The Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief by Jay Baron Nicorvo
Jay Baron Nicorvo reads his essay, “Why We Write: The Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief,” published in the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Like most writers, I consider myself reasonably self-aware. I do believe the unexamined life is worth living, but it’s not a life I’d care to live, at least not as an adult. Yet I’d managed to work on a novel nearly every day for five years, and it never occurred to me that the emotional hardships, the traumas, I was running my characters through were so plainly, and painfully, my own. About a month before a publisher acquired my first novel, The Standard Grand—a novel that concerns a large cast of characters, civilians and veterans, fighting through trauma and its aftermath—I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Which came first, the writing about traumatic stress or the traumatic stress? It’s an insincere question. Me being flippant. A way to delay—yet again, and for just a little while longer—writing something I’ve never before written, not without the guise of fiction or the elision of verse.
Writing trauma, and reading trauma, induces trauma in the traumatized—you may take this as your trigger warning—but I’ve found that this induction, coupled with proper care, can also help us to live with, rather than be done in by, our traumas. So here goes.
Having grown up poor, in poverty’s requisite deficit of security, I’ve got trauma to spare. The longest-lasting, and most stress-inducing, arises from a time when I was around six years old. That’s when my years-long molestation at the hands of my babysitter began. The chronic sexual abuse, my chronic sexual abuse, was hard enough. Worse was the way I was forced to keep the secret of it—first in the face of violent threats and then in simple, brutal shame. There, I did it. And you know what? I don’t feel one bit better. I even feel somewhat worse, and from experience I know that the feeling will carry over into the next days and weeks, at least. But the hardest part, for me, has simply been getting to this point—this very goddamn paragraph—and it’s taken me only thirty-five years from that formative moment of trauma.
***
There is a character in my novel who’s something of a Bizarro me, a me I would have become had my mom not moved us out of that abusive Jersey Shore town and down to Florida when I was ten. In creating this character, I was trying to imagine what would’ve happened had I spent my entire childhood in the same neighborhood as my molester, who was a minor at the time. The alternate reality I kept coming back to was that I would’ve enlisted—something I nearly did on two occasions anyway—to get out from under the long shadow of my intimate victimhood, so my novelized not-me, Ray Tyro, is a veteran, but a vet who’s somewhat compromised. He’s spent more time as a security contractor than a soldier. He’s a mercenary—a population with little representation in our war literature—and I lent him my molestation mostly as I remember it.
Foisting my sexual abuse onto one of my characters helped me to experience my trauma but at a level of remove, and with a little less stress. Very literally, I rewrote the narrative of my trauma, reclaiming some small measure of control over the single most defining, and damaging, moment of my life. Novel writing has by no means saved me, but it has allowed me to reach a guiding hand, tentative, into the past to help shake free that helpless boy still pinned, all these years later, under a teenage boy trusted with my care.
***
My brand of PTSD is somewhat peculiar. It manifests as panic disorder, mostly, but it’s complicated by—comorbidity is the clinical term—an additional, and somewhat controversial, diagnosis of hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD). My panic attacks are hallucinogenic. Before an attack I perceive a distortion in my visual field, somewhat akin to the disturbances that can presage a migraine. Whatever setting or social situation I’m in, I begin to “see” a spiraling arrangement of surfaces and gestures.
These unvaried hallucinations, leading invariably to full-blown panic attacks, began when I was eighteen, during a bad acid trip, right around the time I first spoke of my molestation. All these years later, my hallucinogenic panics have lost none of their disruptive clarity. I might even consider this trick of cognition a psychedelic bargain—freebie flashbacks—if every one of them didn’t feel so catastrophic. And they’re often inspired by stimuli I mistakenly, but understandably, associate with my
molestation.
By and large, with the help of a cognitive behavioral therapist, my devoted wife, and my mother, who is a survivor too, and a years-long secret keeper of sexual abuse, I’ve learned to negotiate, if not control, my symptoms. Writing helps. But I’ve come to believe that writing can’t be therapy. If anything, I’ve learned otherwise: Writing, without familial and clinical care, can cause more emotional harm than good.
***
Listen to the author read this article.
***
As I understand it, novel writing is largely pattern recognition followed by the expression of the recognized pattern. At one end rests the simple symbol of the letter, a fixed arrangement of marks that, in turn and in conjunction, establishes ever more contingent patterns of words, sentences, syntax, and formal structures, ad infinitum. At the far other end of the modest letter looms the novel, arguably the furthest artistic advance of human pattern making in language.
