Writing is generous
For anyone who feels making art doesn't matter:: ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 22nd 2024
Dear soft heart,
My first ever published piece of writing was in my local paper as a student journalist when I was 17.
I covered stories that were interesting for me (women’s day events, art gallery openings), and sometimes extremely boring for me (polar bear dip and a consequent pancake breakfast.) #CanadianJournalism
My first published piece was so exciting. I took out scissors and cut it out from the paper and I put it on the fridge.
I loved being a journalist. So much so that I believed I would do it forever and ever. It is actually completely nonsensical that I thought that at the time, because I am so autistic that I can’t even watch the news without feeling like I am living the story that every single person on there is living. My sense of individuation is hard earned because I have such profound mirror touch1 and mirror emotion2 synesthesia.
But I loved writing, so of course, it makes some sense. More than that, I loved asking questions and getting to know people. I love to know about new things and old things, and I want to figure out what leads to where.
Being a writer is an odd calling. And yes, I think I would venture naming it a calling, rather than a job. Writing complicates things, at the very least. It is also rarely immediately lucrative, if ever, depending on what you do with it. In short, I think you have to do it for the sheer love of it, or else you could go mad.
When I was in the 12th grade, I wrote my first fiction piece. It was about a girl who had panic attacks. Although my character was not me, I was able to process so much of my actual lived experience through her, and put it down to live outside of me, instead of inside of me, and I fell in love with writing narrative then. Shortly after, in college, I was invited to consider writing personal essays about my own experiences with anxiety disorders, namely panic attacks. I decided to go for it, at first anonymously, but when my blog got so much traffic and the audience reception was overwhelming positive, I got enough confidence to use my own name. My entire career in coaching, speaking, and peer education then follows.
Personal essay is often seen as a self-indulgent thing in our culture. I’ve been lucky, most of the people in my life, or who have been in my life, have supported my writing. In the rare cases where this wasn’t so though, god it has hurt and has felt so big even though it was so little in the grand picture of it all.
It hurt so much because while writing is a self-discovery practice, the self- discovery is generous. And to have it be seen as self-indulgent, selfish or self-centred and the like, as in how obsessed with yourself can you be if you feel this impulse and this need to write about yourself and your life, made me feel misunderstood and lonely. I felt deeply unseen when this was reflected back to me because this was the opposite of what writing has historically done for me.
For me, writing was always a bridge between me and other people. Personal essays, or short story, or poetry, was the actual bridge we could both stand on. It was a reciprocal, engaged act. It was the lived acknowledgement that we were not alone. It was a partnership between writer and reader.
Now, I am not delusional enough to not know that writing met my needs. It has met my need to be seen and to be heard, and it has also met my need for connection. Both things were extremely under resourced in my life through my parent’s divorce that was a fundamental break down in my life throughout my younger years. And from being an autistic kid who masked heavily. Before reaching a certain level of maturity, I probably felt embarrassed by the fact that I had these needs and I wanted them met. At times, I felt silly that I had done it this way. I was a little bashful that the calling to be a writer was so big, bigger than even my insecurities, my perfectionism, my fears, and my judgements of myself or even the potential judgements of others. It felt natural to want to remember and document people, things, places, moments. In this way, I was a field researcher, going out there, or in some cases, in here, and seeing what was happening and reporting back hoping I was not alone.
Some might say writers are seeking attention and yeah, that’s an okay thing to want. If it becomes unmanageable, then we can look at it with compassion. Our relationships to writing, much like our relationship to anything else is not always going to be pristine throughout every season of our lives. At times, we will make mistakes. If it ever gets to feel like our writing is begging for attention in a way that is not balanced for us, in those moments, we can ask… Is it a question of not feeling like our needs are met in our intimate relationships? If so, how can we remedy that? Is it that they are met but we want more? And if someone wants more, why is that? Is it that they’ve been afflicted by a hungry ghost? Is it that they never had any and now they are gorging? Is it that they want it from a specific source, like some sort of prestigious or famous input that will make them feel like they are worthy, in a way that doesn’t hit the same from self-sourcing or lesser status feedback? Is it about survival? Is it about social belonging? It’s probably different for every person. But a constant is that empathy grows when we realize that someone who is attention seeking wants something that is entirely human to want. Attention seeking, since we have been born is the way we stay alive.
From another angle, art and writing is often seen as a frivolous activity, something not worth much. “Who cares, why write stories?” might be what the devil on the shoulder of writers of all genre - non-fiction and fiction alike - says. Why write when we could be doing something so much more… productive. We are not the only ones who struggle with this or think this or are told this. There is an entire category of self-help for creativity that sells a lot of books every year. I’ve personally done The Artist’s Way front to back three whole times now and I still learn new ways I have shamed myself for wanting to create, and there are still new fears I spot that are all about looming doom if I do create.
Yet, art and story are the saviour of us all when life happens to us. Sure, we need farmers, and we need teachers, and we need people who pave roads well and build houses, and we need people who know how to handle drinking water and we need doctors and nurses and scientists to get through the years alive and well. Of course, we need practical and physical help and competence all around us to survive, but also, we need spiritual and emotional companionship to get through this life too. At least, this is especially true if we want to be well. And that is highly valuable - to be sane and to be well. Our world is suffering because of a lack of emotional and spiritual companionship. If art can be a bridge for that, for a few hours, days, weeks, or if it has the potential to stay with us in a lasting way, this is to be taken seriously.
