Making it “write”

Is it possible that writing is a form of therapy? And if so why don’t more of us do it? I was feeling really down a few days ago and fired off an e-mail to one of my sisters, who just happens also to be gay (well lesbian actually but the politics of gendered descriptors is the topic for another column). She is probably the most empathic of all my siblings (there are many of us – Catholicism and its rhythm method has I am sure been the root of many an extended family) and so I guess this explains why I wrote to her.

“I’m having an existential slump” I wailed – and then went on to detail, in the kind of shopping list of despair that would fell the toughest among us, all the kinds of things that were bugging me. Ageing, crime, financial insecurity (because I have the investment instincts of a cretin – buying property just as the world enters an economic meltdown), tenure of employment, friends in need who seem to be leeching out all my empathy, friends in need who went on to kill themselves, and so on. The list was endless, so endless even I was getting bored, and the e-mail ended in this weird goodbye, a subsequent reading of which left me thinking “my gosh this reads like a suicide note”.

Now I’ve thought about suicide before – hasn’t everyone? – but to be honest I can’t see this happening anytime soon. The urge to live and connect is so primal in me that the thought of not existing seems ridiculous and awful to contemplate. But I do think that suicide as an alternative to a debilitating, painful and humiliating death is not only desirable, it’s a sign of extreme and sober rationality. Right now I am nowhere near that point in my life and so I am living life as if my life depends on it. Yes there is a desperate tone there but how else should one live but with urgency and intensity? Lord knows this is probably the only life we’ll have so it makes sense to do it properly. And reading (and obsessing I’ll admit) about the recent Air France crash over the Atlantic (the latest theory is that some catastrophic event happened which killed them all pretty quickly, thankfully) really puts into perspective the fact that the thread that holds us all to life is woefully slender and vulnerable.

But the act of documenting my existential slump seemed to be useful in and of itself. I am sure that sending it off to a loving and kind sister (she came up with some really useful theory about us losing our dad when we were young priming us to be a tad death obsessed) and subsequently, since I was on a confessional and self indulgent roll, to a whole slew of my address book, made a difference. But really it was the spilling it out onto the screen of my desktop at work (I was taking a break OK?) which was the truly helpful bit.

It seems the act of finding just the right word to capture the specific nuance of despair, the ordering of the angst into a logical framework, the saying of the unsayable, the occasional self deprecatory remark, is what really becomes the healing. Aren’t you always amazed when authors are interviewed and they are asked if their novel/thriller/romance/short story is autobiographical? I mean, duh, even if they draw on the lives of others (and they truly believe this) it’s not really possible to write without revealing. Us therapists know this (thank you Sigmund Freud), that what is unconscious or troubling will come out whether we like it or not. Perhaps this is why artists of many kinds (not only writers but painters and sculptors and actors for example) regard their art as not only essential to who they are but essential for survival. They need this process to connect to something in them that must be let out.

So yes, writing is survival to some degree.  If it’s just an e-mail to a loved one, an sms to a caring ex, or a vast sprawling novel, the act of writing is a purging, venting, and wound healing affair. Even writing this has been good for me!