Novel writing is the extreme extension of an everyday application, what neurologists call pareidolia: the perception of a familiar pattern—given a stimulus, a sight or a sound, usually—without the existence of the actual perceived object. Seeing faces in strange places (faucets, for example) is a common example. This is distinct from, but may lead to, apophenia: the perception of connectedness in unrelated phenomena. If, while in the bath, the faucet face gives you a queer feeling, bearing a peculiar resemblance to your grandfather, a retired plumber recovering from a recent angioplasty, and you’re struck with the worry that something’s happened to him, well, that’s pareidolia plus apophenia. Pareidolia is the mind finding form in noise, and apophenia is conferring meaning upon the found form.
What novel writers are actively doing when they write, what novel readers are passively doing when they read, is entertaining a shared sense of pareidolia and apophenia. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called this cognitive phenomenon “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Putting it more plainly, Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (W. H. Freeman, 1997), dubs it patternicity, his pet name for a concept that unifies pareidolia and apophenia. He believes our brains are “belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature,” and all our art is—to a lesser degree—the expression of this nature.
What those of us with PTSD experience, on a too-regular basis, is the unwilling suspension of disbelief. We encounter some stimulus and the past is dragged kicking and screaming into the present. During this psychological meantime—having perceived a familiar pattern and established some connectedness, however false—we have difficulty reestablishing our disbelief.
***
I have come to believe that twenty years spent in the daily exercise of patternicity has strengthened my imagination but weakened my ability to regulate disbelief. This is what I mean by saying writing can, on its own, do more emotional harm than good. Is it any real wonder that artists are so often beset by madness? The mad may well gravitate toward art, but making art also asks the artist to isolate and habitually entertain a condition of madness. These days, whether I want to or not, I perceive more connectedness than I did. This is partly the result of a more mature neural network—some would call it wisdom—but it’s also a symptom of trauma.
Those of us living with PTSD have an exaggerated sense of both apophenia and pareidolia. But as Phil Klay, author of Redeployment (Penguin Press, 2014), has pointed out, in an essay for the New York Times in which he bridges that gap between child abuse and battle stress, “If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped—unable to feel truly known.” For veterans coming home from war, for the sexually abused engaging in sex and all of its social suggestions, for any of us who’ve survived the radical amazement induced by life’s awful extremes, but especially those who’ve had to tend, and stoke, the seeming exclusivity of such extremes, the world and its infinite stimuli encourage a great deal more connectedness. As a result, we traumatized are both weaker and stronger for our traumas. I’m convinced I wouldn’t be the writer I am if I weren’t constantly engaged in the practice, often against my will and with significant stress, of finding meaning in what others—the unfortunate untraumatized—deem blissfully meaningless. But I need to be careful.
During stressful times, which for me often coincide with social settings, every single thing—every word, every breath, every movement, mote, and instant—can be cause for heightened awareness leading to panic. In these moments, my perception dilates as my consciousness shrinks. Tapping into our collective cognitive past, what Robert Bly poetically but unscientifically, and in a very 1970s sort of way, referred to as the reptilian brain, I see more and understand less. This overstimulation, finding interconnectedness in every single minuscule thing, feels inexhaustible, and terrible. But afterward, alone or talking with my wife or my therapist, when I’m trying, and largely failing, to make sense of all the dizzying misconnections and disconnections, I’m often left with one or two ties tangible enough to hold tight to.
Once I regain some semblance of myself, the first thing I try to do is write them down.
Jay BaronNicorvo lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek, Michigan, with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, and a couple dozen vulnerable chickens. He is the author of a novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), which was picked for IndieBound’s Indie Next List and Library Journal’s Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, as well as named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers Magazine. He has published a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way Books, 2012), and is working on a memoir.
The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act
In a recent nonfiction workshop I taught at Sarah Lawrence College, a female student cringed when I suggested she include more of her own story in an essay. The narrative experimented with form, suggested a history of sexual trauma, but quickly shifted into a more lyrical and analytic musing on the general subject. She frowned. “But I don’t want to seem self-absorbed. You know, navel-gazing.” The rest of the room—all women—nodded. It is a concern I have heard from countless students and peers, and which I always greet with a combination of bafflement and frustration. Since when did telling our own stories and deriving their insights become so reviled? It doesn’t matter if the story is your own, I tell them over and over, only that you tell it well. We must always tell stories so that their specificity reveals some universal truth.
