January 13, 2021
Brooklyn, New York
I was 27 years old
I launched Keep Out. Didn’t ask for specific art from Austin for this week which will be fine, I think. It’s not truly a pilot without being a little scrappy. Pressed “publish” while laying in bed and, not seconds later, something in my peripherals caught my eye. A massive cockroach crawling along our bedroom floor. I exclaimed without really saying anything and absolutely terrified Austin, surely thinking I saw a mouse or something. Was able to squish it dead with my Ugg. Knock on wood, I haven’t seen any others since. But still—a most auspicious start to this new venture of mine.
Shared it everywhere. Austin’s header graphic was my first (and so far: only) Instagram of the new year. Gonna try and make those posts more meaningful and intentional so that I don’t get so worked up about them. God laughs. Was pretty immediately flooded with a lot of love and a lot of support. Nick Courtois beat them all to the punch, forking over $55 to become my very first paid subscriber, with Austin not far behind. By day’s end, I had 20 paying subscribers and just shy of 200 people signing up for free. And I already figured I’d make at least the first month’s posts available for free so as to build interest and give readers an idea of what they could expect from me. And how kind a response I was getting right off the bat. Krista, aka @auntpantsuit, was the first to share it to her Story, saying she’s never hit the subscribe button faster. Telling me privately, “I adore you!!! I’ve been waiting for this!” I just love her.
And then, of course, the support from Austin. Austin who is so consistently sincere and effusive in his praise of my writing and of this new project. And what’s crazy is that I really don’t think it’s at all in spite of how poorly I’ve received Scrolling. I really don’t think he’s been as complimentary as he’s been in some effort to show me how he wished I had been all this time, how receptive and supportive I should have been. Though he has every right to. Just so beyond sweet, telling me how amazed he is by my writing, by my insight. So insistent about the endless novels, essays, screenplays I have tucked away in the pages of all my journals. Just over and over, building me up. Wanting me to do something with myself and my writing. And maybe, just maybe, if I do have something to pour my energy and attention into, I might not be quite so tortured about my boyfriend’s own professional pursuits. As The Crown is constantly saying: each person needs their own time and opportunity to “shine.”
January 12, 2022
Brooklyn, New York
I am 28 years old
It was the 4 o’clock hour on a weekday of November 2009, so: I was watching Oprah. My stomach surely convex from the Hannaford-brand cheddar and sliced up Granny Smith I’d just gorged, I was partaking in the ceremony, the ritual that had colored most every after-school afternoon for as long as I could remember. My parents busy at work and my sisters busy with social lives while young Brian, with the house almost always to himself, was busy with adoration for Miss Oprah Winfrey. But it was on this particular day that, at the top of the hour, Oprah said she had a big announcement for the end of the show. And in a testament to either my youth or capacity for self-denial, I saw no writing on the wall, zero suspicions of the grave message she’d soon deliver. Looking mighty but somber in a steely gray dress, like a bust of Athena brought to life on a Chicago soundstage, Oprah said, “After much prayer and months of careful thought, I have decided that next season, season 25, will be the last season of The Oprah Winfrey Show.” My life, and unfortunately without much exaggeration here, was never really the same. Yes, there was still another year-and-a-half left of the show but there’s no talking reason to an aching heart. Because somewhere deep down, despite however much was left, I knew and couldn’t forget that it’d all be over soon.
And with the hope that subtext doesn’t fly clear over your heads in the way it does mine, I won’t belabor my own writing on the wall here. After some prayer and a couple weeks of careful thought, I have decided that this post will be the last weekly installment of Keep Out. Though I repeat, and mean this, and will hold myself to it: the last weekly installment. Going forward, I’ll still regale you with excerpts of pathologically detailed diary-keeping and deeply felt reflections on where those journal entries find me today—but now I’ll just be doing it once a month or so. With the understanding, the expectation even, that paid subscribers will decide to cancel their payments while continuing to spend their precious free time with my writing.