And this is why, writers, I think you should write.
Writing changes our lives. Think about the times you have most been lost for a moment. For me, immediately as I prompt myself to this, I think to my Ativan withdrawal.
Now, think, beyond physical and practical needs, that yes were super important, but not the whole picture. Who saved you in a very real existential way during this time? Who helped you reconnect to yourself? We cannot discount how important this is too. It was probably an artist, a writer, a creator, that inspired you to hold on. In small or big ways.
Your entire life can change based on a piece of writing. You can read something and know something new about yourself and then the rest of your life is different… and infinitely better.
How are we supposed to feel less alone if no one shares anything personal? There is complete emotional and spiritual atrophy if we do not share our private lives, our inner landscapes as we feel comfortable to. There is a stall in our collective growth if there are no writers.
Writing helps us record history too. We see progress and evolution through it, and our lives are not forgotten because of it. We track time through writing. And as women, and queer folks, and disabled folks, and other folks of marginalized groups, this is especially important. We get to have a voice on our own terms in our writing. No one speaks for us. Our experience gets some space to breathe. We are no longer shadows.
There is also the fact that writing allows us to evolve. Writing allows us to excavate, alchemize and find freedom. Writing allows us to deconstruct beliefs that harm us and envision new futures.
Having my life changed by Melissa Febos this summer with her memoir abandon me (and also local raspberries)
Melissa Febos about advising writing students on p.292 of her memoir Abandon Me says, “If you want to write about something, I tell them, you have to look at it. You have to look long enough that your own reflection fades. Total self-absorption is the dubious luxury of non-writers. If you want to write about yourself, I tell them, you must meet your own gaze with this same attention.”
“We all craft a story we can live with. The one that makes ourselves easier to live with. This is not the one worth writing. To write your story, you must face a truer version of it. You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you. That do not spar you the trouble of knowing what made you, and what into.”
We cannot become who we want to be, before looking at who we are. We cannot write a better way forward before we understand why we are here, right here, in all our glory and in our mess. Writing is one of the greatest maps from the past, in the present, and to the future.
Writing in my opinion, to make it abundantly clear, is one of the most generous things one can do. It’s generous because it breaks generational trauma. It’s generous because it makes others feel less alone and offers them an orientation that they are not broken or the only lone wolf. It’s generous because you share what you found out in the long hard journey of the thing(s) you have to overcome in your life and you offer it as a short-cut for so little in return, just because you would appreciate it if someone else did it for you too and it’s a nice thing to do. It’s generous because the willingness to know yourself makes you a better person to your people and augments your ability to be more effective at positive transformation in society.
A person who has not faced their pain, is not a person equipped to not cause more pain. A person who has faced their pain is free of being haunted and when we are no longer being haunted, we are connected to ourselves because it doesn’t hurt as much to be here, and when we are connected to ourselves, it’s hard to hurt others because we feel their pain as our own.
I trust a memoirist because they have vast experience with the genre of memory. Writing memoir is not writing fact. I’ve learnt over the years it’s writing memory. And when you are intimate with your memories, you have faced your pain. Of course, writing is not the only way to go about this. Going to get ourselves where we were abandoned and bringing them back here with us can be done in a myriad of ways. And not everyone chooses writing as a way to do that, and not everyone ought to either, but those who feel called to do so, it’s because their medicine lies here. In this art. Writing… it’s doing healing right in the public eye. It’s saying I am so imperfect, and I want anyone who wants to read it to know it, and judge me for it. And then love me anyway.
To want to be loved for an authentic version of yourself is epic. To dare feel worthy of it is glorious. It is a small act that breaks down the systems of oppression that keep us from our humanity, which is to say, our innate worth. It takes the toxic shame that is placed on us and throws it into a fire to turn into ashes. And then it takes those ashes, mixes it with dirt, which helps grow new things. Things to eat and sustain ourselves with. It’s also courageous in the sense that you could just not do it. You could use the hours of processing, transforming, and alchemizing for literally so many other things that are easier than writing.
Yet, here you are, wanting to write. Thank you.
“Some examples of mirror touch: seeing someone stroke another person’s face and feeling a touch sensation on your own face at the same time; seeing a headbutt in a video and feeling a sudden, strong, unpleasant sensation of pain in your own forehead; seeing a runner fall over in a race and feeling friction and pain in your knees, which is the part of the runner’s body that hit the ground; or seeing someone stabbed in the chest in a violent film and feeling a pain in exactly the same place in your own chest. The mirror sensation can be strong although obviously (and fortunately!) it lacks the full intensity of the original sensation observed, especially in the case of violent contact and serious accidents, and the different sensations might be for example a "zap" or “shock” feeling (similar to the typical pain empathy sensation), localised tingling, or the feeling of a pinprick, friction or a cut on the skin, always in the same part of the body as the one being observed and normally lasting for a few seconds or while the action is being observed.” For more info: https://www.thesynesthesiatree.com/2021/03/mirror-touch-synesthesia.html
“for some Autistic people, their experience of empathy can be so intense that it is almost debilitating. Where this gets interesting is when it intersects with synesthesia, more specifically, mirror-touch synesthesia.” More: https://emergentdivergence.com/2023/07/24/hyper-empathy-mirror-touch-synesthesia-and-the-autistic-experience-of-pain/