I realize you are not being quite so literal and that your larger point is the decentering. And this is a beautiful idea. But I still think the asymmetry has bearing, to the extent that the first is more on the level of metaphor and frame, and the second on the level of concrete actions. I recall you remarking elsewhere recently about the limits of metaphor, how they can be insensitive to context. Perhaps in your context you really were called, by family ties or other exigencies. In my case there was a pretext, an affordance – but still it was very much a decision I had to make alone. So it depends on how heavily you want to foreground the causality vs the relation of membership.

What does ring true for me is your proposal that we “write to unburden yourself, to relocate yourself from the center of the narrative to a place with a better view, a place that recognizes others.” This so perfectly captures what you said elsewhere about always writing *to* or *for* or *with* somebody in the background, which it how it has always felt. But for me it feels decentering not because of the thematic subject matter (e.g. a city and one’s place in it), but because of the relational mode it places me into: one of disclosure and explanation. It is not so much that the burden of the decision is shifted, as I feel myself being listened to as I am reprocessing it.