And yet. How many times have I been privy to conversations among other writers in which we sneer at the very concept? We compulsively assure one another that writing isn’t about enacting a kind of therapy. How gross! We are intellectuals. We are artists. And the assumption is that these occupations preclude emotional self-examination or healing. “I mean, you can’t expect people to be interested in your diary,” a friend and fellow teacher recently exclaimed. I nodded. What kind of monstrous narcissist would make that mistake?
I am complicit. I have committed this betrayal of my own experience innumerable times. But I am done agreeing when my peers spit on the idea of writing as transformation, as catharsis, as—dare I say it—therapy. Tell me, who is writing in their therapeutic diary and then dashing it off to be published? I don’t know who these supposedly self-indulgent (and extravagantly well-connected) narcissists are. But I suspect that when people denigrate them in the abstract, they are picturing women. I’m finished referring to stories of body and sex and gender and violence and joy and childhood and family as “navel-gazing.”
At a recent writers conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of trauma survival. One of the male editors rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on Oprah’s talk show, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don’t need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.
Later that day, while serving on a panel of memoirists, I polled the audience—a room packed with a few hundred readers and writers. I asked for a show of hands: “Who here has experienced an act of violence, abuse, extreme disempowerment, sexual aggression, harassment, or humiliation?” The room fell silent as the air filled with hands.
***
In response to a surge of popular memoirs, William Gass, in a 1994 issue of Harper’s, asked, “Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner’s head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety?” He went on: “To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster…. Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway, ‘I was born…I was born…I was born’?’” It is an argument that has been made for centuries, and that I have heard all my writing life.
It is the reason that I did not want to write a memoir. At twenty-six I was an MFA student in fiction, deep into what I believed was a Very Important Novel about addiction and female sexuality. Then I took a nonfiction craft class for which we were asked to write a short memoir. Though the content of my novel drew heavily from my own experience, I had never written any kind of nonfiction. The twenty-page essay I drafted about my years as a professional dominatrix was the most urgent thing I had ever written. When he read it, my professor insisted that I drop whatever I was working on and write a memoir.
I cringed. Who was I, a twenty-six-year-old woman, a former junkie and sex worker, to presume that strangers should find my life interesting? I had already learned that there were few more damning presumptions than that of a young woman thinking her own story might be meaningful. Besides, I was writing a Very Important Novel. Just like Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth or Hemingway, those men of renowned humility.
“No way,” I told my professor. I was determined to stick to my more humble presumption that strangers might be interested in a story made up by a twenty-six-year-old former junkie sex worker.
Do you see how easy it is to poke holes in this logic?
But the story wouldn’t leave me alone. So I wrote it. And it was urgent, but not easy. In order to write that book, I had to walk back through my most mystifying choices and excavate events for which I had been numb on the first go-round.
That book was about being a sex worker and recovering from heroin addiction. It was about desire, shame, bodies, drugs, and money. It was an intellectual inquiry into these topics as much as it was a psychological and emotional reckoning. In hindsight, I can say that the compulsion to write it was an expression of my need to understand what the connections were among those things. To answer my own questions about why a girl from a loving family ended up shooting speedballs and spanking men for a living, and how the power of secrecy could become a prison. I wrote it because I wanted to show the strangers who shared those experiences that they were not alone.
I didn’t write a memoir to free myself, though in the process I did.
***
In the 1980s, social psychologist James Pennebaker conducted some now famous studies on his theory of “expressive writing.” Pennebaker asked participants in his experimental group to write about a past trauma, expressing their deepest feelings surrounding it. In contrast, control participants were asked to write as objectively as possible about neutral topics without revealing their emotions or opinions. Both groups wrote for fifteen minutes for four consecutive days.
Some of the participants in the experimental group found the exercise upsetting. All of them found it valuable. Monitoring over the subsequent year revealed that those participants made significantly fewer visits to physicians. Pennebaker’s research has since been replicated numerous times and his results confirmed: Expressive writing about trauma strengthens the immune system, decreases obsessive thinking, and contributes to the overall health of the writers. And this is after only four days of fifteen-minute sessions.
Let’s face it: If you write about your wounds, it is therapy. Of course, the writing done in those fifteen minutes was surely terrible by artistic standards. But it is a logical fallacy to conclude that any writing with therapeutic effect is terrible. You don’t have to be into therapy to be healed by writing. Being healed does not have to be your goal. But to oppose the very idea of it is nonsensical, unless you consider what such a bias reveals about our values as a culture. Knee-jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and bad science has always been the disguise of our national prejudices.
