over and over again, through blurry eyes in the morning light of my Ann Arbor apartment last May, shoulders bobbing up and down as I cried and cried, tears and snot dripping down my face. I had failed my sophomore review, a sort of stop-here-and-roll-again milestone at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design that requires sophomores to present all of their work from the past two years and discuss its strengths and weaknesses and what you plan to do with your degree. Essentially, you prove that you actually have some artistic merit besides your high school AP art portfolio of drawings and paintings that you submitted with the common app two years prior, and that you’ll be able to pay for at least a few months of rent. You can pass and continue towards your BA or BFA, you can fail and be un-enrolled from the art school, or you could do what I did: fail, unless I complete a project over the summer and give a second presentation about my work in September.

As I came to terms with this failure, and pieced together the feedback from my review panel, I realized my problem: I was writing and making art about feelings of disconnect and a lack of congruency with my family, but I wasn’t really addressing the source. I was making prints about the traditional gender expectations and feminine ideals for me that my family upheld—what it mean to be the only daughter among four sons and what it meant to be the only daughter of evangelical Christian parents. But, I was holding back, barely skimming the surface of how hurt and guilty I felt.

It is no coincidence that this review failure paralleled my own coming out and coming to terms with my sexuality. It was only a few months prior that I made the realization, and let myself understand that maybe all these women that I really, really wanted to be friends with were actually women that I also really, really wanted to make-out with. I wasn’t an idiot: the way my parents had talked about gay marriage and homosexuality, being a girl that liked girls was a huge black spot on the family name. This newly discovered part of my identity (and the resulting angst and shame) made me frozen, afraid to make work that would spill my secret. The resulting emotional paralysis made it difficult for me to focus—my work became scattered, disparate, unfinished. Repressing the parts of my life that I wanted to understand through my work—my family, my sexuality—just made it seem like I didn’t care about my art at all—and, I failed my review. The failure, paired with my concern about my family, grew into the conceptual basis for my project for my September re-review.

A month later I was back home living with my parents. I had begun my research for this summer project, a series of 15 monoprints. As I researched and developed my concepts for the prints, I fell in love with Tracey Emin, her messy drawing style, her explicit references to sex, her boldness, and her confessional, unapologetic style. Her work was messy and gritty and didn’t conceal. It was beautiful because it was so ugly and harsh. I admired her honesty, and I knew that if there was once thing I couldn’t do throughout this project, it was censor myself: if I was going to make something that was truly meaningful, I couldn’t fall into the same trap that I did the previous semester. To be sure I didn’t experience the same paralysis, I had to be as honest and as vulnerable as possible—which meant I had to talk about my family, my relationship with my parents, my brothers, and my childhood.

Tracey Emin believes in being completely and wholly true to your art. She says,  “You’ve got to keep yourself free and honest to you, true to what you’re doing. Because otherwise you just get lost; you just end up being depressed and really weird.”[1] Of course, “really weird” is a little ambiguous, but she’s getting at the idea of being a shell of yourself. I censored myself all through high school, my freshman year of college, without even knowing it, and, I guess, it was “really weird.” I couldn’t censor myself anymore. She went on to say that “art is perceived differently in different places in different times by different people.”[2] No matter what you make, someone will be offended. And, there also is no point in trying to make a certain type of art, or only showing a certain type of self. I took this advice, and did what I had to do: I repressed any fear that my parents would see this work and react negatively.

Because, I had to make this work. It was to survive. Not only did I need a strong enough series to just reclaim my place in the art school, but I also needed it to come to terms with the way I felt like my gay-ness contradicted my family’s culture. I was frustrated and angry that my family inadvertently made me feel so guilty about being gay, and simultaneously so afraid of losing them if they knew who I really was. Because, I didn’t want to lose them. I didn’t hate my family. I didn’t think my parents were bad parents at all. Because they weren’t trying to hurt me; they were just trying to raise me—and four other kids at the same time— the best they could, and the only way they knew they could. I understood that. But, I was still hurt by the immersion of their socially conservative views on homosexuality, and non-traditional gender roles.

I knew that I would be sharing feelings and thoughts that would be very exposing, and surprising, for my family. I hadn’t talked to them about any of these thoughts. Because of this, the only thing that would be holding me back from making this series was fear of my family seeing these thoughts. I could make this work—I just couldn’t show them.

My dad picked up the Tracey Emin anthology that sat on the top of the stack of library books on the dining room table that I had checked out to do some research. He opened the collection of Emin’s work, and began flipping through the monoprints of a woman masturbating, a photograph of Emin sitting on an old hardwood floor, legs spread, gathering coins and bills between her legs. He shut the books, frowning, and said to me: “Alexandra, don’t make art like Tracey Emin.”

