Becoming the Muse

Or, on role reversals

When I was twelve years old, I wrote a song called “Mixed Messages.” My brother Holden and I recently regaled my managers with it, and they watched in bemused, awestruck silence that either of us remembered the lyrics of this 15-year-old song that I haven’t played (or thought much about) since I wrote it. Its subject? The basketball player with the pretty smile with whom I was obsessed for my entire seventh grade year. I confessed my love to him over Facebook messenger in February, which he politely rejected. Then in April, at a school dance, I dispatched my friend to ask him to slow dance with me, which he shockingly accepted. Taylor Swift’s “Today Was A Fairytale” echoed meaningfully in our middle school gymnasium as onlookers from his popular friend group watched aghast. Some weeks later, I dispatched a different friend to ask if he had changed his mind about his feelings re: me. He hadn’t. It was this Shakespearean narrative twist that propelled me to write the aforementioned song. In hindsight, he was a nice boy with nice parents, who knew my parents, and he had agreed to slow dance with me to save me public humiliation. At the time, I felt we were in the throes of a tumultuous love story, a “will they won’t they” of historic proportions. It wouldn’t be the last time I would extract meaning from nothing.

As I said, it’s been a decade and a half since those events transpired, and in that time, my obsessive personality has led me down other rabbit holes. I have fallen in love, for real, and I have documented my experience of that love in great sonic detail. I have returned to my old tricks, writing songs about people who do not feel the way I feel, or who do not know I exist at all. I have written about nonromantic subjects, about professional and platonic turmoil both significant and trivial. I have written about politics, about sexual trauma, about chronic illness. And through it all I have determined that while I do not have “main character syndrome,” per se, I almost certainly have “narrator syndrome.”

Until now.

To my knowledge, in my nearly 27 years on this earth, I have never been the subject of anyone’s writing. There was an abortive attempt at a poem written by a summer camp crush; there was an instrumental guitar line penned by a boyfriend, to which he never set any words. But as far as I knew, no one had written any words about me. I was the one holding the pen. This was, at first, a source of great frustration for me. My teens and early twenties were spent describing people down to the way the hair on their arms caught the light, spent transcribing conversations to the point of direct quotation, and no one had done the same for me. As I aged, it became a relief. I was the first word, and I was the last. And then, quite recently, I became aware of some writing that I have reason to believe is about me.

The person who wrote these words knew me personally, intimately. The writing is public, though my identity is not. They have plausible deniability, as the writing contains no description of me so damning as to make a legal case. But for a variety of reasons, I’m pretty sure they’ve written about me. And I’m not sure they have any intention of stopping.

My first reaction to this realization was shock. Part of my narrator syndrome is a tendency to forget that I have an impact on people, and that they think of me when I’m not around. The only people to whom this does not apply are my blood relations; I know they miss me when I’m gone, that they worry if I don’t pick up the phone, that my words and actions have the capacity to heal their wounds or hurt their feelings. When it comes to everyone else, though, I’m caught totally off-guard when I find out something I’ve done has affected them meaningfully, whether it’s positive or negative. Imagine my surprise when I realized someone I’d once spent considerable time with had sat down at a desk, or in their car at a drive-thru, or otherwise taken time out of their day to write something inspired by what I made them feel. Maybe it’s hard for you to imagine me being surprised, actually. But I assure you that I was.

My next reaction was fear. What if people found out? What if they became less careful in the obfuscation of my identity? What if the writing became so popular, my identity so fixed in its mythos, that I became a victim of a digital pile-on? I wondered if I should reach out to them and tell them to stop.

I quickly realized my hypocrisy and put that thought to bed.

My next reaction? Flattery. First of all, I was framed in very complimentary light in their writing, and second of all, the writing was actually kind of good. It definitely wasn’t bad. I cringed when I encountered it, but only because I recognized myself between the lines. If I didn’t know the person who made it, I probably would have enjoyed it, at least a little. Even if it had been god awful, it would have been impossible not to feel the slightest bit of pride. I had been so significant to them that they made it a matter of public record. Was this how all my subjects felt? A mix of gut-churning anxiety and shameful glee?

I couldn’t help but think of all the people I’d turned into song. Most of them have had their personal details watered down so much that they scarcely resemble their original source material, but sometimes it’s all laid bare. Even in cases when no one else could possibly know, they know. And to be the subject of someone else’s scrutiny is a heady proposition. Even with no contact from the person, to have confirmation that they were, once, still watching, is a weighty thing.

The wise thing to do would be to completely ignore this information, to hide this person’s digital missives from my purview and pretend it isn’t happening. But I know I won’t do that. I know that I will remain tensed for the arrival of the next one, wondering if I’m seeing it early or late or right on time. And ultimately I will be grateful, once again, for the tremendous gift of human relationships—how we shape each other, how we destroy each other, how great joy and great pain might turn any of us, at any moment, into a writer.