Dear As Long As I Live: As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself
Lit Salon addresses the perennial challenge of writing about family (with help from Bessel van der Kolk, Ariel Gore, Laura Davis, Joy Castro, Andre Dubus III, James Pennebaker, Laurie Hertzel & more)
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Quick quick! Before I jump into this week’s Lit Salon, we still have a few sliding-fee slots available on Denise Robbins’s gorgeous climate-writing class. And although the class explores climate writing through the lens of fiction, I believe these techniques are urgent and relevant across all genres. Here’s what Denise wrote in her recent essay on climate writing:"How to write climate fiction without being a doomer":
Things are getting weird. Climate change is unpredictable. There are limits to what we’ll ever be able to understand. “Slipstream” or “new weird” fiction can serve to highlight this unknowingness, delighting in the relentless weirdness of the world.
What is “slipstream”? Typically, this is fiction that borrows elements from sci-fi and fantasy while sitting firmly in a common-day setting. But the real definition is more about a vibe than any particular element. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel wrote in their introduction to a slipstream anthology that this type of fiction “raises fundamental epistemological and ontological questions about reality that most other kinds of fiction are ill-prepared to address.’” Slipstream makes the “familiar strange or the strange unfamiliar.”
Please reach out if you are interested in claiming a spot in this beautiful offering at a tuition you can afford.
Speaking of climate. It's raining here on Seagull Lake, drumming steadily on the logs and slicking the poplar leaves toward an unreal shade of green. Last night, Jupiter was so bright that we could see a streak of luminous red reflecting on the surface of the dark lake. The Milky Way, meanwhile, looked like a cloudy rainbow arcing above, a streak of black through its middle. The low temperature was in the 40s overnight, but, still, we slept happily and oh-so-cozily in our huge canvas tent, buried under clouds of blankets. No sounds other than the lapping of the water, the stirring of the poplars, and, once, in the middle of the night, the coyotes, eerie and beautiful.
I love the way I sleep here. It’s different and much deeper than any other sleep anywhere else, ever. It’s like being far, far away on a peaceful ship on a dark, calm sea. It’s like being … asleep, I think, except that many of us in modern life don’t sleep this way anymore. I feel it on a cellular level in the morning. I think it’s called healing.
And it’s one of the reasons I was excited (and determined) to make the trek here after a particularly emotional few weeks, culminating with the re-publication of my essay, “What My Father Knew,” and the rather backbreaking experience of moving Billie and Z into their new house (almost done; they’ll be sleeping there before the end of September!).
So many of you have reached out to me this week about my essay, “What My Father Knew,” as well as the follow-up essay, “The Cost.” Many of you have also reached out to me about the backstory of those two essays, including my letter to my half-sister’s wealthy boyfriend who, without evidence, asserted that I made false claims about my father. Your words of support have lifted me up (and continue to do so!) and amplified the already immeasurable medicinal impact I have experienced simply through the admittedly arduous yet profoundly beneficial work of telling my story. As Ariel Gore has said, “I honestly believe that telling the truth about our lives is a generous thing to do. It changes the world. Even if that change is subtle, it matters.” I have more to say about that, and more from Ariel, later in this post, as I attempt to answer a Lit Salon query that came in through the comments on last week’s Essay in 12 Steps post. “As Long As I Live” wants to know my thoughts on writing about family and how I deal with the anxiety over my writing potentially hurting them.
Obviously, this is a timely question for me, to say the least, and the first thing I did in response to As Long As I Live was to send a link to this conversation, Family Matters: The Ethics, Rewards, and Challenges of Writing About Family, which I had with Laura Davis (The Courage to Heal, The Burning Light of Two Stars) last year via The Writer’s Center.
Of course, I’ve written a lot and lived a lot since that conversation with Laura. I have suffered additional costs and consequences for my writing since then, and the emotional toll has been steep. And yet I press on.
Why?
