My dearest Mermaid Darlings and beloved members of the Stillwater Petticoat Society,
There comes, often without herald or ceremony and at a moment far quieter than one might expect, a realisation that settles gently yet irrevocably upon a woman’s spirit, wherein she understands that she must at last take the pen back into her own hand, not for the purpose of contesting another’s version of events, nor to plead her case before a fickle and ever-attentive world, but merely to stand within the truth she herself has lived and to write from that ground alone, free of borrowed ornament, softened omission, or the restless desire for witnesses to affirm what her own conscience already knows.
I have been much occupied of late with thoughts of self-authorship, with that sober and inwardly luminous labour of remaining faithful to one’s experience even as more palatable narratives pass easily from mouth to mouth, and with the peculiar ache that sometimes attends this faithfulness — an ache not born of loss alone, but of discrepancy, of observing words employed too lightly and lives recounted with a gentleness they did not earn, until something within the spirit recoils, not in envy nor bitterness, but in allegiance to truth itself, which resents being made decorative.
For those who have truly begun again, without inheritance to soften the descent, without unseen scaffolding erected beyond the public frame, without the luxury of stepping neatly into a next chapter already prepared, beginning anew is neither a metaphor nor a literary convenience, but a lived winter crossed with bare feet and steady resolve, a home rebuilt plank by plank, a life re-entered without applause or reassurance, and it is this unspoken weight, borne quietly in the bones, that sharpens one’s awareness when tales of ruin are told without rubble and reinvention is praised without the reckoning that ordinarily attends it.
I do not set these reflections down in a spirit of accusation, nor with any desire to convene a tribunal of judgment, for the world is already overburdened with courts of opinion and verdicts rendered with undue haste, but rather to remind myself — and you, my dearest companions — that no telling, however polished or warmly received, possesses the power to diminish the truth you have lived, nor does your authority require correction of the record, comparison of paths, or the eventual unraveling of another’s carefully sustained illusion in order to be made secure.
There is, I have found, a particular freedom in laying aside the longing for visible vindication, a freedom that neither demands forgiveness upon command nor insists that justice arrive upon a public timetable, but instead releases the quiet hope that another woman’s life must be exposed, corrected, or undone for one’s own story to make sense, for self-authorship asks only that you refuse to abandon your knowing in exchange for peace with appearances, and that you remain seated within your truth even when it is less adorned and more costly than those that travel easily.
Some stories must be believed loudly in order to be endured at all, while others are endured so deeply that repetition becomes unnecessary, and if you find yourself among the latter — those who have lived without spectacle, rebuilt without illusion, and carried on without the comfort of collective applause — you may rest in the knowledge that you need neither to correct the record, sharpen your voice for hearing, nor measure your path against another’s polish, for your authority resides not in what you proclaim, but in what you have survived without ever consenting to lie to yourself.
Let us then continue, quietly and steadfastly, to write our lives as they are — salt-stained, hand-stitched, and honest — leaving ornamental narratives to those who require them for shelter, trusting that the sea, which knows the weight of true crossings, recognises the difference at once, and that in time, so too, shall we.
Most affably yours til' my next enchanting swim, LR
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