Are you a writer? Or crazy.
It’s a shitty question to ask, I know, but let me explain.
Writer or crazy. What’s the difference?
Some people want to write their stories and share them. Some people aren’t ready yet to delve into their thoughts and ideas. It digs up some uncomfortable stuff.
Uncomfortable can look at lot like crazy.
Sometimes writing blindsides you
I wrote about a trip to Riomaggiore in Italy. It was one of our first stops after leaving New York, but we’d been traveling long enough that we’d fallen into a groove. It was fun, and the stretch of the unknown in front of us became exciting. I felt more free and light than at any other time in my life. I wanted to capture that excitement and freedom in a story. The final story did not match the light airy-ness of those still warm travel days.
Instead, I wrote about being sick in the years after Lila was born and how in certain moments, I didn’t believe I’d ever be healthy or normal again. The story explores what it means to be female in this world and my frustrations juggling parenthood and writing. I also come face to face with a distinct and painful lack of belief in myself.
I didn’t expect my beautiful nostalgia of gorgeous Italian nights by the water, stars twinkling above, painted tiny dots in the horizon over a black as ink sea to end up with me in tears. I almost didn’t finish writing it.
But I am not the writer I want to be if I don’t finish, so finish I did. I don’t particularly want to read it anytime soon, though.
I sound crazy, don’t I?
A recent novel excerpt Teaching the Literature of Mad Women talks about the importance of teaching the madness of women’s stories. It hit me hard, and I actually broke down in tears.
When you are anxious you are confined to the space illness allows. The occupation is suffocating. Anxiety is compressed, dense, and claustrophobic, a million things packed in a tight mind. And it reduced even further on the Great Plains, the looming expanse pressing down on anxiety’s frantic nature until it reverberates. The first women settlers here went mad: lured by the promise of a lush utopia, they arrived to find isolation, barren earth whipped away by merciless wind.
In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath describes the space of Ester’s depression as “very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” If depression is the eye of a tornado, anxiety is where the storm tethers down, a fear funneling up and out for miles, growing wild and frenzied overhead.
Several years after I arrive in Nebraska, I teach The Bell Jar in a women’s literature class for college juniors and seniors who are surprised to hear about the history of women’s madness.
“I designed this course around the long-standing notion that women are ‘mad,’” I begin carefully on the first day, worried my students will know I’ve planned the course because I have a personal interest in the subject, have had anxiety several years by now. I continue, “Because a student last semester came to my office to talk about a paper and while doing so told me, ‘All women are a little crazy,’ and I wanted to explore that common misconception.”
Are you a writer… or crazy? Even a little crazy?
Why have women been shut up and shut down for so long? Why are we relegated to the scrapheap of talent and pushed aside as hysterical, too sensitive, too much and too loud? Why are we punished with such violence for using our voices?
“All women are a little crazy,” says the student.
“Writer or crazy?” I ask again.
Why do our words frighten people so badly?
What does crazy mean?
I wrote a list of words I want to reclaim. I didn’t include crazy, because crazy is in a league of its own. It’s used to take people down, to say our opinions aren’t valid. Crazy says “Don’t believe her story.” Crazy means different, and it most definitely makes people uncomfortable. When someone tries to invalidate my opinion by calling me crazy, I call it what it is. Gaslighting.
Another person’s inability to understand or accept your opinion is not your problem. Nor mine. Not when you’re writing your truths.
When the student in the essay above says all women are a little crazy, what he’s saying is he doesn’t know how to handle it. That’s not my responsibility or his ex-girlfriend’s or any other person but himself. Yet he blames women by putting the crazy on us.
Sometimes, though, you won’t be ready for your writing to dredge up the past. Your whole body reacts and rejects, intuitively. You want to break something or someone or yourself. It makes us irrational and we say and do ugly things.
I’ve seen people erase entire novels, tens of thousands of words, in a plunging desire to negate the self and pretend they never wrote, never wanted it, never cared. And I never ask if they regret their actions because it would only serve as a useless admonition. Once a thing is gone, it’s gone.
Our words have value. They deserve to exist. We have value. We deserve to exist.
Writer or crazy? There’s a huge difference between crazy and not yet ready to write.
Sometimes, therapy is the answer.
I ran a memoir workshop years ago in Atlanta for people just beginning their books. We explored our different topics over the course of three days, delving deep into why we wanted to write and what our books were about.
One wrote about leaving an abusive marriage.
Another wrote about drug addiction.
A third wrote about giving her daughter up for adoption.