Because what is keeping a diary if not an exercise in free time? Evidently, it’s never something I’ve lacked. And anytime someone learns I’ve kept a diary since age 10, the first thing they ask—after the inevitable yuk yuk of “What have you said about me?”—is, “Do you ever go back and read your old ones?” Like death, like taxes, like a reboot of Girls within the next 10 years, it’s inevitable. And my answer was always the less-than-satisfying but mostly true, “No.” Up until I started Keep Out, the only journals I had on my person were the ones I’d completed since moving to New York. The rest of my past interred, naturally, in New Hampshire. Collecting dust, and lots of it, on a bookshelf in my childhood bedroom, out in the open for my parents to snoop through in the world where they took such an active interest in me. But that’s changed now. To do this project, to mine my personal past and chart my emotional present, I’d need to do the obvious. I had to read my old diaries. There’s 24 of them, in toto. Covering 18 years, almost exactly. January 2004 to the ongoing January 2022. I’ve brought them all back to Brooklyn and promptly scattered them around the apartment, keeping most of them in a closet while ones with the brightest covers sit on the top shelf of our “display bookcase.” I remember Emma, our roommate, being surprised that I was comfortable keeping something so private so out in the open, that these collections of my deepest and darkest musings on, for example, being a virgin in 2011 (...and 2013…and 2016…) were so tauntingly accessible. I’ve never been too concerned. Because I knew then, and I know it even better now, that the only person who gets truly hurt or embarrassed from reading a diary is the person who wrote it.
Because I have laughed on occasion, going through what I’ve written. This endeavor hasn’t been completely masochistic. But time, I have to say, isn’t always this all-healing balm. If anything, the older the diary entry—which is to just to say: the younger I was—the stronger the gut punch. Because it’s never what I wrote in these entries that I find the most telling, it’s what I didn’t write. The redactions of the things I was really feeling or the names I was being called at school or the details of the arguments I was overhearing at home. It’s those willful exclusions that can feel the most upsetting. That even in my journal—this most private and personal thing that, for all I knew, no one else would ever read—there were some truths I just had to keep out. And while it all might seem totally worth it, that pulled heartstrings could just be called a wash in the face of this invaluable trove of recorded thoughts and feelings from most every stage of my sentient life—sure. But there’s also something to be said that I’ve never once encouraged anyone in my life to do what I do, never feeling compelled to pass along this self-analyzing habit, scared of perpetuating some sort of curse if I ever were to say, “Oh, you have to start keeping a journal.”
Because “habit” really is the word here. In the years since The Oprah Winfrey Show came to a (greatly-mourned) end, Oprah has talked about her surprise when that loyal, committed, higher consciousness-striving audience didn’t follow along in droves to her next venture, The Oprah Winfrey Network. Something she, obviously, has wisely come to understand, saying, “What I did not realize until the show was done was that we had created a habit. And that habit was a 4 o’clock habit. And I didn’t even realize it when people were saying, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna miss you so much—what am I going to do at 4 o’clock?’” On my days off, on the Northeast Regional from New York to Boston, at a desk in the breakroom and a bench in Prospect Park, in the fourth grade and in my Saturn return, not because I want to, not because I need to, I write in my journal. It’s a lot of work but not a moment’s effort. Writing for an audience of one, without deadlines, without editors, without invoices to file, without any possibility of rejection or the far-scarier prospect of success, I can spin my own wheels fast enough to blur all those unpitched essays and unfinished screenplays looming from the margins. Reveling in the ease of finding time for a habit but, like any true diarist, noticing the pattern. Each of my scrawled entries not all that different from my afternoons with Oprah, tuning in to episode after episode on days I could have been spending with friends or auditioning for the school play or learning how to ride a bicycle. All those 4 o’clocks when I could have put myself out into the world that I otherwise devoted to sitting on my own, communing with a force that felt so much wiser than me, learning who I was and understanding, slowly, how I might be better. And if I have any real regrets on the matter, I’ll keep it to myself. That’s what diaries are for.
Oh my B please say it isn’t so. I will miss this. But as I do get it, as long as I have something to still look forward to once a month I should be alright. I hope! I do love your writings🥰👍