This Dead Blog Makes Me Sad, or This Is Why You Can't Have Nice Things

When I was eleven, I had a teacher, one Mrs. Wilkinson, who had everyone in our seventh-grade English class keep a journal, which she would collect periodically, just to ensure that everyone was really putting effort into the assignment. She set aside class time for writing, although we were encouraged to write avidly outside of class, as well. I'd kept diaries on and off for a few years prior to that, but nothing as well-maintained as the project I was about to begin. I took it seriously.

I bought my first journal at a stationery store in Vienna, a few steps away from one of the tram stops between Grinzing and Schottentor on the #38 tram. The first book had a chartreuse paisley cover and, like all of its successors, was hardbound. Because I wasn't yet aware how much and how frequently I'd be writing, or that I'd be pressing everything from photographs to flowers between the pages, the first journal had a small, stiff spine. I took it everywhere with me. Writing became a solid part of my routine. I wrote when I woke up in the morning; I wrote during lunch at school; I wrote, elbow to elbow on dining-room tables, with my best friends; I wrote in bed, by flashlight; I wrote on field trips--in Graz, Salzburg, Hallstadt, and in Prague, Budapest, and Paris. I doodled, sketched, and painted in it, taped ticket stubs, postcards, cut-out snowflakes, bits of sheet music, candy wrappers, stickers, and friendship bracelets inside. When I ran out of pages, I'd go to the stationery store and buy another journal. Our class visited the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp; I wrote about that. My mother got sick and returned to the United States to get on the national transplant registry; I wrote about that, too. I documented the piercing of my ears, the euthanizing of our oldest family pet, my first experience skiing, the effects of war in Sarajevo, my debut as a clarinet soloist in a youth music festival, the harvesting of wine grapes with Cobenzl vineyard workers. I wrote (and meticulously taped construction-paper flaps over) awful poetry, first-kiss fantasies, lamentations on the subject of puberty, weird dreams, made-up stories, and racy passages copied from romance novels. I described the night my father and I drove on roads lining the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, on a night so bright he turned the headlights off and navigated by moonlight alone. I described the night it was first suggested to me that he wasn't coming home. I described a few things that happen to you once in life and then never again.

I had about ten years' worth of writing, some eleven volumes, when I destroyed the entire collection.

I had a roundabout way of doing it. I fell in love, packed the journals in a big box, drove 900 miles across the country, and left them in my beloved's bedroom closet. I was nineteen. I thought I was coming back. I thought giving him my single most precious and irreplaceable possession would guarantee my return at a time when few things were certain. Here's why it's my fault: I never told him what the box contained and--either out of respect of my privacy or a complete lack of curiosity--he never looked inside it. We fell out of touch while the box was shuffled around among his things, deposited in a flood-prone basement, and then finally discarded by a disgruntled landlord, along with a smattering of other abandoned belongings.

Among friends, I've referred to the self-sabotaging tendency by which I lose or destroy the things I love best as my dispersionism. I am a dispersionist. My journals were the greatest thing I have ever made and lost. And while I'm wise to the fact that their loss lends them a vaster greatness, it is nevertheless true that words are stronger than memories, and that I greedily regret not having more of both.

It's been about five years to the day I had the brief conversation--long distance, over the phone--about the fate of my journals. I tried to convince myself that maybe it was better this way; that the writing was probably all leg hair and slow dances anyway; that Past Me and Past Life were not as compelling as I'd like to believe; that it's silly and self-indulgent to be so backward-looking all the time; that it is far better to have nothing so dear to lose, no more paper to hoard and haul around, et cetera. And yet, within the last couple of years, I could still catch myself entertaining the deluded fantasy that my friend had actually held on to the box and was hoping to surprise me at some point with an unexpected reunion, or that there exists somewhere some landlord or dump-worker who thought, "Who could possibly throw this away? It must be important to someone. I'll hold on to it for a little while." (Even to describe the "chartreuse paisley cover" is a nod to the latter.) These are, of course, effects of denial--an inability to accept, or even grasp, the scope and permanence of the lack (together with, I admit, a splash of self-importance). Every now and then, I'll tell some half-remembered story, and someone might say, "You oughta write a book!" and I'll flinch to think of the resources I no longer have. It was the first loss of my adult life, the first for which I was solely accountable, and one which seemed to reiterate and worsen all preceding losses (the act of documentation itself being more often than not a futile attempt to salvage and recreate, in my case). I'm still sore about it today.

