Relax, I Don’t Write About You.

A love note to muses.

Toronto, 2022, at 41, with my original muse.

“How did you become a writer?” is a frequent one. I’ve told the story before, at parties for sure, when asked how it began. Nine times out of ten, I say I started writing because of (not for) my boyfriend, who I eventually married and divorced, and who told me I was his “favourite writer” after I gave him a love letter. The other one time out of ten, I tell the story of my start, about how I was the news editor for my university’s paper in Toronto. It was also the first time I got paid to write, and being paid to write is one way to call yourself a writer without doubting that you are.

I wasn’t trying to impress my boyfriend with the letter. I wrote it for myself, like I write most things I am not paid for. The number of times a man has asked if I will write about him remains proof of how delusional some people can be about their importance to you. No, I will not write about you. But I might write because of you, and have some commentary to share.

I cannot remember what I said in that note to him, but likely they were declarations and comparisons to romantic imagery I had access to at the time, about my swelling heart, wetness and daydreams for him, I’m sure. I know for sure that I wrote to him because I felt the feelings, and that is where most writing begins.

I am also sure that I’m the kind of person who would have stayed married to someone who kept that note locked in a drawer or tucked in a book for decades. But no one knows where it is. I wrote it in 1999, and can trace my writing career all the way back to that piece of paper.

A couple of years before turning 18 and meeting my boyfriend, I quit figure skating, and effectively lost my label as figure skater. It was a sudden breakup from skating, which had been my greatest love up to then.

I was sick and tired of trying to nail these jumps, the white whales of our sport, crashing and burning into the cold ice that felt like hot hell when you hit it at ungodly speeds and force. One morning, after a fall, I screamed that I would never skate again and left the ice in a flaming exit. I was done, disgusted at trying for something I would never land.

Some days I smashed into the ice on purpose to feel something bigger than the disappointment of not landing a jump. Sometimes I smashed into other skaters, by accident, which happened horribly and dangerously at the speeds we skated. Inevitable. And all of it was done while trying to look elegant on two blades that could pass as weapons. Praise and points demanded it.

I skated off the ice that day, angry and broken, leaving a trail of swear words and screams as I passed my mom, coach, and teammates.

In the change room, I ripped off my skates, almost dislocating my ankles, and smashed them into the cement walls, as if murdering them so I could never use them again. Puddles of melted ice dripped off the blades like blood.

I cried hard for the thing I loved and had to kill off to save myself, the muse I had turned skating into. The feelings it gave were gone. I never called myself a figure skater again, total disillusionment.

The next week I started a part-time job as a cashier, reinventing myself as a teenager who worked, went to school, and made money to live for the weekends with my friends.

Then a boyfriend told me I could write, and that I was good at it. A new muse.

Love does inspire without devouring, even if it sometimes eats you whole. It consumes because it is designed to change and break us, reinvent and shift us, and smash us into the cold hell of new feelings on purpose.

It could be a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a stranger for the night, your child, spouse, parents, or yourself who you give the love to. It doesn’t care. Love only knows, instinctually, that it is hooked into a source.

Sometimes you are the source for the siphoning, and sometimes you are the one who drains it. And sometimes you are all of those things and write it down.

I have known, and also been, this kind of love: the draining, the risky, the unsafe, the fantastical, the dramatic, the painful, the uplifting, the drowning and the free. The kind that smashes your body against things that are meant to stop your fall, like boards in a rink or marriage in a home, the real muse is not the love you land, but the kind you fall for again and again.