Because, as Bessel van der Kolk says, “As long as I keep secrets and suppress information, I am fundamentally at war with myself.” Van der Kolk also says:
We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.
And for me, nothing, not one single thing, has been more transformative, healing, and empowering than creating narrative from my past. Of course, we are all different and must navigate these choppy waters in ways that are safe for us and that reflect our values and the feelings we have for our relationships. That said, the healing effects of writing are well documented. One of my favorite researchers in this area is James Pennebaker of Unversity of Texas at Austin. In a recent issue of Harvard Business Review, Deborah Siegel-Acevedo touches on Pennebaker’s work:
These effects of writing as a tool for healing are well documented. James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, studied the impact of a certain kind of writing on mental health in 1986. Since then, over 200 research studies have reported that “emotional writing” can improve people’s physical and emotional health. In classic studies, subjects who wrote about personal upheavals for 15 minutes a day over three or four days visited doctors for health concerns less frequently and reported greater psychological well-being. According to a 2019 study, a six-week writing intervention increases resilience, and decreases depressive symptoms, perceived stress, and rumination among those reporting trauma in the past year. Thirty-five percent of the participants who began the program with indicators of likely clinical depression ended the program no longer meeting this criterion.
Nonetheless, the fact a creative writing practice might help us heal does not address the question of our writing’s impact on those we write about. And I cannot, of course, do that giant question justice in one post.
But I can share from my heart.
Lit Salon
Dear As Long As I Live: As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself
Dear Jeannine,
I welcome this Essay in 12 Steps challenge. Somehow, I feel that I needed it. At the same time, I know how easy it is for me to be swept away in nostalgia. Or maybe it's not even nostalgia. It's the ocean of things that have passed and will never come back.
The previous assignment felt a bit different for me, felt more like a challenge than the previous ones. Maybe it's because it was no longer just about playing with shimmers and shards (although maybe you would say it's still playing, it's always playing). It's about sitting down, calming down, and writing.
But there's something else that lingers on my mind. As I've explored different subjective strands, what has come to the surface over and over again is my relationship with my parents. That’s no surprise. But now I'm struggling a bit with the fact that I may expose things that my family (meaning parents but also extended family) may find disturbing or simply too intimate to make public. I don't exactly know how to deal with this. I don't want to upset anybody by making it seem as if I intended to expose something unpleasant about them. At the same time, I cannot ignore that these are the things bubbling up each time I take the time to be with myself.
I am not writing about physical abuse or something in that category. However, for me, the things I write about will stay with me as long as I live. They hurt and continue to do so.
I would love to know what you think about such a situation. I know that you've been through this a lot.
Thanks so much!
Signed,
As Long As I Live
Dear As Long As I Live,
It may surprise you to know, given the things I write about in essays like “What My Father Knew” and “The Cost,” that I’ve consciously omitted significant people and events from my writing in the name of preserving relationships and protecting people’s feelings. But there are certain things I simply must write about. Things I must write to live as a whole human being.
And I like that Bessel van der Kolk quote in its entirety—not just the bit I excerpted for the title of this post, but also this bit: “The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
What does that really mean, to “allow ourselves to know what we know?” I don’t suppose I can say what it means for you, or for anyone else, but I know what it means for me: it means to allow those “oceans of things that have passed and will never come back” to rise up and meet me, to let them gently and sometimes fiercely swallow me, so that I can reconstruct them with words, one careful syllable at a time, and, in so doing, claim, in the present tense, an agency I never had in the moment.
This way of writing, this process of immersion, can be difficult and even at times dangerous, and I have written about ways to stay safer while “diving into the wreck,” as Adrienne Rich puts it in her incredible poem by that name, from which I excerpt below:
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
But despite, or perhaps and most likely because of he challenges and pain of this writing, it has been for me the truest path to “allowing myself to know what I know.” And that knowing has been more instrumental to my well-being than any other aspect of the writing, including publication.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that writing and publishing are not the same thing, and you can and very much should make it a conscious practice to