More ally, book

content/ally/030.md

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+---
+date: 2020-02-17
+weight: 30
+---
+
+Does death take more than one form? Can it be anything other than it is? Can it sneak up on you while you aren't looking, and then when next you take a breath, you realize that you are in some afterlife?
+
+> I suppose it must, given this lead in.
+
+Have I died? Has some part of me already rotted and sloughed off? Is this, in some very literal way, an afterlife?
+
+> Do you feel as though, another seven years having passed, you are moving on from the life that you built up?
+
+Yes.
+
+> Then I see no reason not to label it as such.
+
+Perhaps lorxus was right. Perhaps I am writing this at the end of a life.
+
+> What are you leaving behind?
+
+I think I'm leaving behind that bit of me who was struggling to live earnestly.
+
+> Are you not, now?
+
+No, I think I am. Or, well, I think I am living fairly earnestly. I think what has happened over the last few years is that the struggle changed its shape.
+
+The Madison who was struggling to come to terms with a post-Matthew life is not me any longer. She spent the last seven years mourning him, in a way. She spent the last seven years figuring out how to live without him, throwing away his stuff, leaving behind family and homes and states.
+
+> Is this her memoir? Or yours?
+
+I don't know, honestly.

content/ally/031.md

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+---
+date: 2020-02-17
+weight: 32
+---
+
+I've been pulling this all into a book. Like, a physical one. A paperback.
+
+> I know.
+
+How do you feel about that?
+
+> Not my department.
+
+That feels like an evasion to me. You had opinions on me streaming the process of writing. You had opinions on the process itself: you called me out on writing stuff in commit messages, on having our conversations in comments in the source code. You had opinions on me buying the domain name. Do you have no opinions about our words on something to be bought and sold?
+
+> A friend once asked Maddy, "Why do you shout into the void?"
+
+I write all of this down because the very act of putting it into words brings a sense of clarity that I lack without. By taking these moments of my life and articulating them, I almost automatically get another viewpoint on them.
+
+> And by articulating them as a conversation, you get two. That is not the friend's question.
+
+No, I suppose it isn't.
+
+I write for the clarity, but I share out of some perverse need. *The chances that ally will pick up any sizeable audience are slim, so I almost feel like I'm publishing it as an extension of my compulsive need to overshare,* I wrote. I share because I have to.
+
+> Does Maddy shout into the void because she must shout into the void?
+
+Perhaps. Sometimes.
+
+Sometimes I have to speak so that someone will hear me out of some desire for feeling justified. I need to be heard, to be seen, so that even if I'm going through something alone, others will know that I am doing so. It's being witnessed.
+
+> There is power in the word, as you say, but there is also power in the act of speaking it. There is no value-judgment for me or anyone else to make in that. Words have power, speaking has power.
+
+There is value-judgment in the content, though.
+
+> Yes. There is value-judgment in intent, as well. That you are publishing these words is not something that I **can** have an opinion about.
+
+What about my intent?
+
+> Your compulsive need to do overshare is an implicit part of our relationship.
+
+Shall I throw your words in your face?
+
+> By all means.
+
+<a class="pulse" href="/aside/2">"Am I something to be bought and sold? Am I something to be traded and marketed?"</aside>
+
+> Have you answered the question? **Am** I something to be bought and sold? Me, here, being a part of yourself.
+
+Since having that conversation, I've released two books, and yes, I suppose you are. I am. We are a brand to be built up and marketed, parceled up and sold to any comer.
+
+"The tragic core to all this," I wrote, "is that I'm not an interesting person." I *am* a writer, though. This will be my fourth book, something I never thought I'd say back in seventh grade, when I discovered I actually rather enjoyed writing those silly five paragraph essays. I never thought that I'd be the type of person to sit down and actually write things.
+
+Hell, I never thought I'd be the type of person to sit down and actually finish...well, anything. It's the type of thing that continually feels out of reach for me, someone who is up to her neck in stalled projects and who justifies them with phrases like "the process is the art".
+
+That said, I can't stop. I can't not make more things. I can't not write. If I have to write, and if, implicit in that need to write is a need for my writing to be read, then yes, you are something to be bought and sold. I am. We are.
+
+> See? Not my department.

content/ally/032.md

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+---
+date: 2020-02-17
+weight: 32
+---
+
+> My turn.
+
+Shoot.
+
+> You said: "you are not the project, but there is no project without you."
+
+Yes, that applies to us both.
+
+> You have spoken to your compulsive need to overshare, and you have spoken to the fact that the act of writing and selling a book is, in its own way, the act of selling yourself. **Restless Town** and **Eigengrau** are not so firmly tied to you, though, and **Rum and Coke** certainly is not. I don't think you could say the same about this. Speak to your ties to this project.
+
+Do you suspect that it is too personal to sell?
+
+> You asked my feelings on the matter.
+
+I'm of two minds on the matter.
+
+> Har har.
+
+Thank you. Seriously, though, I can see two different sides of this.
+
+I feel like I'm putting, as Jon Ronson puts it, my maddest edges on display. In the process of pulling the book together, I was forced to reread much of what I had written, and there are parts of it where my words burn too hot, or get too slippery to hold. There's a feverish quality to them. It's something that felt good to write.
+
+These maddest edges are something that are integral to the project. You, after all, are one of the, and this project is named after you.
+
+> Is it mad to have a six month long therapy session with an imaginary interlocutor?
+
+This is both more and less than that, and you know it.
+
+> Yes.
+
+It would be 'mad' were I to believe that you were an actual interlocutor. It would be 'mad' were I to present these things as a universal worldview. It would be 'mad', awful as that word is, were I anything but deliberate with this project.
+
+As it is, I summoned you. I started pulling down bits of nostalgia when my I was shutting down my Dreamhost account. I got the idea to write, so I did. It was a deliberate effort.
+
+> Is that mad?
+
+...huh.
+
+> A question for another time. Tell me of your two minds.
+
+Right.
+
+On the one hand, I read back through all of this and I find myself tasting blood. Who is this Madison? Is she okay? She seems to be having a rough time of things at times, and at others she doesn't seem wholly sane, or at least not wholly healthy. That's a rough thing for someone to put on display. What would lead someone to do that? Some strange form of self-flagellation?
+
+And on the other, while I'm most certainly not wholly healthy, I am, at my core, a storyteller. A young one, and certainly one of uneven quality, but I'm learning and improving by doing. There are stories to be told here, with my life, and that's what I'm doing. I'm making them interesting. I'm embellishing some of them. Hell, I'm making some stuff up wholesale. And I'm doing all of this for the specific purpose of it being read.
+
+In the end, it's the storyteller that wins out over the concerned, private individual. If I can't *not* overshare, if I must compulsively tell stories, then I'm going to tell the stories I have and I'm going to make them worth reading.
+
+> A friend once asked Maddy, "Why do you shout carefully constructed, thoroughly edited, well rehearsed speeches into the void?"
+
+Maddy replied, "It pays the bills."