By August, my prints were finished, and by September, I had passed my re-review and had begun to curate my first solo exhibition, a show of my prints titled Some Things I Cannot Say. I had even managed to make a secondary, small series of prints to show my parents, to cover up the actual works for when my parents asked, “so, what are you working on?” I was balancing two lives, one at school, and one over the phone with my parents. Fear kept me in this hiding place—although I had a good feeling that my parents would react positively to my coming out, I wasn’t totally certain. And, with even the slight possibility of losing my family (as well as their financial support that I still very-much relied on), it felt safer to wait another year, until I was almost finished with college, to both come out to them, and to show them my work in person and explain myself.

But then at the beginning of January, my dad called. It was late, and he had texted me earlier, asking to call him. He didn’t say what it was about, but I already knew. In the process of trying to hide all of these secrets, I had slipped up—they had all become too much to balance. My dad found my website through an email signature I had accidentally sent back to him.

I had been, in a way, preparing, waiting for this moment for the past year. I just didn’t realize it would be now, and didn’t want it to be now. I had been keeping too many secrets from my family: my sexuality, my therapy appointments, my feelings of self-loathing and guilt, and my artwork and writing that documented this secret-keeping all on my website. And, as one secret reveals other secrets, in one moment all of these well-concealed parts of my identity from the past few years had been revealed.

It was my dad whom I spoke to on the phone at 11:30 that night. My mother was “asleep,” but I knew she wasn’t really. My dad was angry, hurt, and we yelled over the phone for half an hour. “So, you’re gay. That’s fine. It’s fine. Lots of people are gay,” he said, “but Alexandra, you can’t make art like that! You can’t make work about other people! Why do you want to hurt people?”

I was confused. While, yes, this work was about other people, referencing my parents and my relationship to my family, it wasn’t primarily about them; this project was for myself, to understand my experience over the past year, and the past twenty-one years. This work was about understanding and validating all of the insecurities and uncertainties about my identity through the context of my family, but it wasn’t about them. Yet, somehow, as I made myself extremely vulnerable, sharing intimate details about my inner thoughts, my sex life, my imperfect relationship to my family, all my parents could see was how I hurt them. This was extremely invalidating and defeating.

“But that’s how I felt!” I defended myself. “I don’t know what to tell you. Of course I didn’t want to hurt anyone. But, I had to make this work, to understand how I felt.”

“But these drawings are so dark, they’re demonic, malicious. Why can’t you make work that isn’t so dark?”

Of course, my sexual orientation, the main source of anxiety over the past year, wouldn’t be an issue after all. Of course. The weight of my coming out was brushed aside as my parents’ own pain clouded the way they saw the prints. They gave me an (vague) ultimatum, asking me to remove some prints from my website, the more provocative ones and the ones that referred explicitly to my family—“or else.” I obliged, while also wondering if this would be the last time I could ever make work about my family—or anything—ever again.  

I reminded myself of a David Sedaris interview I read a few months before. Sedaris, too, has little qualms about discussing intimate details of his family, his mother’s unconventional parenting or his father’s evening dinner table routine sans-trousers. While he usually focuses on lighter, more ridiculous stories, respecting his sister Tiffany’s wish to stay out of them, when Tiffany committed suicide last year, Sedaris wrote another essay all about her. It was a more somber piece, about how her suicide changed his family’s identity and his own identity, and some of the public retaliated. It was interesting to read most of these informal blog posts, people sharing their opinions on the article about how Sedaris’s essay was all focused on himself and disrespectful to his late sister. But, what if the essay wasn’t even focused on her in the first place? When talking about writing about his sister’s death, he says, “I do write to make sense of things. … It’s a heavy thing, and it’s complicated by the fact that I hadn’t talked to her in a long time. If I had hidden that – it would have been really convenient not to mention that, but that would be false. And again, that makes things more complicated, when that’s part of the equation.”[3] Here, he’s acknowledged that their relationship had fallen apart, that he could have done more. But this essay wasn’t primarily about Tiffany—it was about David understanding himself, now that 1/8 of his family, 1/8 of his identity was no longer living.

Alison Bechdel, too, relies on revealing family secrets to tell her stories. Through her graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, Bechdel reveals the complexities of her relationship between her parents, her father’s suicide and closeted sexuality, and the dysfunction of her family life growing up. But Bechdel is so much older and wiser than I, I thought, she must have found a way to write so vulnerably and open about her family, while still maintaining their relationship! Not quite so: When talking to Slate magazine about writing about her family, Bechdel acknowledged that “no matter how responsible you try to be in writing about another person, there's something inherently hostile in the act. You're violating their subjectivity. I thought I could write about my family without hurting anyone, but I was wrong. I probably will do it again. And that's just an uncomfortable fact about myself that I have to live with.”[4]

Bechdel’s “oh well” attitude was a little disheartening. But, she is much older than I am, and her relationship with her mother is different from my own. I’m only 21; my relationship with my parents is still evolving from the parent/child dynamic to an adult relationship. I don’t yet feel totally autonomous Bechdel might feel now she is in her 50s.

