BY LISA MARIE BASILE
Last night I happened on writer Deanna Schwartz’s Twitter conversation about selling trauma for a byline. Maybe you’ve seen it by now — it’s elicited all sorts of responses, which means it struck a vein. And it bled.
At first, I found myself feeling — what was it, exactly? — defensive. It’s my choice to sell my trauma if I want to! I don’t need a 21-year-old’s regret to muddy my experience. But I didn’t say that. I retweeted someone else’s eloquent response about the power of writing and then I logged off.
Of course, I kept thinking about it, in the dark, in bed. All those words, all that honesty, all that hunger to be a writer.
I remember those early writer days, swirling in some haze of poverty, confusion, and eagerness. Before MFA, writing was my heart language, and poetry was my truest identity. It alchemized the Me who’d been born of pain into some new Me, a transcendent thing. My work housed all of my secrets: the foster kid secret, the homeless shelter secret, the family addiction secret. It was my underworld, alit by passion. Poetry gave my suffering meaning, even if no one read it — and for a long time, I was alright with that.
Things changed when I was fresh out of MFA. I felt the pull to prove myself as a writer — to show that the $50,000 loan I’d taken out for graduate school was not all for naught. I was writing batches of freelance ehow.com articles for $3 or $5, and I was penning celebrity gossip blog posts about people I’d never heard of, for which I was underpaid. I never asked for more. Then I started this website. Writing became less of a thing that I was compelled by spirit to do and more of a thing I had to do. Or so I thought.
That beautiful byline? It was an illusory well in the desert. It was something other, better writers got to have.
Enter xoJane. Fuuuuuck. It was about 2013 or 2014, and I wanted that publication dopamine. I wanted to say, “I published this” and go about my day knowing the Internet housed a small piece of my soul and that everyone could walk past and glare at it, its maggots festering in publication glory.
I sold my traumas and ideas for, what, $50 a pop? I wrote honestly about not using birth control and got reamed out by family members who were “concerned for my wellbeing.” And then there were the “you’re a slut” emails (which, to be honest, trickle in every so often for no reason at all).
I talked about not having health insurance and being treated poorly at a hospital when I had a ruptured ovarian cyst. Although xoJane’s readership was mainly women, they were not interested in allyship. They had fangs and they were out for blood. Rather than compassion, most commenters fixated on the fact that I’d taken a hospital selfie. You’re not really sick. You’re lying. If you’re that sick, you don’t take a selfie. (I wonder what they’d think of the many chronic illness Instagram accounts today, which specifically document the experience of being ill).
This didn’t deflate me, though. This egged me the hell on. I wanted to drench these bloodsuckers in my pain, feed them the stinking abyss of my most personal wounds. Of course, this was a coping strategy, a way of justifying the fact that I’d put all of myself on the Internet to pay a sixth of my rent. I lived in a shitty apartment, mattress on the floor, three roommates — and every $50 was a $50 that could honestly change my life that month.
Eventually, I got a job at Hearst editing personal essays for The Fix, which solicited and pumped out personal essays to the various Hearst publications — mostly Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook. This was probably the most stable and interesting job I’d had at that point, and I took it very seriously. In a sense, we were part of the personal essay pipeline, and I’d track views and clicks, curious to see what “performed” and what didn’t. We were sorely underpaying these writers to bare their souls — and if I could have paid them more, I would have.
In my heart, I believed that lending my editing skills to this platform was, in a way, helping these writers to bloom and grow through storytelling. I loved our writers. I gave my heart to their stories. I became their friends. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that The Fix was part of the problem. It normalized bearing your grit and glory for very little pay — which often preys on the most vulnerable among us.
Publishing personal essays should not be a cavalier process; and these stories, in all their painful detail, should not be viewed as low-hanging fruit for clicks. Humans are at the other end of these stories, and we need to treat the process with humanity.
It’s not that I think Schwartz is entirely right, though, when she says, “Don’t sell your trauma and personal experiences at all! I sold mine for $300 and regret it. It's not worth the money and byline to feel like one essay is going to follow you around forever.”
I don’t think I’d say the same, even with my background editing personal essays and being burned at the stake online.
It’s that I hope more publications don’t exploit writers.
I think it’s a good idea to tell stories, to share your pain, and to normalize, through storytelling, the issues that society turns away from. Speaking aloud erases stigma and shame. It brings us together and creates a space of tolerance and support.
Personal essays are a sort of shadow work for the collective; they ask us to look within ourselves and cast the mirror out at society. It may be bloody, but ultimately, we all learn from it.
When I finally wrote my first personal essay about my foster care experience — for The Huffington Post — it was as though my albatross had finally moved on, taking a new form as something beautiful; my wound became my guiding light.
I was proud of this story. It led to a life of foster care advocacy, and even helped secured more bylines in The New York Times and Narratively. I believe that these stories helped me get book deals and create community. It gave me the writing life I always dreamed of (and, it turns out, was always working toward).
The difference between this piece and my work for xoJane was clear to me: I had taken the time to think about if and why I really wanted to publish this particular work. I had done it not under financial pressure. I was more mentally prepared for any backlash.
I can’t say I would have known how, when, or why to write my piece if I didn’t write all that garbage back then. I can’t say I would have become who I am without that.
Regret is a strong word. It’s a word that erases the climb, the journey, the necessity of discomfort.
I don’t regret any of it.
I think each writer gets to decide what feels right for them, and I don’t blame or shame any writer who feels the pull to publish. I know the power of money when you need it badly. And I know the hunger that comes with imposter syndrome and perceived competition and even self-competition. I also don’t think it’s fair to discount someone’s trauma if they had a bad experiencing publishing a personal essay. It’s personal.
The writing life is paved with strangeness, and curiosity and hunger often lead us down roads we might not have taken otherwise. Knowing how to bloodlet and for whom can help. But sometimes, you don’t know if it was worth it until you’re bleeding. And that’s okay.