I realize that my writing paints a certain picture. It paints a picture of my life, my romances, my family, my heart.

But the thing is, as most who write already know, it is not the whole picture.

Very recently I dated someone whose perception of me was shaped, in large, by my writing. He “got to know me” through the poetry and stories here. He made a lot of assumptions based on what he read. And it became painfully clear, very quickly, that those assumptions were off track. Way off track. Like, you are on another train, going in the opposite direction, Off Track.

If I didn’t care what people thought of me, these assumptions wouldn’t matter. But that has always been my problem. The whole point of writing and putting things out there, for me, is to be known and understood. So when I feel like what I say is misunderstood, or rather that I am misunderstood because of what I say, I feel the need to explain.

But that’s like telling a joke, and then trying to explain why it’s funny. It really makes it not funny.

I have to start working on (again, because when I was in school it was easy for me to watch the poem get interpreted by 30 people who all thought they knew what I meant) on really letting the writing go, once I write it. And if I exaggerate something to make it sound sad, and then someone thinks I’m a depressive…or if I talk about sex more off-handedly than I really see it, and someone thinks I’m a wanton woman…so be it, I guess. It’s just hard for me to imagine what she seems like, that person who is built by the poems.

If anything, it serves as a lesson to me, to never evaluate and condemn someone based on what I see, or what I think I see. We’re far too complicated for that.