That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against “personal writing” is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.
That is, Karl Ove Knausgaard is a genius, a risk-taker, while all my female graduate students are terrified to write about being mothers for fear that they will be deemed (or, that they already are) vacuous narcissists. Or, as Maggie Nelson, in her latest book, The Argonauts, says of a man inquiring how she could possibly pen a book on the subject of cruelty while pregnant: “Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks.”
I suspect I could write something relevant and dynamic and political and beautiful and intellectual about my own navel. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if the navel as the locus of all this disdain has some faint thing to do with its connection to birth, and body, and the female.
***
Acknowledging all of this will not get your book published. Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the insanely hard work of making art. There are plenty of mediocre memoirs out there, just as there are plenty of mediocre novels. I labored endlessly to craft my memoir. But after it was published, I still fielded insinuations that I had gotten away with publishing my diary. Interviewers asked only about my experiences and never about my craft. At readings, I would be billed on posters as “Melissa Febos, former dominatrix” alongside my co-reader, “[insert male writer name], poet.” Even some friends, after reading the book, would write to me to exclaim, “The writing! It was so good,” as if that were a happy accident accompanying my diarist’s transcription.
Writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing. In order to write that book, I had to invest the time and energy to conduct research and craft plot, scenes, description, dialogue, pacing—all the writer’s jobs, and I had to destroy my own self-image and face some unpalatable truths about my own accountability. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It made me a better person, and it made a better book.
Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. For many years, I kept a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet tacked over my desk: “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
***
Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or beating a dead horse. Believe me, I wish this horse were dead. To name just one of many such statistics in a grossly underreported set of crimes: The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey recently found that 46.4 percent of lesbians, 74.9 percent of bisexual women, and 43.3 percent of heterosexual women have been the victims of sexual violence.
But we shouldn’t write about it because people are fatigued by stories about trauma? No. We have been discouraged from writing about it because it makes people uncomfortable. Because a patriarchal society wants its victims to be silent. Because shame is an effective method of silencing.
***
I have just finished writing a second book about my own experience. It’s called Abandon Me, and it’s about having a sea captain father, about loving women, about being annihilated and invented by love and sex. It is an exercise in applying my intellect, and the intellects of other thinkers—philosophers, psychologists, holy people, poets—to the raw matter of my own abandonments. It is about having abandonment issues.
This sort of admission might make you cringe. But white straight male writers are writing about the same things—they are just overlaying them with a plot about baseball, or calling their work fiction. Men write about their daddy issues constantly, and I don’t see anyone accusing them of navel-gazing. I am happy to read those books. I just wish that male authors—along with the greater reading populace—were not discouraged from reading such books by women. That women were not discouraged from writing them.
The new book is a collection of linked essays, and I have never worked so hard, sentence by sentence, image by image, on anything. But I struggled with the title essay, which, at over 150 pages, is more than half the book and tells the story of a time when I lost myself in love, acted in ways I would never have believed until they happened.
I showed an early draft of the essay to a close friend. After reading it, she said: “This is a very pretty story, but this is not what happened. If you want to tell the real story, you are going to have to be more honest.” My heart sank. I knew she was right. I had included only the parts that I felt safe revealing. I had hidden the ugliest parts. When I thought about taking her advice, a cold fear surged through me. “I am not allowed to write this,” I thought. “No one can know how profoundly I lost myself.” But I knew that she was right. So I rewrote it. I faced the truer version that I had tried to avoid. Because it was a better story, and because I wanted to be free.
What I’m saying is, don’t avoid yourself. The story that comes calling might be your own, and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writers block. I only believe in fear. And you can be afraid and still write something. No one has to read it, though when you’re done you might want someone to. One of the epigraphs of my book is a quote from the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” The book I’ve written is about secrets, too. About my father’s father, who terrorized his family; about my mother’s father, who was mad. About my biological father, his father, and his grandfather—who lied on a census and said he was Polish, instead of native. It’s about the legacy of those secrets, how they ruined us for generations, how they have formed me.
To William Gass’s argument, “To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster,” I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.
Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. And I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that’s what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.
What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go of. Tell me about your drunk father and your sister who lost her mind. Give them whatever names you want.
Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.
You write it, and I will read it.
Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), and an essay collection, Abandon Me, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in February. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Granta, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Monmouth University and the Institute of American Indian Arts and serves on the board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her website is melissafebos.com.
