Writing? A Mental Condition?
By Erika Hoffman
Writing—this desire to communicate one’s insights to strangers—borders on a mental condition. Only by words do they know you. A reader tries on your thoughts to test if they fit. The reader’s imagination hems the words, sometimes altering their meanings, to adjust the story to their world of perception.
Thousands of invisible Emily Dickinsons exist. Like her, they nightly roll their poem-pearls up and tie them in scrolls with blue ribbons and tuck them away in an ancient bureau for happenstance to discover someday-metaphorically speaking. Or maybe in this Age of the Internet, these souls spill their secrets, unloading them prematurely on a “cyber chest” to millions instead of buffing those stones, making them parables with meaning. Anonymous scribes blog, using the web as a confessional dump but never publish to be paid. Or they tweet!
The obsessed author is the shoe-in-the-door salesman pounding on every portal searching a customer willing to ogle his wares. Me, I don’t paint pictures on a cave’s wall and wish that someday boys playing will discover them and proclaim: “This caveman or cave dweller had a narrative to tell. Who’d have thunk it?” Too many objects d’art remain lost to the world because their creators didn’t seek an audience. Persist. Lincoln once wrote: “The world will little remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Au contraire. It’s the phrases, the elegant ones that remain and remind future generations of historic sacrifice. Without the words, one forgets the heroics. Amazing sentences are signposts to the deeds of history. Let your thoughts be fruitful and multiply. Shout them from the rooftops! What if Moses hadn’t revealed what was writ on God’s tablets?
It’s a dilemma for a writer, having an obsession which makes her feel, tell, reveal, and yet not want to proclaim, market, publicize. No writer wants to emulate Hester Prynne and mount the scaffold and stand there with her baby (her opus) for all to snicker about: So that’s what she’s been doing in her discretionary time, the gossips tweet. Yet, the truths revealed in a finely crafted story shouldn’t be kept under lock and key in one’s private art collection or overflowing drawer. The persistence to declare one’s own universal truths must take precedence over one’s reluctance to let the world stare at one’s obsessive-compulsive ritual of writing out one’s life. If you’re modest, fearful, or shy, find a pseudonym. Admiral Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Let us writers rephrase the sailor’s edict: Damn the rejections, damn the critics, damn the self-doubting, full speed ahead! Use a stealthy pen name, then, and dodge under the radar of the flame throwers.
Why? Why write? Well, I read an email posted to a group of writers where the newbie fretted about telling of her bouts with mental illness and divulging too much of her diagnosis. Many in this writerly group advised her not to give up when an editor told her to avoid spelling out what exactly she suffered from. The consensus was to continue to pen about mental illness, using a fake name if she feared repercussions or a stigma associated with her byline. She feared becoming labelled as the gal who copes with “such and such.”
Yet, many classics have been scribed by folks who have dealt with overwhelming mental issues. Instinctively, you can rattle off the names: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolfe, Hans Christian Anderson. If you add to these authors the names of musical composers, artists, actors, dancers, and other creative types, one may wonder if any person who taps into his imagination isn’t destined to be more afflicted than the regular Joe who grows up to be a plumber, a business manager, an accountant, or a salesman.
Perhaps sensitive souls are more attuned to the world around them to observe, feel, and record what they see and maybe feel more intensely than the usual Tom, Dick, or Karen? Yet, is that true? I think artistic types can suffer from anxiety, neuroses, phobias, and dreaded psychoses, but so can folks who follow more mundane vocations where their names only appear in the dated yellow pages or discarded phone books; they have no bylines and their moniker doesn’t decorate the spine of any novel.
In ways, I understand why therapists tell folks to write down their stories. Sometimes, one doesn’t know how one feels until it’s put down in black letters on white paper. Then, you read it back to yourself and exclaim, “Aha, that is what I think, after all.” Things gel when you give voice to them on paper more than they do when you orally converse. If you are prone to daydreaming, then you may be adept at creating a new world or taking an old one and giving it a fresh twist by composing fiction. After indulging in reverie instead of repeating your ruminations to someone, write them down in a story, a poem, or …a tome.
To me, writing is a type of mental condition. It’s like yoga, meditation, or prayer. You still yourself to understand, for a little while, what you’re thinking about your life or the lives of others or the world’s life. It’s an exercise in uncomplicating life. Writing is therapeutic. It’s a means of putting things in perspective while creating something— maybe of beauty, maybe memorable, and, at the least, something that builds your confidence and perhaps makes a connection for you with the world now or the world’s offspring of the future.
Yes, writing is a mental condition. It’s something that fulfills one. If exercise is good for one’s body, health, and mind then writing is good for one’s intellect, equanimity, and personality. Personality? Yes. Definitely. Writers always have stories to tell so long as they don’t tell everything. Create a bit of mystery. Or if that is not in your wheelhouse, give them an insight they’ll remember like quoting Warren Buffet: “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.” Like getting your body toned at a gym takes time, writing takes time. No one wants a flabby body; ergo one seeks to condition it. Even if you never sell your writing or see it published anywhere, your brain has benefitted from your scribbling conditioning. Your personality, too.