In the Elephant Room

As my yoga teacher reads a poem by Rumi called “Elephant in the Dark,” I pin one nostril and think: This is part of my adventure, to reclaim my life, to write a new story. I will decide what it looks like. I sweat. Others in my class are sweating, breathing, sitting cross-legged on foam. In the final meditation, I stop thinking about the origins of coughs or sniffles coming from adjacent mats and think about the poem.

In it, wise Hindu men are asked to determine the nature of a creature that lies inside a dark room. The men enter and experience the animal. One man describes it as “a water pipe creature,” another as a “leathery throne,” another as a “back-and-forth fan animal.” Of course, each man has touched a different part of the elephant—the trunk, the back, the ear. None of the men have a snapshot of the whole animal.

In “A Telescope at the Sky,” I consider the ownership of stories and the ability to claim them. I examine the desire to establish rights, like a property deed, to stories before someone else can.

As I wrote the piece, I considered my plight, the differences between my stories and other stories, what made this one in particular worth sharing. Doesn’t everyone’s breakup feel like a cosmic collapse, the signs and stunning metaphors of which appear in every corner? Am I the first case of metaphorical rending caused by former love?

I am not the first. I am not the first, nor the last, nor the best, and these details forced me to consider my right to pen the story in the first place. Eventually, all writers must question what nonfiction is and what justifies the writing of it. Why do we tell our own stories?

When I finished a very-first draft of the piece, I sent it to a friend. He said he was proud of me and that he loved it. I had been looking for him to confirm that in fact, my piece had universal meaning, that it applied to him, that he was a better person—not just a better friend—for having read it.

“Yes, but do you like it because you like me?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, as a reader, do you care about what’s going on in the piece because you know me and care about what happens to me?”

“Yes,” he said.

This was not the right answer—I didn’t want the piece to be about me and only me; I didn’t want to claim the right to sob.

Back to square one.

Eventually, we all have to question who we are as writers, as people. Did I learn something about myself in the writing of the piece? Is it about me? Of course. It’s natural to put ourselves in the middle of everything—if we can’t use our own experience to understand a greater universe, we have nothing. We are, after all, the center of our own universe.

Whenever we write about ourselves, there is doubt—about ourselves, about whether others will care, about what there is to offer. This is a normal doubt. But to move past the first draft, I had to take myself out of the middle and examine this doubt more fully.

I pictured the wise men in Rumi’s poem, entering an incense-filled room, rearranging robes, running fingers over clammy elephant skin—each man with different hands, wrinkles in different places, different bone structures and arthritic joints, with different accounts as they each left the room—none of them wrong, but none right.

And that’s when “I” became “she.”

When I finished what I considered to be the final draft of the piece, I sent it to my former editor—“he” in the piece—and asked him for comments. In the past, he’d sent back everything I’d written peppered with bright yellow and red Track Changes on Microsoft Word. I hate Track Changes; I find them invasive of my...