Writing the Self: Some Thoughts on Words and Woe
Growing up, I only knew that my grandma had been “sick.” Later I heard more, and learned that she had taken her own life. But it wasn’t until I started researching a book about culture-bound syndromes that I uncovered the fuller version: Late one night, in 1968, my grandma woke up, opened a bottle of barbiturates, swallowed them all, then climbed back into bed. The next morning my grandfather found her body next to his. She was fifty-six years old. They had been married since she was sixteen and he was nineteen.
At the time the doctors said she had a nervous breakdown, or sometimes that she was depressed. But that meant something different to the doctors than it meant to her family. And as I researched my book, it started to become clear that even today it probably means something different to everyone around the world.
Rates of depression vary widely. In Korea or Japan you have a one in fifty chance of having experienced major depression over the past twelve months, while in Brazil your chance is one in ten. Symptoms vary too. According to Handbook of Depression, a textbook on mood disorders, Koreans and Korean Americans experience manifestations that others would never consider related to depression: constipation, abdominal cramps, heartburn, stiff joints, sore muscles, and increased heart rate. In cultures where excitement and happiness are considered normal, people with major depression show low energy and blunted emotional response. In cultures where emotional control is considered the norm, the opposite is true: Intensified emotional responses are a common symptom of depression. The British psychiatrist Christopher Dowrick, author of Beyond Depression: A New Approach to Understanding and Management (Oxford University Press, 2004), has suggested that depression itself should be considered a culture-bound syndrome.
Culture-bound syndromes (or “cultural syndromes,” as they’re now called) are mental illnesses that mainly occur in certain cultures and that are shaped by those cultures. They are things like koro, a genital-retraction syndrome found in Asia and Africa; or khyâl cap, which is a panic-related condition from Cambodia whereby the wind flowing through one’s body is believed to be blocked; or taijin kyofusho, a paralyzing fear of other people’s embarrassment (not your own) that strikes people in Japan.
When I started researching these conditions, there seemed to be a clear line between them and the depression that afflicted my grandmother. But as I dug deeper, that line began to blur. The belief in the United States that depression is biochemical or genetic in nature—always assumed, but never proven—began to seem culture-bound as well. How could something so big, so terrible, and (sometimes) so final differ so much around the globe, or across a family?
My father, my two brothers, and I are all prone to waves of darkness rolling through our lives, which does point to a likely hereditary component. And yet the way it has played out in all our lives is so different that we each might as well be living in his own country: My youngest brother turned to religion at age fifteen, which is still his source of great joy. My other brother spent many years self-medicating before joining Alcoholics Anonymous, after which he felt better. As for me, while I’ve sunk into dark places many times, for a variety of reasons I have never gone all the way down my grandmother’s road.
If depression were a simple biomechanical process, a series of cellular dominoes falling, the effects should be more uniform from Korea to Kenya to Kansas. But they’re not. And after spending several years reading and thinking about these things, I now see that there is something else at work. Something layered over, and woven through, our biology.
I came across this almost by accident, when someone recommended the work of James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who did some of the first studies into the effects of “expressive writing” on health. His interest started in college, at a time when his marriage was falling apart and he fell into a depressive spiral. He started smoking. He drank more. He stopped eating.
Then, after a month, he started writing, first about his marriage, then about his feelings, his parents, his career, death, and so on. “By the end of the week,” he wrote in Opening Up: The Healing Power of Confiding in Others (William Morrow, 1990), “I noticed my depression lifting. For the first time in years—perhaps ever—I had a sense of meaning and direction.”
So he embarked on a series of experiments in which students wrote about various topics—some emotional, some not. Those who wrote about their emotions experienced a bizarre health benefit: Their trips to the campus health center dropped by half. Their immune function increased. Yet those who merely “vented” about trauma, or who wrote on superficial events, saw no such benefit.
Another of his studies focused on almost fifty professionals (average age fifty-two years) who had been laid off from a computer company in Dallas, where most had worked for thirty years. All were fired the same day, with no warning, and, as Pennebaker noted, were “among the most bitter and hostile group of adults I have ever seen.”
One group was instructed to write about “their deepest thoughts and feelings about getting laid off,” for thirty minutes each day for five days. Another group wrote about time management. And a third (control) group didn’t write anything. Within three months, 27 percent of the first group had found jobs, while only 5 percent of the second two groups did. Several months later, 53 percent of the first group had jobs, compared to 18 percent of the other groups.