In time, though, the constellation of responses to something like this--the disbelief, denial, delusions, even disappointment--are superseded by acceptance. There is the sad old adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And so it is that I labor to convince myself that it is not the writing itself that mattered, but the fact of having written. The simple fact that "it was" is greater than whether it was actually good or bad, useful or not.

I've written, albeit ambivalently, about the writing cure--here, too, the process is of greater significance than the product. It is somewhat comforting to know that I can't obliterate the effect of all that work as easily as I did the work itself. Writing is--among other things--a craft. Aspiring writers are often advised to write every day, because improvement is a matter of practice. Maybe I'm a better writer now than I would have been if I hadn't poured so much energy into those journals. Maybe I'm a healthier, better-adjusted person than I would've otherwise been. I certainly have pretty penmanship. Consolation prizes, all!

The moral of this story brings me, finally, to the point of this post. When I started this blog, I looked at it as both an impetus and an opportunity to broaden my research and writing habits. I have interests that are not directly related to my job or creative endeavors, and I figured that keeping a blog would provide both an outlet for those interests and motivation for me to put time into, say, reading a pile of studies about the effectiveness of SSRIs versus behavioral therapy with regard to treatment for mild to moderate depression. I wanted to blog about research, about ideas. I wanted to avoid personal pronouns and navel-gazing. The unfortunate truth is that it takes me much, much longer to research, draft, edit, and publish posts about studies and ideas outside my realm of expertise than it would to just write about what I think. The other unfortunate truth is that it's much, much harder for me to consider an avalanche of personal thoughts and experiences as interesting or valuable as reportage and analysis.I try to remind myself that merely having done is more significant than having done well, or even poorly. I'd rather keep a regular blog than not, even a bad one. Really! I loathe being responsible for yet another piece of internet detritus.

My life now is different from what I imagined it would be about eight months ago. If I don't have time for the kinds of posts I was originally planning on writing, I certainly won't have time for them later. Still, I'd prefer to fill this space somehow. There is also the fact that, all things considered, the next year or so offers a bounty of newness that I want to document and share. I've been where I am now for longer than I've ever been anywhere. And I'm leaving. Cat and I are heading across the country. I'll be trying my hand at a super-selective, fancy-pants MFA program. I'll be teaching for the first time. I'll be in the company of writers I've admired for years. It could be wonderful; it could be a complete disaster; it could be variable amounts of both. But it'll be worth writing, I think, and the people who stop by here most often (hello, my friends!) might consider it worth reading.

I'm going to try to post here once a week. Topics may range from perspectives on solitude to the effects of consuming an entire pot of Earl Grey tea (biochemically no different from a tablespoon of ipecac, in case you're wondering). They may be 1,200 words long, or 12 words long, or may just be YouTube videos of toads bouncing down mountains. It doesn't matter. I'm doing it. Weekly. Promise. (In part because it's not easy to pack the internet into a cardboard box and accidentally the whole thing.) It could be bad, it could be good, but most importantly, it will be.

So, cheers to all that. And thank you, Mrs. Wilkinson.

A "Cure" for Writing

In my last post, “Where the Problem Fixes You,” I wrote about an article that examined the potential benefits of depression. One of the claims in the article (and the study on which it’s based) is that writing promotes quicker resolution of depressive symptoms by allowing the writer to gain objectivity, insight, and control through the abreactive process of writing about one's troubles. This idea (commonly known as the “writing cure”) is not quite as new the adaptationist theories in which it plays a role.

