I Ran Nineteen Years of Myself Through the Matrix

I am scrolling Threads a little past the end of my work week when the breakdown stops me. @rebcam2000 on Threads has run Barack and Michelle Obama’s June speeches through a set of metrics. Sentence length. Reading grade. How often a sentence interrupts itself. The post is generous and fascinating, and it ends on a distinction I cannot stop thinking about. Michelle wrote to a person. Barack wrote to the moment. Her speech began at her husband and widened into a country. His began at an idea and pushed outward through history. Two structures. Two ways of being understood.

I walk the dog, make dinner, fold laundry. My mind keeps working on how words are used, when they can become rallying cries and when they are weapons. The thought veers inward, toward my own work. I have been writing in public since 2007. Nineteen years of weeknight entries, birthday entries, grief I could not vocalize at the dinner table so I processed it here instead. I had told myself I was the same writer who started, only with better material. The Obama post made me want to check.

So I pulled the whole archive. One thousand three hundred posts off the back of my own website, into a folder, through a script that measures what the Threads post measured. Reading grade. Sentence length. A number for how often I break my own sentences open with a question or an aside. I expected the numbers to flatter me, a line going up.

In 2007 I wrote like someone talking fast. “This Sunday it will be six years. Six years of being a wife. Six years of moving to rustic countryside.” Short sentences strung on ellipses, one clause tripping into the next. The machine grades it easy, and it was easy, because I had not yet leaned into the complex. I wrote the way I spoke to the circle of women who read me. We had found each other through our blogs. Madhuram, Suman, Shy, the comment threads on Sepia Mutiny. I wrote for an audience that knew my children by their nicknames and would stay with me for years, through the paper-pregnant months and the snowstorm that stranded us and the morning we finally brought the babies home, and never once needed me to explain a single thing.

The grade climbs through the next decade. It peaks in 2018, the year I wrote toward a book. My sentences grew long and subordinated. I reached for the literary and you can see me reaching. Then something I did not remember doing shows up in the data. After 2018 the grade comes back down, and stays down, and the writing underneath it gets better.

Here is 2007 again, “This Sunday it will be six years. Six years of being a wife. Six years of moving to rustic countryside.”, and here is a sentence from 2022. “The ring lies on the ledge inside the shower stall. I remember to bring it outside when I am done.” The ring belongs to Mommy B, who carried my twins before I did. The reading grade of those two passages is almost the same. They are not the same writer.

As a budding writer, I had only plainness. The writing now is a choice. Somewhere between them I stopped telling you about my life and started inhabiting it. I wrote my way out of the past tense. The birth story in 2014 is all recollection, the day narrated from the far side of it. By 2016 I am dropping my daughter at daycare in the present tense, the trees going russet as I drive. By 2022 the essays open cold, in a bathroom, in a kitchen, no throat-clearing, and widen from there.

I used to love a list. The year in review, month by month. Lists and firsts. Letters numbered to my daughters. I built posts like inventories, the comfort of accounting for a life by laying its objects in rows. The lists thin out as the years go. In their place, a single moment held long enough to inspect and introspect. The dictionary definition I set at the top of “Motherhood, Cleaved” in 2018 was the first time I built an essay instead of recording a week.

The Threads post had it right about the two directions. I started where Michelle stood. Writing to people I could name, the circle widening only as far as the next comment. The blog was a kitchen. Then the readers became strangers, and the strangers multiplied past anyone I could picture, and I had to learn to write to a world I could not see. The craft tightened as the audience widened. You cannot lean on the reader knowing your children’s nicknames when they are anonymous strangers. You have to put the child on the page.

The number I keep returning to: the measure of how often I interrupt myself spikes in 2021. Higher than any year before or since. The machine sees broken sentences, questions stacked, asides that open and do not fully close. It reads this as turbulence.

2021 was the year I wrote about being a child who was hit. Knuckles, the calf, a hard rubber rod that stung and kept stinging. I had carried it for forty years and finally decided to write about it. The script can count the fractures in those sentences. It cannot know what split them. It has the seismograph. It cannot feel the earthquake.

This is the limit of running yourself through a matrix, and also the reason to do it. The numbers are revealing. They told me my sentences got shorter and my scenes got closer and my grade level fell from its peak. They were right. They cannot tell me that the shortening was grief learning economy, that the present tense arrived the same season I stopped being able to bear the past one, that the year my prose came apart was the year I found my voice.

I read the Obama breakdown and felt found by a stranger’s paring of the prose. Then I ran the same analysis on two decades of myself and met a person I had not noticed becoming.

I have the files in a folder called Writing Analysis. I am on WordPress drafting this piece, in present tense for my audience now.

If this moved you, send a tip.