Having kept a journal since my late teens, I found this fascinating. Writing in it has always made me feel better, though while I was doing it I had no idea why. I told myself I kept it to collect material that would later become essays and stories. But honestly, there was never much worthwhile in those pages. Mostly it was just me trying to figure out why I felt so bad, or working through problems, or trying to figure out what kind of person I was. I rarely looked at the pages I left behind.
But I kept writing in the journal, first when I went overseas alone, then again when I traveled with my wife. Not long after we returned to the States, having settled in Madison, Wisconsin, I stopped journaling without knowing why. Whenever I opened the pages, it seemed tedious, pointless, and painful. The little I did write felt trivial. I wondered for whom I was
writing: Who would care about these things? I started losing touch with old friends and made few new ones. I had no idea who the audience for my stories might be.
Fortunately, I still had an audience of one—my wife—who grew alarmed at the dark turn I had taken, which showed no sign of passing. I felt a strange, new kind of hopelessness that went all the way to my fingertips. Soon she insisted we leave Madison, and within a few weeks our house was on the market (we had one daughter and another child on the way). This time we moved to Minneapolis, and after that things slowly began to improve. Fitfully, I started writing in my journal again.
All this made more sense when I read Pennebaker’s work. But it made even more sense when I stumbled into the field of “self-affirmation” research (not to be confused with “self-esteem”), which uses short writing exercises to change the way people see themselves. One of the most common is to write for ten minutes or so about your values, about why they are important to you, or about a time when those values came into play.
Repeated just a few times, these exercises can have significant effects. They can boost students’ gpa for years. They can improve subjects’ health and relationships. The reasons for their power are not fully understood, but it seems to have something to do with expanding your sense of self, of who you are, and of what caused you to become that person.
In a 2014 overview of this research, Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman noted that “the self” can be best understood as a kind of “storyteller” with “a powerful need to see itself as having integrity.” We need to believe we are good people, moral people, and that we can achieve the goals we set for ourselves. This is what Cohen and Sherman call a “narrative of personal adequacy.”
Yet the world does not always confirm our adequacy. In fact, it often tells us the opposite, in the clear language of failure, rejection, exclusion, pain, and other unpleasant things. These can threaten the idea of our self. And when the idea of our self begins to crumble and we can’t quite hold it together, it can take an emotional and physical toll. Long before anyone talked about this kind of thing, the psychiatrist George Engel looked at cases of 170 people who died suddenly and unexpectedly. He found that there were various circumstances that precipitated death: the loss of a spouse, child, sibling, or friend; denial of a promotion; loss of a job; a robbery; the demolition of a hotel where one man worked for thirty years; and a reconciliation with long-lost family members. Engel noted that these episodes marked periods of extreme excitement, loss of control, or “giving up.” Many involved the sense that the person “no longer has, or no longer believes that he has, mastery or control over the situation, or even over himself,” Engel wrote. In other words, when your sense of self unravels, your actual self can too.
Writing affirmations seems to offer some protection from these slings and arrows. In one study that Cohen and Sherman cited, both affirmed and non-affirmed people were shown a live caged tarantula. The affirmed group correctly judged the distance between themselves and the spider. Non-affirmed people saw the threat as physically closer than it really was. When the story we’ve told ourselves about who we are is threatened, the world feels more dangerous. Things can look more dire, more risky, more hopeless than they are. That’s a feeling I remember clearly. It’s one I’m sure my grandma knew well.
Culture-bound or not, depression is a complex beast. Even today there are no known physiological causes, despite our perennial assumption that these will soon be found. There is no biological test you can take for it. That’s why, for me, the intersection of narrative and neurology is where a key piece of this puzzle can be found.
Surely nothing as simple as a notebook and a pencil could have saved my grandma, just as when things turned darkest for me, my wife had to intervene. Yet I still feel lucky that I became a writer when I did. Because for years those journal pages helped me hold myself together when the world pulled me apart. They helped me figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and how to bridge the distance between the two.
But most important, I see now that in all those years when I thought I was writing one kind of story, I was writing another. Now when I open my journal, I know which story that is. I know why I’m writing it. And I know the end is still a long way off.
