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that turns away from public life or a greater political good.Before, I wrote as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation about me, too hesitant to enter into the conversation or else it would mean I gave in to the appeal of recognition, too invested in selfhood. But then, I was processing sexuality and a bad dissertation. The essay gave me room to experiment with writing the self in public, in ways that let me be more intentional, both more guarded and giving, in how I use others — other objects — in my work, whether “academic” or not. It let me figure out that personal writing can still be critical of that cringey self-recognition, even if it is held tight to the chest, in one’s possessive grip.This is my attempt to explain, hopefully with something akin to Oh’s grace, that I have let go of certain parts of this essay. I look to the ambivalence and hesitation conveyed in the utterance, “I guess,” as a sign that such a close, compromised position cannot always be sustained: eventually one has to let go and move on. This does not mean my attachment to representation is gone, or that I no longer care about Oh and her characters. Rather, I wonder if my relation to her and her characters has shifted, from one of identifying as and with Oh, of wanting to be and be with her, to one of using her, not so that I can see myself represented and reflected back, but so that I can be surprised and relieved when I do not. Barbara Johnson wanted to think about how we use people rather than relate to them. While using people might generally be unethical behavior, this view also assumes that people are intact, omnipotent, and self-possessed, as opposed to vulnerable, open, and dependent on others. Given this, Johnson asks, “Might there not, at least on the psychological level, be another way to use people?”1 Johnson was in conversation with D. W. Winnicott’s descriptions of transitional objects: objects that are “‘not-me’ possessions,” neither internal nor external to the self, which do not and cannot offer an image of oneself as contained and whole and relieves on the of the fantasy of omnipotence and control.2 Crucially, upon use, the transitional object survives attempts at its own destruction. The object can withstand the use it endures, becoming the let-go object — “not me,” separate, and distinct — because there is the understanding that it will still be there. Johnson writes, “[O] bject use involves trust that separation can occur without damage.”3 Perhaps, then, what I was trying to do in this essay was use Oh, 1 Barbara Johnson, “Using People,” The Barbara Johnson Reader, edited by Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 262. 2 Ibid., 263. 3 Ibid., 269. 70
