (Kristin’s idea — the deadline being extremely helpful). The blog I started, which I hesitated on for weeks because I couldn’t think of a good name — Kristin convinced me that paigedunnrankin.com was good enough, and it was. When I shared my writing with my family, for me a necessary first step to sharing it more broadly, it was because Kristin helped me let go of any fears, however irrational those fears turned out to be. I’m now starting to look at what it could be like to have a career where I write (just about every way you can interpret that), and it’s incredibly reassuring to know that Kristin will be there.

Maybe I could have learned and done these things myself. Just like how someone who hires a personal trainer at the gym could have read up on exercises, motivated themselves (!), occasionally asked a friend to spot them, and gotten into shape. If you’ve tried to do this without help, you know how hard it is. And if you’ve ever worked out with a great personal trainer, you know the difference — even expecting to check in regularly with that person, or being able to call them when you have a question or a success to report, goes a long way. Not to mention all the things they see in your tendencies and your technique that you’ve missed. Someone professional has my back as I face the struggles and fears that come along with figuring out my life, and just because that’s more nebulous than physical fitness doesn’t mean it’s silly or indulgent. If anything, it’s that much more important.

And I think it’s important to change the message I picked up, that I saw echoed in that sitcom, which is: by all means, get a personal trainer, get a coach for your golf game or grades, but a life coach? Getting help living in alignment with your values, choosing work that you care about, and achieving balance and happiness? You’d better keep that one to yourself, for now.

Now, a life coach isn’t cheap. Over six months, I’ve paid Kristin what it would cost my fiancé and I to go on a nice vacation. And there may be a time when I decide — Kristin and I were open about this at the beginning — that I could get more value out of putting that money elsewhere. But I couldn’t be happier with my decision. And I want to keep speaking up over the laugh track that maybe exists mostly in my head, but exists all the same.

Kristin and I are closer now, a happy consequence of sharing our gifts with each other (mostly, hers with me). My respect and love for her keeps growing. If anything I’ve written has made you wonder if you could use a life coach, do check her out at www.kristinbrabant.com.

Truth and Fiction

The very first short story I finished after leaving my job to “become a writer” was about a young father whose daughter becomes obsessed with a present he’s gotten her, a virtual reality best friend. The dad becomes obsessed with the knowledge the virtual friend is learning and logging from his daughter and her environment.

Despite what I felt was an interesting premise, the story failed to come together in any way that satisfied me. I’d set out to write about the ways that technology is diving generations — wondering, what kinds of things will our future kids play with that we won’t understand?, landing on VR, which is something that had already made me feel old and alienated, when it became the cool thing to work on among my friends and colleagues while completely failing to interest me. I ended up writing about this dad’s lack of compassion and his pathetic confusion about technology. Because I have never been friends with or even I think known a young divorced dad (to up the stakes and eliminate the number of characters I had to deal with, I made him divorced), I guessed that he would be feeling mean-spirited towards his ex-wife and jealous of her new boyfriend. Because I haven’t spent much time around children, the daughter was always either saying something cute or throwing a tantrum. I had no idea how to describe her interactions with the virtual friend — the very generational gap that I was trying to write about — because virtual reality interested me so little that I didn’t even have the willpower to research how this might work.

Finishing the story felt like finishing a sports game that you know you are going to lose. I pushed the dad towards some kind of epiphany…he cuddled his daughter and removed the virtual reality glasses from her room. “Main character is not likable,” I wrote in my notes. “Look into how VR actually works.” It took me a few more months, a few more failed story attempts, to realize that I’d rigged the game against myself from the start.

Next, I wrote a story about another put-upon man, a software engineer whose team is responsible for a bug that caused a fatal self-driving vehicle crash. This idea was taken from the headlines. I’d come up with a great title: “Post-mortem,” the name of the document we had to write whenever something went terribly wrong on a product at work, only in my story, it obviously also referred to the real death that had happened. The death — that was the problem. I thought I needed to write about something dramatic and important, to discuss tech companies’ great power and responsibility, but I had no idea how to actually deal with the death in a way that felt realistic. My main character’s tears felt insincere; his manager’s whip-cracking did, too.

I tried to picture my former tech leads in the main character’s situation, struggling to find and fix the bug. But I could only recall the ways they acted around me in (less) stressful situations — what happened between them and their monitors had been, mostly, a mystery. And so it remained in my story. My character banged his head on the keys and the code went blurry in front of his eyes, and so on. As the story meandered, sometimes into truthful situations full of details I remembered from office life, I finally had a mysterious stranger come and fix the bug for everyone, and my main character took a new job. I could feel it; another defeat.

I talked about my dissatisfaction with my life coach, who was helping me achieve the life goal I murkily and emotionally announced during our initial conversation: “to create something I was proud of.” She encouraged me to celebrate finishing stories, to show my writing to others, and above all to call myself a writer, something she dubbed “acting as if.” But I wasn’t a writer. Not yet. Would someone call themselves a painter, if they set out to paint a scene realistically, and then the trees came out blobby and the perspective was all wrong? “How will you know when you’re ready?” she asked me; or, of the work, “How will you know when it’s ready?” I was frustrated with the implication that I was being difficult to please, that if I couldn’t be satisfied with my progress so far, I might never be satisfied. I knew that if I wrote a good enough story, I would recognize it, the same way that as a beginning baker, I still recognized a decent loaf of bread from a flat and dense mess that had to be thrown away. “I’ll know when I know,” I said. “I’ll know when I feel like it’s right.”