A fourth wrote about her mother who passed away just a few months before the workshops.
The woman who lost her mother? I thought she’d cancel and not attend. I thought it would be too difficult to write about her mother soon after her death when everything was still so raw. I was wrong.
All of these topics trigger us in a multitude of ways and delving deep into the why, how, when and other details of our most tender subjects is enough to make you want to hide under your bed.
I don’t pretend to be a therapist.
The work I do with writers may often be therapeutic, but it is not therapy. After decades of working with writers as they write so close to the bone, I’ve learned to focus on the writing and not the writer. My questions address the characters, the plot, the areas that work and those that don’t, and yes, sometimes my questions dig into real life issues.
I don’t judge what you’ve done in your past. I only care who you are in the moment of writing and how I can help you keep putting words on paper until you finish telling your story. I also know that while the writing can be incredibly painful, finishing creates incredible closure.
It’s a long journey, but it’s worth it. Usually.
One woman who came to the workshop was not ready to write.
She refused to do the exercises or write. Which is fine. I figure whoever attends is an adult. They’re free to join as they wish, write as they wish. Each person tells me their goals, and I’ll support them and guide accordingly, but if someone chooses not to take part? So be it.
Then the negative comments began.
Then the distractions like watching videos of dogs in costumes. She stopped the workshop to show others, giggling loudly.
She got visibly annoyed and signed deeply when I was talking. Sometimes, she just walked out.
She interrupted me. She criticized my parenting. She’d enter rooms when I was the only one there and refuse to say a word to me.
At first, I thought I misunderstood. Sometimes people need quiet time. Sometimes people disagree, but no big deal, although I didn’t understand the hostility that went the disagreement.
Finally, her upset became clear when she blocked me all over social media. Not all at once, but one platform a week for weeks after the workshop. She’d tag me and when I went to see what she’d written, I found out I’d been blocked.
There’s a very fine line between someone who is engaged in the hard work of facing the things that have hurt them most in life and someone who is ready to write about it. It’s easy to mistake one for the other.
I didn’t realize what was happening with this particular women until after the workshop, and once I realized, she’d already cut off all contact. I decided not to pursue it further, because she’d made it so clear she wanted nothing to do with me and this is not therapy. It’s writing.
The last thing I saw on Facebook before she blocked me was a crowdsourced question asking for therapy recommendations. I think this makes sense, but ultimately it’s her decision. I wish her the best.
If you’re not ready to write, I won’t force it.
How do you know when you’re ready to write?
Keeping in mind the following is not an exhaustive list. It’s a guideline based on observations over years of working with writers. Ultimately, your instinct and any work you may do in therapy will offer more answers.
- People who are ready to write, learn to move through intense emotions.
- They pinpoint their feelings and ask for help.
- They take responsibility for their thoughts and actions.
- They’re aware when they avoid writing. They recognize they’re in pain when thinking about the past.
- They move forward on their work nonetheless.
- They find relief in writing through the pain and finding their way to a conclusion, even if the written conclusion isn’t closure in real life.
- They can look back and see more than one side. You have to be able to do this in order to flesh out your characters. Even if you write about people who did horrible things in your life, you cannot write about them as a character in your memoir without considering their point of view to some extent. Otherwise, you end up with unbelievable writ ing.
- They engage in self-care. Sometimes therapy. Sometimes it’s taking a break. Sometimes it’s knowing how to get help.
There is no shame or other value judgment in not being ready to write. One day, if you want to write your story, you will be ready.
There is also no negative in taking a break in the middle of your writing to take care of yourself. One client, a woman I’ve been working with for years, has been writing about severe trauma. When she tells me she needs a break, she is always so apologetic as if she’s letting me down. I assure her there is no disappointment in creating space and taking care of yourself. It’s important and necessary.
I’ve also noticed in three years of writing her memoir, she always returns to her book after a break. She is determined to finish. She is incredibly brave.
No one can tell her or you when to write. No one but you determines when you’re ready. You’ll know when it’s time.
How-to write when you’re not ready
Writing is a practice, and as such, keep writing even if you’re not telling your story. You can brainstorm or write out character sketches. You can keep a gratitude journal or pitch articles to magazines. You can write your morning pages as suggested in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Or be inspired to create something with Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist. Or get over your writer’s resistance with Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.
Write something every day. It doesn’t matter how much or what you write. Write every day, and on the day you’re ready to begin sharing your story, you’ll have the experience and knowledge and practice to tell your truth as it needs to be told.
