Can I Get That In Writing?

"Put things into words and there's no telling when you'll get them out again."

~Carrie Fisher, The Best Awful

"What you fear, if you turn toward it, will give your writing teeth."
~Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend From Far Away

Though I have been keeping my Spiral Notebook Journal for about 28 (!) years now, there have been gaps--sometimes stretching into months and even, in one instance, over a year--where I've written nothing at all. The gaps tend to coincide with big, scary life stuff--capital-F Funks, above average turmoil and upheaval, that kind of thing.

And though the pages are often used to exhaustively analyze the words, actions and emotions of myself and those around me, there are all sorts of things that get put in there much after the fact or not at all. I've thought a lot over the years about why that happens. (I've even written a few extraordinarily navel-gazy entries about the phenomenon.)

Theoretically at least, the journal is private¹ and there's no doubt that I use it primarily as free therapy. (It's the only therapy I know for sure will be covered by whatever health insurance I have (or don't have) at any given time.) So there should be no restrictions on what I write there, but clearly there are--and part of the reason has to do with what cdnkaro over at four under 4 (plus two) so succinctly said in her post "Pass" a little while ago: "There's something about the written word that lends significant weight to one's thoughts."

I know this to be true from experience. I need think no further than the enraged ranting entries that have so often made me angrier rather than helped me work through my anger.

And I know it to be true in my gut as well. There is a way in which writing something down--especially something painful or, worse, shameful--makes it more real. For me, it is something that goes beyond just leaving a written record that others--or even some later version of myself--might stumble upon. It is not about evidence, exactly, but about the way in which the written word helps to create the story we tell ourselves about our lives in a much more substantial way than the intangible thoughts that comprise the ongoing narratives in our brains.

While I shy away from writing the biggest, scariest feelings out on paper, I also know that sometimes digging around in them on paper will result in an understanding I might not have achieved otherwise. And, in fact, that light-switch click of insight is one of the primary reasons I've continued to keep a journal for as long as I have. The problem, of course, is that when you're dealing with putting big, scary feelings on paper, there's no way of telling when you begin where you're going to end up.

Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to avoid writing about the things I fear the most. How does that avoidance affect not just my journal writing, but the writing I put out there into the world?²

Natalie Goldberg addresses the issue of fear many times in her various books on writing. In Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir, there is this passage:

This is the beginning: to let out what you have held hidden.

Here's another rule of writing practice: Go for the jugular, for what makes you nervous. Otherwise, you will always be writing around your secrets, like the elephant no one notices in the living room. It's that large animal that makes your living room unique and interesting. Write about it...Get it out and down on the page. If you don't, you'll keep tripping over it.

Goldberg goes on to suggest making a list of all the things you shouldn't write about and then systematically writing for ten minutes about each one. I confess that even though I've worked my way faithfully through many of the other exercises in this book, this is one I've skipped up to now.

But, I'm determined--some day soon, I'm goin' in.

1. At some point, I decided that as long as what I was writing was true to who I was in that moment, I would stand behind whatever it was, embarrassed or not. I wouldn't be happy if, for instance, someone's feelings were hurt by something they read, but I decided that by reading work meant to be private, that was a risk they took. (Full disclosure: I copied and pasted this footnote from a comment I left on an earlier post. So naughty--and lazy.)

2. I also have significant concern for how this avoidance is affecting my overall mental health, but this was a post about writing and I left that concern out. Then, too, as a self-identified writer-type person, my mental health and my writing have been hopelessly entangled for as long as I can remember.