The writing cure is a variant of the “talking cure,” a concept generally regarded as the basis of psychoanalysis. The term was coined, not by Freud, but by Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O.” in the case histories), who was a young patient of Freud’s colleague, Josef Breuer. In 1880, Bertha and Breuer discovered together that regular discussions about her condition had the effect of reducing the severity of her symptoms. Through words, the limbic intelligence of the “underbrain” acquired the possibility of negotiation outside the self. In the analyst’s office, speech became the vehicle through which unconscious pressures could be shifted into consciousness, where they could then be examined, dealt with, and eventually mastered. Bertha Pappenheim dubbed this “the talking cure” or, in jest, “chimney sweeping.”

D. H. Lawrence might’ve come close to articulating the writing cure in 1913 when he famously wrote to a friend that “one sheds ones sicknesses in books — repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be a master of them.” To shed sickness in a book confers a purpose on sickness that it might otherwise lack, and that’s certainly remarkable. But I’d prefer to argue that the first person to write about the writing cure might well have been Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press had been publishing Freud’s papers since 1924, but Woolf herself reserved several years to pour scorn on the man before reading him in earnest (and meeting him!) in 1939, the same year she wrote the autobiographical essay “A Sketch of the Past.” In a much-discussed passage of the essay, Woolf describes how the experience of writing To the Lighthouse allayed her obsessive fixation on her mother’s death; she writes,

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

However deceptively cut-and-dried Woolf’s account might be here, this is the basic machinery of the writing cure. It makes some sense that people who write a lot are more likely to stumble upon a particular kind of writing that helps them — at least temporarily — alleviate pain. And yet, why is it that some of the strongest testimonies to the palliative effects of writing tend to come from writers who ultimately commit suicide? If writing is such a cure, why does it fail consistently enough to have earned its own term? It’s possible (in fact, likely) that participants in writing-cure studies and those who choose to write for a living are birds of a very different feather; but I’m going to go ahead and sit on that point for a minute.

James Kaufman, who coined the term “Sylvia Plath Effect,” coauthored a 2006 article in the Review of General Psychology titled “Why Doesn’t the Writing Cure Help Poets?” (note: link goes straight to a PDF file), which cites twenty-some studies on the way to the assertion that “writers are, generally, more likely to be mentally ill and die young than others in the arts,” with poets essentially blowing the curve with “higher rates of mental illness, suicide, and mortality than other writers.” (The New York Times covered the same topic in 2004, in an article titled “Going Early into That Good Night.”) Belief in the therapeutic power of writing, in light of such strong evidence against it, seems to come packaged with the notion that the majority of poets (and many writers) do it wrong.

Kaufman and Sexton, the authors of the 2006 article, argue that the key elements of writing-cure writing, done right, are expressivity and narrative; that is, in order to feel better, the writer needs to make an emotional investment and tell a coherent story. Language-level details might also help to clarify what’s ticking behind allegedly palliative writing. Linguistic-analysis software allows researchers to examine connections between the frequency with which a writer uses certain categories of words and the health benefits that the writer may or may not report (or demonstrate) after having written. (Categories of words, for example, might include “cognitive” words (“because,” “reason,” “result”), big words, self-references, interrogatives, positive and negative emotions, etc.) Linguistic analysis allows psychologists to make some pretty remarkable observations. For example:

Another finding is that writers who shift in their use of the first person singular (e.g., I, me, my) to third person (e.g., we, us, them) are better off than those who continue to use the first person singular (Stirman & Pennebaker, 2001). This suggests that a shift in perspective is an important element and is consistent with the idea of storytelling. The picture that emerges is that the healthy writer is telling an evolving story and using emotion while doing it. . . . Conversely, a shift toward usage of the first-person singular may indicate a change in mental health. An analysis of the works of Kurt Cobain, John Cheever, and Cole Porter revealed that as their fame increased, all three writers used more first-person singular in both their creative work (song lyrics and stories) and in their private diaries and journals (Schaller, 1997). As this increase took place, so did an increase in self-destructive behaviors (e.g., excessive drinking) and depression (and for Cobain, an eventual suicide).

