Mightier than the sword

 

‘How many times have people used a pen or paint brush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?’ Virginia Woolf 

That’s me right now, fingers on a keyboard in place of pen, intent on unloading my troubled mind of all the detritus of my life. Free to write more meaningfully when I can dip into the well of silence that accompanies more imaginative efforts at writing. Later. For now, I’m clearing my head.

Julia Cameron invented ‘morning pages’ a few decades ago but before her there were folks like Dorothea Brand and Marion Milner who urged us as writers to allow ourselves to explore our innermost concerns as an adjunct to our work.  Sometimes my morning page efforts find their way into more serious attempts to communicate with the world. For, trying to get my dog to stop barking seems like an impossible task like wrangling an unwieldy piece of writing into shape. 

My essays begin like this. rambles all over different topics, shooting off to multiple tangents and keen to travel wherever my thoughts take me. I collect snippets short and long, tacking them together in an unruly pile of words and ideas. Then comes the time for pruning and rescaling. To work out what matters and what fits where.  

So much gets culled and fresh ideas added until I have what looks like a rudimentary essay, say on the nature of shame, an emotion dear to my heart as I’ve spent the best part of my writing career these past three decades fleshing it out.

 Shame, as the definition suggests is a whole-body experience of feeling as though you are bad all over. It comes, most often when we are small and vulnerable in our inability to cope with sudden responses, typically on the part of those who have power over us, to render us even smaller than we might have felt in the first place. 

When we write about shameful events, we shift the balance. Invariably when such otherwise hidden experiences, for instance the fact of my teeth neglected in childhood before the arrival of fluoride, left me minus incisors replaced by a partial denture – I can still feel the flush of shame when I put it out there – but it’s nowhere near as bad as when I was a child and walked around holding my hand in front of my mouth whenever I spoke so that people might not notice my yellowing teeth.  

When we write into our shame we relocate the source and shift the burden of responsibility from our shoulders onto those who might be responsible. The sexually abused child recognises it was not her fault. Those thrashed for minor infractions as children begin to recognise the use of corporal punishment is harsh and extreme and need not have applied. Whatever our shame, when we write the stories behind it our shame lifts, if only lightly.