I think a lot about what to say versus what to leave unspoken. It comes up as a memory of a moment with an ex-boyfriend. At the time, long after our breakup, I wanted to talk about what happened—what drew us together and what pulled us apart. “I just want to turn over all the stones,” I said.
“Turn over all the stones,” he repeated, not unkindly. “We don’t need to say everything out loud.”
I don’t know why this is the iteration of the idea I always remember. Plenty of moments test the boundary between spoken and unspoken, but I carry this one like a litmus test, or like a worry stone. I think of it when I’m trying to decide what to write about explicitly versus what to let lie as an underpinning philosophy of what I write. Do I need to say out loud what is guiding me? Or do I just let it guide me to the thing I say out loud?
If I were to write about everything I’m obsessed with, if I were to turn over all the stones, I would write all the time about anxiety and depression: how I follow a story idea until it drops off a cliff into a tangle of complexity, uncertainty, and inelegant disclaimers, the consequences of error or oversimplification or ignorance razor-sharp. I start to write about my family and consider the unfairness of being the one to tell our stories. I start to write about mixed-race identity and wonder if I’m taking up the wrong kind of space. I start to write about a book and fear any comparisons I make to other works will be random and incomplete.
Talking about anxiety, let alone writing about it, feels indulgent. Who isn’t anxious right now? My version of anxiety—housed, surviving financially, my family healthy, my skin not placing me in immediate danger—is so relatively low-stakes. Plus, I’ve written about it before. Can’t once be enough? But it seems to reaccumulate like phlegm, something I need to clear before I can speak about anything else.
I had my annual physical this week, and for the first time in the four or so years I’ve gone to this doctor’s office, the nurse gave me the depression and anxiety screenings on paper, rather than asking the questions out loud. Doing the screenings out loud, I had always felt uncomfortable, like I was having an inappropriately intimate conversation with an acquaintance.
“Over the past two weeks, how often have you felt bad about yourself—or that you’re a failure or have let your family down?” the friendly nurse asked one year. I knew about her kids, their age gaps unusually wide, the teenage one so supportive of the youngest and asking so little of her parents.
“Two,” I said, the answer meaning more than half the days.
“Aww, really?” she replied.
I couldn’t stand moments like that, even with this nurse I liked. With the paper questionnaire this year, without the awkward social feedback, I tried to be honest, but still I felt the tension between asking for help and pulling myself together.
“Over the past two weeks, how often have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things?” another of the screening questions asks.
I feel pleasure every day: in the fresh air, the sound of traffic and rustling leaves out my window, the touch of my partner’s skin, talking with my friends. I feel a lack of pleasure every day: the wildfire smoke particles trapped in the marine layer, the heat of an endless summer worsened by climate change, the complete hostile insanity of the Trump administration and white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, the untreated manifestations of mental illness in my family.
I want treatment and I want connection but I don’t want the “aww.” I want to be honest but I don’t want the honesty to be taken for or to become an implicit plea for pity or blanket forgiveness. The things I fear are not unreasonable. It is unfair for me to shape my family’s story. Writing about my racial identity, as a light-skinned and ambiguous-looking person, is a complex dance requiring constant self-interrogation. Writing about others as a journalist, I do need to work against simplification and self-centeredness. But I get stuck at the phase of deliberation, in my head or in my journal. Should my reservation be unspoken or spoken this time, I wonder? I turn the worry stone over and over and over.