Softening Your Heart: A Strategy for Ending Essays

Web and Media Editor Bess Winter: Natalie Villacorta’s “Letting Go” from issue 22.2 explores the pain and release of both yoga and the act of letting go of bone-deep family hurt. Today she shares with us a craft essay that helps you do the same in your approach to writing.

Last fall, when I started practicing yoga again after many years, I got the urge to return to an essay I’d started in 2017. The essay was about practicing yoga with my father and his girlfriend, Nora. It was about my relationship with them in the wake of my father leaving my mother for Nora—who was his secretary at the time. It was about my low opinion of the two of them because of this. It was about how these feelings had changed, particularly my feelings about Nora. How I’d come to have more empathy and respect for her.

The irony was that when I returned to this essay I was not speaking to my father or, by extension, Nora. My mother had suddenly died a few months earlier, and I’d found my father’s reaction to her death insensitive and hurtful. We’d gotten into several painful fights. Wanting to protect myself, I’d stopped talking to him.

Somehow, I didn’t see a problem with this—that I was working on an essay about how I had come to “let go” of my anger towards my father and his girlfriend when I was currently very angry at my father. I was telling a story about the past; I didn’t think my current conflict with my father was relevant. Or, more likely, I did know that it was relevant, but because it didn’t fit with the story I wanted to tell, I ignored it.

When I thought I had finished the essay, I submitted it to CR. The editors wanted to publish it, but they wanted some revisions. We went back and forth, but they still didn’t like the ending. They said it felt cliché and truncated and didn’t capture the essay’s full aboutness— “reconciliation with family and self.” Their feedback didn’t surprise me because I’d been struggling with the ending myself. I’d even admitted it to them, writing: “I was struggling with the ending, with writing something that felt honest, that admitted that I still struggle to let go!” Now this strikes me as funny because I knew exactly what the problem with the ending was, but what I submitted to the editors didn’t fix this problem. And that’s because I thought if I was truly honest and admitted that I wasn’t talking to my dad again, I would undermine the entire story. I could not end a story about letting go with me not letting go.

I could not end a story about letting go with me not letting go.

I kept writing different endings, but none of them felt quite right. Weeks passed. And during this time, something happened. I went to home to Virginia for the first time since my mother’s funeral to babysit my nephews while my sister traveled. I’d been apprehensive about this because I knew I’d have to see my dad when he took over babysitting from me. How would I behave? Would I keep punishing him for hurting and disappointing me?

No, this would only lead to regret. I had learned this the hard way when my mother died. I had to open myself up to him again; I had to accept him as he was. Over text, I asked if I could bring my nephews over for dinner one night. He immediately agreed—and he didn’t try to make me feel guilty for my months of silence. I appreciated that he was trying, perhaps thinking about my feelings and not just his own—something I’d been craving for months.

When my nephews and I arrived at his apartment, my father had just begun to cook one of my favorite Filipino dishes, chicken adobo. I saw again that he was trying, putting in the effort to cook for me rather than just ordering takeout.

Though it wasn’t quite pool weather yet, I insisted on taking my nephews down to the complex’s pool for a swim; I needed to ease into in my father’s presence. But within minutes, we were shivering, and I had no choice but to return to the apartment. While my father continued to cook, we watched a documentary about sharks. We were keeping our distance from one another, trying to gauge whether the other was a threat, like the Greenland sharks circling the submarine in the documentary. I could feel us continuing to hold back during dinner—my father because he didn’t want to say something that would start another fight, me because I worried if I showed myself to him, if I was vulnerable, I’d get hurt.

I left the dinner still feeling disconnected from my father, but I didn’t feel angry anymore either. He was trying to show me care the way he could, and though I was still holding back a part of myself, I had at least let my anger go. I recognized that this was the best we could do at this stage and that it was still progress.

A few weeks after this visit, my deadline looming, I again attempted to end the essay. I found myself writing about how the feelings I’d felt after my dad left my mother in 2011 had returned in the last year, in the wake of her death. And how, just as I’d done then, I’d pushed my dad away. But now, I was again trying to let go. I wrote about my recent visit to Virginia—about seeing my dad again—and it felt right. I felt like I had finally found the ending.

The editors agreed.

I didn’t want to share the essay with my dad and Nora; I worried that doing so would start another fight. But I wanted to practice what I preached. In my creative nonfiction classes, I teach Melissa Febos’s essay, “Big Shitty Party,” in which she argues that you should let the people you’ve written about read your work before you publish it. Febos doesn’t promise to make any changes based on the feedback she gets. But she has found that letting people read about themselves before the words are printed and bound often tempers their reactions.

So one afternoon last summer, I emailed my dad and Nora the essay. A few hours later, Nora texted me. At first, I skimmed her text, fearing the worst. But her message was positive, astonishingly so. She said the essay had made her weep. She praised the writing and the form. She recognized that the essay wasn’t just a struggle for her to read, but also for me to write. She said it had taught her about me but also maybe something about herself. She wished me luck in my writing career and thanked me for “softening [my] heart and allowing [my] dad back in.” I bristled slightly at this last bit—at the implication that I was solely responsible for the conflict with my father—but I was so grateful for her gracious reaction to the essay that I immediately let it go.

Now I wonder if letting my father back into my life was my unconscious motivation for returning to “Letting Go.” I thought I was working on the essay again because I was doing yoga again. And no doubt that was part of it. But I was also in touch with the past self of the story I was telling—feeling many of the same feelings she had felt. Feeling them and, perhaps, wanting to let them go. And perhaps I knew, on some level, that writing about letting go would force me to.

This occurred to me when I recently reread another Febos essay, “The Return.” The essay is about the overlaps between personal narrative writing and the religious practices of confession, or repentance, as well as the process for recovering from trauma. The first step of repentance, Febos writes, is to undergo a change of heart: “a shift toward, or away, or perhaps a desire to return to some truer version of myself.”

“I don’t even have to know that I’ve made it, but when I look back at the beginnings of everything I’ve ever written, there it is,” she writes.

Often, she writes, a change of heart is “signified by an urge to write.” As an example, she tells the story of the origins the title essay of her book Abandon Me, an essay about a toxic relationship: “One evening, near the end of a long and terrible cry, unsatisfying as all my cries were in those days…I had a flash of inspiration: I would write the story of this, and that story would be called ‘Abandon Me.’” She goes onto describe her feelings for her lover as worshipful and writes, “Embedded in my decision to write about our relationship was the intention to abandon that worship.”

Rereading this sentence, it occurred to me that embedded in my decision to return to “Letting Go,” was my desire to let go of my anger at my dad.

In “The Return” and in other essays in Body Work, Febos writes about the power that writing personal narrative has to transform the writer. For a long time, I didn’t understand this. I understood that a good personal narrative needed to be the story of someone changing, but I didn’t understand how writing the story changed the writer. But now I do. “Letting Go” is not just the story of how I let go of my anger at my dad and his girlfriend—writing the essay is what helped me to let go of this anger.