Frank Bures is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Why We Write: In the Presence of Living
Until the summer my grandmother was dying, my children were the only people I had ever watched sleep. I used to lie beside them at nap time, taking shallow breaths, while I waited for a thumb to fall away from a mouth or for a jaw to drop open: the signal that they had drifted off. I willed them unconscious with all the silent concentration that a white-knuckled passenger in the back row uses to fly a jetliner. Sounds from outside the room seemed magnified then; a distant door slamming or a slightly raised voice threatened to wake them. In the presence of my sleeping grandmother it was altogether different. Even nearby noises—a car starting in the lot outside her window, the phone ringing—seemed curiously muffled. A neighbor down the hall conducted mysterious business in his home office, but his voice sounded as if it were coming from far away. I adjusted the fan toward her bed and covered her legs with the sheet. I watched my grandmother’s breath enter and leave her body and willed it, not to steady into the even metronome that accompanied my children’s dreams, but to stop.
She was dying at home, and home was a shady one-bedroom apartment crowded with books. The shelves in her front room were heavy with story collections from the forties and fifties, the works of Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Adventures of Augie March, and tomes that promised cures for back pain, leg pain, and, though they did not promise but implied it, the indignities of old age.
She kept a handful of favorite books in her bedroom, as well as the latest reading assignment from the literature course she’d taken at the local community college for the last sixteen years. Volumes of contemporary poetry sat next to Portnoy’s Complaint, Dubliners,The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and a long-ago gift from me: An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. My grandmother’s all-time favorite book was Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. It came up so often during discussions of my writing (she liked a lot of my work but I was no Isak Dinesen) that I often teased her by intoning in a nasal imitation of Meryl Streep in the movie version, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She always laughed.
Early in the summer I had thought to bring my laptop over and work while she slept. When she woke she’d call my name. Sometimes she needed help getting up from the bed into her chair. Sometimes she just wanted to make sure she was not alone. I brought my machine into the back room and showed it to her. She was suspicious of computers. I told her I was working on a novel. She brightened and urged me back to work. She wished me luck.
Luck was just one of the things I needed. I write about the challenges of parenting wild teenage girls, and late-life love, and the dramas of living in a close-knit community. I asked myself who could possibly care about such made-up stories when this flesh-and-blood woman I loved (who had secured her own release from the hospital with the firmly delivered words “I’m not interested in staying safe, I’m interested in staying sane”) had received a terminal diagnosis? Her decline was so swift that each day rendered yesterday’s arrangements obsolete. The nursing student my mother hired to pop in twice a day to help with the washing up became the home health aide to administer baths became the person to sleep on her couch at night became the twenty-four-hour companion who meted out morphine at two in the morning. All within a few days.
I arrived one morning midway through the summer and found my grandmother sitting on the edge of the bed. Josie, the night helper, stood beside her. I bent to put my arms around my grandmother’s waist. This was how we lifted her onto her legs: one, two, three, hup. Josie waved my arms away. No more. It took me a few moments to understand. Sometime during the night, it seemed, my grandmother had lost her ability to stand. She sat. We waited. She was groggy, as if she had been woken from a deep sleep. After a while we lifted her legs into the bed. Josie left to get her bus. My grandmother dozed. I reached for An American Childhood and read the opening paragraph:
When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
She’d loved these words as I did, but I doubted she’d have any use for them now, if she could even hear them over the Morse code of pain that her body was sending her. For most of the rest of that day, and the days after, it was hard to gauge how conscious my grandmother was. Her eyes opened only partially, if at all, and when they did she seemed to be gazing at something far beyond her quiet bedroom.
My mother came to take over, and with only an hour left before I had to pick up my youngest child from camp, I headed to a reservoir located near where she lived, just north of San Francisco. The sunny fire road was patrolled by biting blackflies that I had to jog to outrun. I was sweating by the time I reached the path around the lake. I worked the muscles in my legs hard, charging in and out of shadow and leaping over roots and rocks. My grandmother’s life was falling away from her like acorns from a chinquapin, and music, literature, and art seemed to be the lightest of objects. They made hardly a sound when they hit the ground. My mother was singing to her when I left. She had been holding her hand and singing in the voice she used with me as a child when I had a fever. I stumbled and my hand clutched at the spongy bark of a redwood.
As a writer who was also the mother of two small children, I was no stranger to the nagging fear that time spent spinning tales might be better spent spinning lettuce. In the presence of my grandmother or my children or even the blue-bellied lizard that skittered over the path and into the brush, the balance seemed to tip decidedly toward lettuce. The next day, when I got in the car to go to my grandmother’s apartment, I left my computer at home.
