Monkey in Mid-Pacific

Posted on February 19, 2009 in ADD Originality & Creativity Therapy Writing/Darkness

I’m working through things here, as always.

The best part of writing for me has always been the revision, the changing of sentences, the putting of words into new spots and choosing what really said that I wanted to say. In mania, I could do this quickly and the task could draw me out of a depression.

Quite separate from this was the task of developing the ideas. As a high school student, I could pull it all together only once in a while which is why I often earned only a B average until late in my high school career when I had a steady streak of stability ending in hypomania. I was in English AP, so I was not seen as stupid. One of my teachers, at least, seemed to understand the cyclical nature of my abilities and gave me leeway. There were times when faced with a topic that I couldn’t pull it together. I waved my hands in the air, trying to slap from a line of Dylan Thomas the deep meaning that I knew to be in there. I didn’t love Dylan Thomas much, though some of his poems such as “Do not go gently” spoke to me. I felt the nighness of a good night and I raged against it whenever I felt I was beginning to slip. But my efforts were futile, the splashing about of a monkey who cannot swim in the middle of the Pacific. I could never rage hard enough when these episodes came over me and they still catch me now and then.

The difference is that I don’t panic when they occur: I float.

* * * * *

It’s hard for me to write much when I have the wrong kind of therapist, the one who thinks that writing is nothing more than a tool for therapy, who tells you that it doesn’t have to be good or detailed, just “done”. The ants in [amazonify]0441003834::text::::The Once and Future King[/amazonify] divided the world into done and not done. In that pismire language, the kind of writing I could forsee was always “not done”, not worth doing because it wasn’t a journal anymore but a repetitive task of therapeutics.

Inviting my therapist to look over my shoulder, to inspect my work stifled the essence. I never felt that I could bring my work in to Lorraine, never wanted to because she had this way of questioning assumptions and getting on me in her emotional correctness. You find in writing not so much by answering questions as you do by blundering around and looking at the thing from many different angles.

I felt I couldn’t kvetch, I couldn’t swing that kvetching to clever heights of ridicule if the moment seized me. I always dreaded writing the truth in my journals lest they be discovered, read aloud, discussed, and mocked. My private world was meant to be private and I hated those people who, instead of championing that right, said “You just have to be careful what you write.” A journal, I hold, is a private place and no one has the right to go there uninvited until after you die.

This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]