Sorry for the Slow Response: I'm Busy Being Perceived by Our Increasingly Fractured World and Thinking Existentially.

On women's multifaceted identities, the feminist concept of "selfcraft" and "public" vs "private" spheres in the age of social media

Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today. Comments and questions and musings and suggestions are welcome, because life and feminism are messy and I love diving in with you all!

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Willem de Kooning “Woman”

I’ve been trying to draft a newsletter for months. Clearly, I have failed in this endeavor. Partially this is because of the complete and total exhaustion that was putting a book out into the world. Yes, writing a book proposal, selling a book proposal, actually writing a book was extremely time-consuming, stressful, and exhausting, but nothing quite prepared me for the months of having to sell the book. (Sometimes it felt like individually, by hand.) And partially, I’ve failed to write a newsletter because every time I’d sit down or write something, I’d think, is this me?

It’s not that I don’t enjoy being perceived, I actually do. I think we all do at least sometimes, even if we’re anxious or introverted or quiet. There’s definitely a part of me that loved the rush of every book event, getting to be the center of attention from all the people who showed up to listen to me talk about a thing I’ve been writing and posting and yelling about for years and years. And a crazy thing happened, I realized that having this book with my name on it, made people see me in a different way. I didn’t feel like I constantly had to prove myself as a journalist or an expert of some kind, I was just seen that way. I also became very used to being asked if I was “a runner.” I’d never really identified that way, even though I’d always run off and on. Mostly running books are by people who identify strongly as runners. I started to say yes, and I also started running more. But that wasn’t why I was able to write this book. I was able to write the book because I’m a journalist, and a good researcher, and I think about gender and sport a lot as broad concepts. But a shift in my identity had begun.

So it became a summer in which I got used to being perceived, and often misperceived. Of course, women in this world are all used to being perceived, even when we don’t necessarily want to be, as physical bodies. But this was something else, too. The physical part was there (the reason I hired a stylist to help me figure out my “appearance” outfits, wore makeup nearly every day for months, and got very good at using my travel steamer). But there was a different kind of perception too, a way my thoughts, my voice, my opinions were suddenly granted more importance by “the public.” I spoke to strangers with confidence in my voice. I acted as though it was normal for me to be taking Lyfts to the airport day after day, and to post about my travel outfits on my Instagram stories. I began, for the first time in my life, to tell people what I did, or why I was in town without feeling like a total fraud. “I’m a journalist. I wrote a book,” I’d say. “Look, see, here it is!” I also started feeling as though my job was no longer to think and write, but to post, and post, and post. Sell! Sell! Sell! I posted to my Instagram and Facebook accounts about every piece of publicity I got, every story I published up to and around the book release and into and throughout the Olympics. I became a person who sometimes makes Reels and TikToks and posts them on the Internet for everyone to see. And sometimes people even watched them. I had to start turning the comments off. 

Three months after publication, though, as I returned to a time when my inbox and calendar were not overflowing with interview requests or story deadlines or event organizing, I began to feel extremely unsure as to what part I should be playing now. Which me was I now? PR person for myself? Runner? Influencer? Writer? Journalist? Sports fan? Author? Feminist? Mom? Who was I, now, really? My Instagram and public persona certainly gives one impression: that of a successful, happy debut author, who had a book about women’s sports come out at the exact right moment when everyone cared about women’s sports. A book that got national media attention and an author who went on a real actual book tour. And none of that is wrong. 

But it’s not the whole truth either, is it? I’m not posting the anxiety-induced way my brain would shut down before an event, or just after, sure that it would go terribly, or I’d said something wrong, or I hadn’t sold enough books. I haven’t offered up all the times that I’ve cried when events didn’t go as planned, when no one showed up, or the booksellers decided it wasn’t worth it, or when mean people emailed me to tell me my voice is annoying and I laugh too much after radio or TV interviews, (FREE TIP TO PEOPLE: DON’T DO THIS), or when I’d go into a bookstore I love and see that they didn’t even have my book in stock. In some senses, all of us do this. And I have always been conscious of having to split my personality up. At my fancy liberal arts college, I had to pretend it wasn’t insane to be around people from New England-style generational wealth. At my MFA program I had to pretend like I was artsy and literary, not a working journalist. I’ve always hated talking about my job in social settings. But, for some reason, the addition of author felt like it broke my delineated system.

As the book events wound down and I came back to the rest of my life in the waning days of summer: parenting, family trips, grocery shopping, and coffee with friends, I’d be faced with this feeling of self-delusion, like I was pulling one over on everyone I saw. I’d be sitting on the living room floor, helping my 2-year-old build something with magna-tiles, or taking my 6-year-old to the playground and think: “Do I even know how to do this? Is this really me? Was publishing a book a dream that happened to someone else?” 

