Another version of an explanation

I wrote this earlier this fall, striking back at an attack of self-doubt. I don't know whether it will go in the literal book or not, but I like it. It's as true as I could make it. Really pushing myself to write without bounds.

An imaginary Twitter thread on why I am writing a book about myself and Mary Dyer, or warfare with the demons on both sides that tell me this is nuts

I write about Mary Dyer because I want to tell my secrets, but don’t want to be the center of attention.

Because nothing happens in my story, except everything I never do and everyone who leaves.

Because I don’t know what my life adds up to, even now. So how can I write a memoir? If my life adds up to anything it adds up to this.

Because I was too busy searching to remember.

Because I am middle-aged but still want to be a heroine. Or to have one at least.

And most of what made her famous happened after she was forty-five.

Because I am apparently still arguing with that historian at the conference who insisted that religion and sex are separate categories.

Because I have spent decades in the seventeenth century pretending it was not my own story.

Because I was afraid to become a writer, so I became a scholar, and now I need to figure out what I really am.

Because I fear you would find my life so strange, I might as well hold up what seems even stranger.

Because I want to share what I love, and dare you not to love it too. Strange as it is.

Because Mary Dyer loved Anne Hutchinson, and now I think that was the secret engine of her life.

Because I imagine her as daughter to Anne’s mother, femme to Anne’s butch.

Because she survived losses, common and unspeakable.

Because through believing these things about her I can pretend that she is like me.

Because my foremothers are lost and strange to me in nameless shtetls, so I have chosen to borrow a past.

Because she lived with what she knew to be lies, held up by others as an emblem of error.

Because the meme of monstrosity wrapped around her from the beginning--a whisper, then an excavation, a scandal passed from tract to tract.

And still somehow she managed to breathe.

Because this is what all of my sisters are struggling to understand.

Because she did not stop there but followed her deep longing, and stood up in resistance.

And she dared to leave her husband and children behind to do so.

There would be consequences and yet she chose them: to be imprisoned. To be bound in the words of others again. To be bound in the noose.

Because who among us has gone to the scaffold, been walked down from it alive, and then gone back to it again?

Because I want to be brave. Because the thought of the world ending strangles us all with fear.

Because she found a language that pulsed with divine extravagance. With love and grief and fury.

Because she found her people, so that even when her neck snapped she still spoke.

Even if they took her words and made them their own, yet again.

Even if that is what I too am doing.

Because somehow this is the one story I want to have time to tell.