My grandmother stopped drinking water shortly after her legs failed. Her spells of consciousness were briefer and less frequent. Each breath seemed to cause her pain. The hospice people assured me that she could still hear my voice. They told me to tell her that she could let go and I did it, thinking that if there was anything I could give her that would help her die, I did not want to hold it back. I told her that my mother would be all right. We will take care of her, I said. We will take care of each other. I turned to other subjects for relief. To the antics of my children. To books. I told her how much I liked Billy Collins, whom I had moved on to after Annie Dillard. He was funny and sneakily profound. In the tradition of the writers I loved most, he led the reader to surprising places with deceptively simple language, like a child who tries to describe what he’s seen and finally just grabs your hand and takes you to it.
My mother stood with me in my grandmother’s bedroom and I told her about Billy Collins, not because she was a particular fan of poetry (that gene seemed to have skipped a generation) but because I was searching for something cheerful to say. On the spot, I decided to read her the poem “Dharma,” which begins, “The way the dog trots out the front door / every morning / without a hat or an umbrella, / without any money / or the keys to her doghouse / never fails to fill the saucer of my heart / with milky admiration.” Billy Collins deserves a dozen yellow roses, I thought, just for making my mother laugh. Between us lay my grandmother. I looked down and saw that her eyes were wide open, as they had not been in days, and that they were filled with tears.
The next day and for the remaining days of my grandmother’s life, I read aloud. From An American Childhood and from Sailing Alone Around the Room. One day I read a poem titled “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” which began: “I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna / or on any river for that matter / to be perfectly honest.”
I finished the poem and read another and then another.
Cleaning the apartment with my mother after my grandmother was gone, I would find several copies of Out of Africa and ask myself with reproach why I had not read to her from it. Grief and remorse sit close to each other on the scale of human emotions; they are easily confused. Only later would I realize that the thing I was feeling at that moment was loss rather than guilt. I would turn to “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” and read on until the words began to blur. This was the compelling voice of a mature woman with a story to tell and it is not something that you can easily set aside before the end. It was clear to me then what I must have suspected before: My grandmother and I had not had that kind of time.
Those last days passed in high summer and the trees next to her back deck dropped layers of pollen-covered pods. I slipped outside whenever my brother the doctor would call from the East Coast with instructions to increase her Ativan and morphine. Each time I came back inside I brushed the layer of gold dust from the bottom of my bare feet. I watched my grandmother shrink on her hospital bed. I read aloud.
“You’re not alone,” I reassured her, after a prolonged silence. “I’m just resting my voice. I’m still here.”
“I know,” she said. She had long ago stopped accepting water or food; she had not responded in days. Her body was gaunt and her voice was parched but unbelievably, it was her own.
“Grandma?” I laced my fingers through hers, talking, talking, talking, hoping for more. More never came.
What had made me think there was a difference, I wondered then, between the love that we had for each other and the words we used, or tried to use, to express it? It was the searching for words that was so uniquely human and precious—it was the very audaciousness of trying to capture feeling into something as tangible as a poem or a story that meant so much. I returned to my imagined mothers and children, to all the characters in my head, and greeted them with renewed affection and respect. There are worse ways to spend one’s brief time than in the attempt to write something good. After all, is it so very disappointing if the amazing thing a child drags you to see is something as ordinary as a hummingbird or a snail? What matters is the taking of your hand.
Lise Saffran is the author of the novel Juno’s Daughters, published in January by Plume. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published stories in a variety of literary journals. She lives in Missouri with her husband and two sons.
If you’d like to share your story of perseverance or offer some perspective on why you continue to write despite rejection, lack of recognition, or other challenges, e-mail us at whywewrite@pw.org. Your essay could be the next installment of Why We Write.
Spoken Futures, a youth organization based in Tucson, Arizona, hosted the season kickoff of the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam (TYPS) on August 19, 2017, which featured P&W–supported poet Bobby Wilson. Wilson’s work is heavily influenced by his Dakota heritage, and his spunky spirit and deep cultural roots resonated with the high school-aged youth. He led a writing workshop with about ten youths, moving them through the anxiety of writing and performing. By the end, all overcame their fears and signed up to compete in the poetry slam.
Wilson, a new transplant to Tucson, but a friend of many years to local organizers, also performed a set halfway through the slam. He roped in the audience with poems about his indigenous heritage, trauma from colonization, and dreaming our dreams. In his opening piece, he spoke about the national anthem: “I will not stand, I will not kneel. There are needles in our knees given to our grandparents by good God-fearing men and the women they own.” Wilson is raw, honest, and a kind person. He stayed late to talk to youth, and supported our work with his time and energy.
