Haley Nahman

The Maybe Baby writer on the downside of feedback, getting lost on a nude beach, and becoming an unintentional resource for acid users.

AS TOLD TO GOSSAMER

I came into writing in my mid-twenties. I wasn’t specifically pursuing it, but it’s one of those life shifts that makes a lot more sense in hindsight. Being a thinker, or very ruminative, is pretty core to who I am. Sometimes in a bad way. It’s how I process the world, and what I’ve always done to soothe and understand myself.

I think of it more as codified thinking. Less about prose, or even finding the most beautiful set of words. To me, that is what I find satisfying about writing. I turned to journaling when I was young. I enjoyed—or I relied on—being able to put things into words. Basically, to be able to talk back to myself.

My mom always talks about how I was kind of a precocious kid, but not in a child-genius way. I wanted to be older and settled and have the questions of my life answered. I used to beg her to take us to a fortune teller. I was too young to have cynicism about that. I was like, There’s somebody out there who can tell me what’s going to happen?Through my mom’s retelling, I used to say that she was so lucky because she already had a family and knew what she was doing with her life—everything was settled. She thought that was a strange thing to want at such a young age.

 

Writing has always been about finding order in the disorder.

 

 
 

My writing is not like an Amazon product with five or one star reviews under it.