It was as though this equally important and difficult part of my life, mundane, and domestic, and less public, couldn’t possibly belong to the same person who had been treated as an AUTHOR, in public, mere weeks before. Can I be a person who wrote a very good book and got invited on TV to talk about it and makes Duplo farms with my kids and writes long-winded feminist essays and posts silly Reels about women’s sports and cans homemade plum jam every year and cares deeply about my community and politics and my kids’ schools, etc.? And I don’t mean it in a “can she do it all?” kind of way. I mean it in a self-identity kind of way. What of these identities, is truly me? And so, I froze. I didn’t write or post much for the past month fearing that every time I would say or do something “publicly” I’d be performing the wrong identity. I felt like a sham of a human. When my neighbor asked me on the way to the bus stop on the first day of school if I had a good summer, I said I worked a lot. I didn’t elaborate, and I felt like I had lied. 

A cornerstone of second-wave feminism was to “make the personal, political.”¹ To bring women’s lives, our work, our health, our needs, to the public square. By some definitions, this meant to share personal experiences in small, local consciousness-raising groups, in order for women to see what of their suffering was structural, not personal at all. But as feminist historians tried to pinpoint how and when women “entered” the public spheres of literature, politics, journalism, business, sports, etc., many came to the conclusion that the whole construction of a “public sphere” in opposition to a “private life” — often defined as the realms of the male and female, respectively — had been invented by men.² Naturally. Defining the world in this binary way meant that men could maintain the gender roles that kept them building the power structures, being the public-facing mouthpieces for their families, while women — becuase of our unique biologies, etc. etc. — were largely relegated to home and family and housework, (whether in their own homes or in other people’s homes depending on class, race, etc.) or labor at lower wages and with far less prestige than men who did the same work. But all the while, women were impacting the “public” world, whether directly or not: Raising the next generations; Teaching children; Writing under pen names; Giving husbands their best political ideas.

Over time, of course these formal walls keeping women out of “public” have slowly been torn down. And in very recent years, social media has broken the dam on this front even further. Women, and other people who aren’t cisgender men, have circumvented the gatekeepers of the public arenas of yore. You don’t need a publishing house, or a print media editor, or a film producer, to approve you. You can just flood the public square of the Internet with whatever you want to say, including all of the experiences we used to consider the realm of the “private.” (This, I believe, is a major reason women’s sports has finally broken through to the mainstream, because the athletes themselves took the microphones, but I digress).

As the reality of our 21st century lives has smashed some of these boundaries apart, the way we present ourselves has become more complex. We all consist of more than one identity, that’s the entire basis of the concept of intersectional feminism — it’s humanity. But now, so much more of our lives are able to be “public,” whether in the traditional sense or not. As a writer, now an author, whose work has been published into the “public sphere,” of the literary world, I have a privilege to have been invited into that formerly masculine realm. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote³. But it’s a disservice, I’m starting to think, to continue to fracture the work I do into public and private roles, allowing the patriarchal structure of society to endure. To make me feel like a self that is not fully realized in any of my roles.

Edwina Barvosa writes in her book “Wealth of Selves,” of the need for self-integration, an act she calls “selfcraft.”⁴ Barvosa writes that integrating the various identities of a self like this is a feminist act, one which allows us to give up the privileges of certain identities and groups that we belong to, and identify more with others, seeing our own struggles in theirs. I see it a bit like taking the puzzle pieces of our identities and finding ways to fit them together, even if it means sanding a piece down here, or cutting off a chunk there. I also don’t mean any of this to say that I will now be posting every moment of my life to social media, or to this newsletter, or writing memoir. Just that I’m coming to the conclusion that the divide between my public self and my own personal identity, needs to blur, whether that is uncomfortable for me, or not.

As I head into fall I will be thinking more about this concept of selfcraft. Barvosa outlines the steps as three-fold: “inventory, discernment, and revisionary living.” Selfcraft is an ongoing, even lifelong, process, she writes.

Have you read “Wealth of Selves”? Do you ever wonder which you is the real you? Have you experienced shifts in identity throughout your life?

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Other facets of my fractured being:

• Buy my book! You can still buy the book. It makes a great gift for a woman runner you know, or anyone who has bought a “Everybody Watches Women’s Sports” shirt. Also, if you’ve already read it, you can leave a review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads!

• Stay tuned for some fun events coming up in NYC over Marathon Weekend. (On that note, if you have fall marathon needs for a speaker or book to giveaway or sell, lmk!)

• I’m heading to the Albuquerque Balloon Festival with my family soon, my first time in New Mexico, what should I see!? (besides balloons)

• You can see more of my existential dread and my professional success and hopefully a more integrated sense of self soon on my Instagram always.

• Some cool things you might have missed because I have not shared here for the past couple months:

  • A story for The Atlantic I wrote about the first Olympic Women’s Marathon, in 1984.

  • I was on You’re Wrong About!

  • Megan Burbank
    and I are back, baby! At
    Gilmore Women
    we’re diving into the second half of the Seventh season (IYKYK).

    A Christmas Episode About Getting Divorced

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Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens

You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads.

1. "The Personal is Political” Carol Hanisch

2. "Gender and Public Access” Mary P. Ryan

3. "The Second Sex” Simone de Beauvoir

4. “Wealth of Selves” by Edwina Barvosa