Recently, I read a blog article in which the author sketched their stepbrother with such precision that it felt like a fine-line portrait. Every sentence added another shadow, another highlight, another contour until I felt like I’d met him.
I want to do that, I thought. But the immediate fear and shutdown I felt in my body told me otherwise.
So I tucked the desire away—or maybe more accurately, I tucked away the need to understand the shutdown—until I had the space to explore it.
Well, it’s 7:50 a.m. The rest of the house is asleep, and it’s just my four hummingbird feeders filled to the brim.
I don’t know where to start. Except a memory comes to mind.
Years ago, an emotionally unstable friend became afraid I was going to write about her. She felt exposed. Vulnerable. Knowing I had a blog, she warned me not to.
I wasn’t going to. I wouldn’t have. But the wound of knowing she didn’t feel safe with me left a scar.
I feel like I’m not supposed to write about people, that it’s their business. As I sit with that feeling, I become younger. Fifteen, maybe even earlier.
Isolation was common back then, and the message I absorbed from my family was that there were certain things you didn’t share. And if you did, it had to be in whispers.
I remember the quiet conversations about my Aunt Jackie in Alabama whenever she’d come to visit. That she’d murdered her husband with a shotgun wasn’t something anyone sat me down and explained. I pieced it together over the years by overhearing fragments.
Kids are good at that.
To be too crazy, too out there, too weird, or too troublesome wasn’t okay. There were the under-the-breath conversations from my grandma to my aunts. “Well, she… you know… if you can believe it…”
However normal those whispers were in my upbringing, something about them always felt dangerous.
Perhaps it’s the lack of context that leads us to the wrong conclusions. Or reducing a person to their worst moments, without understanding what shaped them.
Sometimes I catch myself becoming a whisperer too. I’ll find myself overly focused on someone’s physical traits or a noticeable behavior, and for a moment, I’ve done the very thing I dislike. I’ve reduced them before I’ve even known them.
Almost immediately, shame follows. I did that thing. How insecure I must be, I think.
Or maybe it isn’t only insecurity. Maybe it’s just how deeply I was taught to see people. How strong the modeling was. When you grow up around whispers, sometimes you catch yourself whispering too.
But the fact remains: I want to write about people. I don’t want to flatten them. I want to give them back their dimension. Their flaws, their beauty, their contradictions, and the context that makes them who they are. If I can do that, maybe writing about people isn’t a betrayal after all. Maybe it’s one of the deepest forms of seeing them.
Love, Jaclynn