I was journaling the whole time, getting to know the small voice inside my head, the voice of a young woman. A few of the books I was reading had encouraged me to write about memories, and though I was convinced I’d had a very uninteresting life, I found myself crying as I wrote about walking down to the beach with my family, or my grandmother hanging a fresh-flower lei around my neck at her house in Hawaii. Then, I wrote a speech for my grandfather’s memorial service in April — my first real writing assignment. Just talk about some memories, my mom said, and though at first I worried I wouldn’t have enough, as I sat down and focused, memories of him came flooding back, and of how I had felt as a girl.

The next time I sat down to write a story, I wrote about a young woman, sitting for a tech interview — and quickly her interior thoughts went from skin problems to getting sucked into Wikipedia browsing to riding the bus to outdoor education camp in sixth grade. There was so much emotion as she thought about that time — the excitement of being away from home amid the smell of the pines, how sad she’d been that it didn’t snow, the odd girl she’d been trying to distance herself from that year, but who ended up sharing a cabin with her anyway. What happened between them? I wasn’t sure, but I felt it was something uncomfortable, embarrassing, and confusing. Because of course something like this had happened to me. We were far from the interview now. I was writing a new story, my first true story.

In this story about camp, all the details were deeply felt, and I raced towards the ending with a sense that the truth could win. When I finished, I wasn’t sure if I had a victory or not; I thought some of the character’s choices weren’t fully explained, as if in reaching so far back, I had dropped a few essential pieces and needed to go looking for them again. The story simultaneously contained too many true things and not enough, ending up a kind of muddled reflection in which one could barely see the outline of the plot and the meaning. But for the first time, I made it to the finish line with an exhausted feeling of pride. Looking back, my speech for my grandfather was the first thing I was proud of — the real completion of my goal. But this was the first piece of fiction I was proud of, which had been my real goal.

Or was it fiction? I was afraid, as I wrote, that I was cheating by using so many things that weren’t made up. But this was also exciting, as if I was doing something illegal, seeing what I could get away with. I started another story, pulled directly from my recollection of being almost kidnapped while on a work trip in Shanghai, which I’d written in my journal months back in lieu of posting a #MeToo publicly. My last story had been based on memories of being 12; in this story, I was remembering being 22. It was much easier to remember how I’d felt and acted, but the emotions were duller, perhaps the result of too much drinking or my immature capacity for empathy. I was also creating characters from fragments of former coworkers, some of whom, unlike my elementary school classmates, I still occasionally saw and talked to. My first draft was too realistic, just because that was the only way I knew how to get it down — then I took out the details that didn’t serve the story, and merged and distorted the characters until they became new people, unattached to the real world.

This story, after several drafts, finally felt right to me — it was accurately saying something I wanted to say, something I cared about. I hadn’t known what I wanted to say when I set out to write the story — unlike in my first attempts — only that there were some emotions back in Shanghai, some unfinished business like in my story about camp, that asked me to dig deeper. And in the end the truth seemed to emerge out of getting those details and those feelings as right as I could make them. I was happy and invigorated, but confused. Sure, I had made up some things; if you figured that all memories and perspectives are “made up,” I had made up everything. But this didn’t feel like fiction to me — the way I had written stories in college from the point of view of a poor woman in Costa Rica or an artist’s muse, neither of whom I knew anything about, neither of whom I could even picture in my mind’s eye.

When I learn a new way of doing things, my first feeling is always skepticism. There’s always something foolish and ridiculous about myself, trying something so out of character. There’s often something just too obvious about this new way. In this case, I was learning to “write what you know,” which meant exactly that, and which must be the oldest piece of writing advice. I’d been resisting it for so long, justified by the fact that so many books or interviews had told me it was wrong and limiting — everyone is allowed to write about anything, and this rule can be followed too strictly, used as a way to play it safe.

But for me, writing what I knew was my artistic risk. For one thing, it involved getting a close look at myself, which I hadn’t done perhaps ever. For another, I was sure that what I’d written would reflect badly on me, and possibly hurt other people — as I started writing blog posts that were sort of about my parents, or as I handed my fiancé, my first reader, that Shanghai story, in which the main character dances dirty in a club and has a crush on an obnoxious guy.

“Just please don’t think that it’s about me,” I told him, unable to be in the same room as he read, and unable to sit still, either, scribbling in my journal. When he came over, he reassured me that was easy to think of the protagonist as someone else. Affection in his eyes told me that this pretends mattered much more to me than it mattered to him. He wasn’t mad. He liked the story.

I submitted this story to a few writing contests. As I wrote more and more truthfully, with that same fear I continue to force myself to reframe as a thrill, I gushed to my coach about my epiphany. “Acting as if,” had, in fact, been a necessary step — I had to just type every day, I had to finish a few bad stories, to figure out how to do things better. But acting as if, I was excited to report, was really no substitute for being.