A version of the widely used text-analysis software designed by Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis is available to play with online, for free (if you don’t mind contributing to their corpus with your sample) at http://www.liwc.net. (The current version counts words that refer to sex, eating, or religion, too.) For what it’s worth, I’d offer that the delightful blog Dear Thyroid is a perfect example of what therapeutic-writing exercises can offer, and if I weren’t averse to pasting in stuff that doesn’t belong to me, I’d run some of that stuff through LIWC just to see what it says.

Certainly, there is no lack of evidence or research supporting the argument that certain types of writing are beneficial to mental health, even if the longevity and universal applicability of those benefits might be debatable. The Scientific American article I wrote about last time suggested that depression, in itself, is an evolutionary advantage that should perhaps not be thought of (or treated) as a mental disorder. A week ago, the New York Times ran an article about the anxious mind that seemed to resonate with the ideas described in the Scientific American piece; as Robin Marantz Henig relates,

“Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety . . . “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.

In view of all of these things, here’s what I think about all of this, finally: Depression probably offers a greater benefit to writing than writing does to depression. Contrary to the arguments expressed in the articles I wrote about in my previous post, analytical rumination may be better for your writing than it is for you. For Virginia Woolf, it was “the shock-receiving capacity” that made her a writer; it didn’t make her a happy person, it didn’t make her well-adjusted, but it did (by her account) make her see things more clearly, and she was able to bring that clarity of vision to her work. A high threshold for “shock” is perhaps the only way to explain how she could weather the eleven turbulent years (beginning, for her, at age thirteen) that brought the deaths of her mother, half-sister, father, and brother. I think it’s safe to suggest, with regard to extreme emotional disturbance, that the endgame of analytical rumination may be to say, essentially, “This insoluble problem is an integral part of who I am; and to the extent that I am happy with that, the trauma has a reason for being, and I accept it.” Such is adaptation.

Two weeks ago, over the text “near-unspeakable questions,” I linked to a four-word question in “A Sketch of the Past” that I think about a lot, and which appears in the below excerpt:

If to be aware of the insecurity of life, to remember something gone, to feel now and then, overwhelmingly, . . . a passionate fumbling fellowship—if it is a good thing to be aware of all this at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, by fits and starts —if, if, if—. But was it good? Would it not have been better (if there is any sense in saying good and better when there is no possible judge, no standard) to go on feeling, as at St. Ives, the rush and tumble of family life?. . . . would this not have been better than to have had that protection removed; to have been tumbled out of the family shelter; to have had it cracked and gashed; to have become critical and skeptical of the family—? Perhaps to have remained in the family, believing in it, accepting it, as we should, without those two deaths, would have given us greater scope, greater variety, and certainly greater confidence. On the other hand, I can put another question: Did those deaths give us an experience that even if it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the Gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously, and giving us a job which they would not have thought it worthwhile to give—say, the Booths or the Milmans. . . . So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality.

The “near-unspeakable” question is a matter of examining consequences and asking whether one would (albeit impossibly) substitute that Thing so terrible that one wishes it never happened, that Thing that forges a person, for something easier, for a life taken less seriously. Perhaps to catch oneself unwilling to substitute that trauma for the blithe “rush and tumble” is to catch oneself confessing preference for the trauma (and the hard-won wisdom that comes with it). It might mean thinking such admittedly complicated and disturbing things as, for example, “It is good that I was abused,” “It is good that I have lost my loved ones,” or, paraphrasing Mizuta Masahide, “It is good that my house has burned down. Now I can see the moon.”