The Ethics of Writing About The People You Love (and Hurt)

On the morality and consequences of turning private lives into public text. Also, sorry the last email had a weird formatting thing. Read this one!

The Trouble of Exposure

I want to write about you. About the way we settled into ritual—a quiet, strange, frequent limerence. About how the morning light made me restless in your apartment, hovering in the kitchen, never sure if you wanted me to stay or go. But I don’t want to go. So I wring my hands together, smile, smile, smile, and wait for you to ask me to stay a little longer. Like, a dog.

I won’t write about the private intensity of your wanting, or the things we did in the dark, with the cool, damp air humming from the AC and the sheets smelling of wine, salt, and iron. I will leave those unnamed. I am trying to keep you intact, to resist turning you into material. But even restraint is a kind of exposure. This is the ethical problem of writing about other people: every attempt at restraint still betrays. You know who you are. But do others? Maybe close friends I’ve spoken to about you. But anonymity doesn’t protect anyone when intimacy is recognizable.

The Crux of Dating Me

Once, I wrote about a man who had given me permission. He said it would be flattering, in any capacity. So I did not hold back. He stopped speaking to me after. I can see why. I wasn’t kind. Reading it now, I hear the ego trip, the objectification. I told myself it was about boundaries, which was partly true, but somewhere in the writing it bent—subtly, fatally—into cruelty.

So can we ever write about those we lust for, hate, love, or are hurt by? My parents can’t read English, but my extended family can, and they have Googled me. What will they think? Men on dates have told me outright they won’t pursue me because they’re afraid I’ll write about them. And they’re right. I will. That’s what happens when you enter my life.

Yes, I could write investigative pieces, cultural critiques, and a very long researched history of fuckboys, and I will. But I believe writing about my unglamorous, vaguely pathetic life offers a balm to others struggling. Maybe the ethics of writing about others isn’t restraint at all, but admission: every sentence is already a trespass. And I will trespass anyway.

The Morality of Making Material

This tension folds into the larger question: what does it mean to turn someone into text? Lovers, friends, parents—do they become raw material against their will? I don’t mince words, though I scatter levity, absurdity, and irony into every essay. People tell me I sound disturbingly sad. Perhaps they’re right. But what are personal essays if not sadness rebranded, commodified, serif-fonted for consumption?

And is that fair? Or is it just another form of taking?

The marketing world taught me how easy it is to build a persona. Here, I became a sad woman, but hot. In essays, I try to escape that trap, but I circle it still. Every lover risks becoming archived in a paragraph. Every experience risks becoming a metaphor. Also, bitch, this is just me. I am a sad woman right now, and everything I’m writing is happening in real time. A friend asked if I keep pressing on these hurts—the rejections, the heartbreak, to mine the pain for material. And maybe I do. I took it out of my Mortal Chains draft, but it remains true: there’s an open wound pulsing under my chest, and I press on it to release the creative pus that feels, at least to me, like proof of life.

And yet I am trying to live differently. I am unwell, and I’m searching for clinics and resources. I joke about suicide to normalize it, but then I write goodbye letters. I don’t want to be a sad woman, not forever. I want to bite into a peach and taste it again. I want to sit with my friends and feel them return to me, sharp and present. But if I'm better, will I still be interesting? Krista wrote this to me while on the plane to Paris: Life perhaps will not have the same fatalistic sexy darkness you’ve become familiar with. But that sexiness is illusory; it’s enmeshed in pain.

Grief, Restraint, and the Bonsai of Trauma

My first post on grief was an archive, a ledger of what happened between Berlin and Los Angeles. It chronicled the odyssey back to a home that held as much pain as it did love, as much familiarity as it did loss. That was writing as survival, as witness. This is different. This writing is a release and a strange sort of accountability. I can read back and go Wow, that was fucked.

And here I am again. Writing about you. A lover. My life has always been consumed by relationships. Do you like coffee in the morning? I’ll get up early and make sure it’s there. You like tech? Suddenly, so do I. I bend myself to be the easiest partner imaginable. But that can only last for so long before I start to bleed out.

I tend the bonsai of my trauma: pruning, shaping, endlessly returning to the same branches. The lines are never straight. Each cut is meant to control, but if I'm not careful, it becomes some Grey Gardens shit. And every time I write, I press shears to the same wounds, hoping discipline will bring order. Instead, the pruning hurts and looks unruly or worse; it looks like when you have no idea what the fuck you’re doing in Animal Crossing.

So what are the ethics of writing about you, or my friends, or my parents? Maybe the ethics is simply this: restraint cannot save anyone. I could journal privately, let notebooks gather dust in corners. But I choose instead to offer them here, trimmed branches on display—crooked, alive.

Closing the Circle

Which brings me back to you. To the rituals, the sheets, the wanting, I swore I would leave unnamed. I tell myself I am keeping you intact, outside the reach of narrative. But the truth is less merciful: you are already here, a ghost in the sentences, caught in the branches. I will let you go. But first, know this: silence has a scent, and you are still in the air, everywhere.

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