I didn’t consider my relationship to my mother to be close. We never talked about emotions. In fact, in my entire family, we never share emotions beyond an “I love you!” and a kiss as you leave the house, or an angry homework tantrum. Over the years, through mandatory church attendance, small comments about praying for my future husband and dressing modestly, my mother’s implicit expectations for my existence as a woman accumulated. I felt like everything that I was completely contradicted everything she valued. And, so, the guilt and shame about my sexuality and boyish clothes and hair accumulated, too. It was because I love her so much that I felt like I couldn’t tell her about any of this. I didn’t want to disappoint her. I’m her only daughter; I felt like I was failing her. Our relationship dwindled, and I retreated, sharing only the most superficial information about my life—my grades, my classes, what I did last weekend—leaving out the hopelessness, the guilt, the cutting.

After she saw the prints, she didn’t speak to me for a few days. But, once she did, it was text message after text message, reassuring me that there was nothing I could do that would make her love me less. A week after my parents found my work, I FaceTimed with her. We both cried. She told me that the prints made her feel like she was a bad mother, like she had failed. I had never seen my mother in so much pain. And, while her pain was also in reaction to the pain that I had felt, I couldn’t help but feel guilty all over again: my work made that feeling. I made that.

It’s not that Sedaris and Bechdel’s writing about their family is totally malicious and manipulative. While Tiffany prefers to not be written about, and perhaps would prefer that David would not write anything at all about their family, the benefits of his writing can’t be overlooked. When talking about touring after publishing the article on his sister’s suicide, David discussed how “[he’s] met so many people since then who’ve had siblings that committed suicide. I’ve never written anything before that’s gotten the kind of reaction that piece has, in terms of the number of letters. … The letters that people write have been so helpful.”[5] By writing about and sharing his experience of having a sibling commit suicide, David was not only able to heal himself, but also help others heal. Because, why do we write and create, if not to connect our experiences to others? Perhaps Tiffany never wanted to be written about, but writing about the tabooed subject of suicide and mental illness, and sharing this experience, David was able to make sense of his life, and help others make sense.

As Bechdel discusses in an interview the exhibition and intimacy of Fun Home she says how “it’s an incredibly revealing book, and I don’t know why I feel like I want everyone to know these intimate things about me […] it’s insanity.”[6] However, the interviewer disagrees: “Not necessarily. I don’t think so. I saw it as a very positive thing — for me as a reader, anyway — and reacted to it that way […] I really appreciated your willingness to be so out there about your family.”[7] We just want to connect to other humans. And when we make ourselves vulnerable, about difficult issues within the family, and struggles we face within our own mind, people can identify and connect. And, so, while there is pain in acknowledging someone else’s truth, there is also the joy of humanity and connection for someone else. It is about deciding the worth of each impact.

After displaying my prints in the art school, I received hugs, tears, and emails from friends, as well as others I didn’t know so well, explaining how meaningful the honesty and vulnerability in my work was to them. A friend of mine at the art school emailed me the first day of the show, after seeing the prints, writing “Your content, and the vulnerability in those vignettes are supremely moving […] while I see you a lot and consider you a friend I did not really know you all the way. This work makes me feel you much more.” I made that feeling. I made that, is all I could think. Through my own pain and confusion, and manifesting this on paper, I forged a connection with another human being. Yet, I had also forged a disconnect with my parents.

For Bechdel, Sedaris, Emin, and myself, too, writing about our own life and family isn’t just about our family—it is, at the forefront, about processing and understanding. It is a type of therapy. Bechdel says that there is something “inherently hostile” about writing about others, and it is an unfortunate byproduct of the positive impact of discussing often difficult-to-address topics, like suicide, sexuality, and parents-child relationships. However, where and when does the positivity outweigh the hostility? I began this essay to try and answer this question. But, I’ve realized that there is no answer. I am not sorry that I made my prints. I do not regret making that body of work, because it helped me stay sane, it helped me survive. My work will always have the ability to impact some people, and I will have this ability to connect to others, reminding me why I make my work. But to my family, my voice may never be validated; there will always be a slight disconnect in our understanding, a wound that can’t completely heal. It is about deciding the worth of each impact.