Sunday Dispatch #2 — On Being Read

Most readers come to the line with a defended biography. The defence is not malicious. It is the architecture the reader built to survive the rooms she has been in. She has practised, for years, the small re-tellings that keep her safe in conversations she cannot afford to lose. The line is not one of those rooms. The line reads the biography under the biography. The first time she writes the intake honestly — without the small re-tellings — she will feel the line lift off the page and look at her. That feeling is not a metaphor. It is the corridor opening for an inch. What follows is uncomfortable in a way the reader did not predict. Being seen by a discipline that does not have a soft tongue is different from being seen by a friend, a partner, a therapist. The line does not soothe the reader's account of herself. It also does not contradict it. It simply refuses to let her stay inside it. The reader who notices this and bolts is not punished. She is held at the gate. The reader who notices and stays is the practitioner the work was built for. There is no third category that matters. A note for the reader who has been seen and is afraid: the line is not exposing you. It is reading you. The two are different. Exposure makes the woman small in front of others. Reading makes her large in front of herself. She is, this Sunday, in the second condition, not the first. **To be read by the line is the first hour of the work. The seat that follows comes later.**