Self As Subject

“You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneously with yours… what you are in an expression of history”. ~Robert Penn Warren, World Enough and Time

“I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.” ~Frida Kahlo

“A little magic can take you a long way.” ~Roald Dahl

Why use the self as the starting point: Aren’t we all obsessed with ourselves enough already?

For those of us who started writing as little children, we often didn’t write about ourselves. Instead, filled with imagination, we dreamt of living in places like Cloud City in Star Wars and of shooting rainbows out of our bodies like a Care Bear or even of monsters whose glowering eyes made us shudder at what worse thing we couldn’t see. Our stories and poems reflected the unfettered and dramatic possibilities within the mind. Our little brains were wired to imagine and creating stories plays a beneficial role helping us learn new skills. Dr. Sandra Russ, a creativity and play expert has explored how making things up involves symbolism, organization, cognitive integration of seemingly separate content, and divergent thinking (the ability to come up with many different ideas, story themes, and symbols). The same skills that make for good writing at any age. Pretending, however we do it, helps us integrate our emotional and cognitive experiences.

Then something always changes. It must.

Often, as we get older, confusion at how we arrived at someplace we don’t like changes the nature of our writing. Yes, our brain wiring has changed, but instinctively, we know that writing may allow us to place disparate pieces into something of a cohesive whole. When I look back at what I wrote in high school, it was an attempt to know the person I was becoming and to make the sadness I felt beautiful. This practice turned into a necessity when my health began to fail me in my late teens and none of it made any sense at all.

The self-writing I did during the most challenging points in my life helped me to understand what was happening and who I was becoming. Equally important to me was I still had the ability to make something that felt sad, lonely and terrible still beautiful. If I was able to use my imagination to write about my hardest times, it felt magical.

Building the ecology of our lives through writing

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word--all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities--it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true.”     ~ Bessel Van Der Kolk

Writing about our life allows us not to have to worry about the “knowing” element so we can begin building something out of it. We know our own experiences. So why don’t we do it more often. Many things can stop us in our tracks when it comes to a self-narrative: judgment, anxiety about being able to remember or remembering more than feels comfortable. We also probably wonder what someone else might think if us. To feel those things but to work through them, techniques like playing, making visual art or meditation before we begin writing allows us to become porous and relaxed, which is what allows us to access that knowledge. Fear of not knowing where to begin can cause us to be cut off from what we already know and put us into a bizarre amnesia type of state around certain memories or thoughts.

It may also bring up fears around how to write about things we cannot possibly remember because we didn’t form memories in the first place, whether we were too young or because we didn’t get enough REM sleep, which is critical for our memory consolidation. Instead of seeing this as a lack, not having formed memories around something allows us an entrance into creativity. Something happened and you know what the outcome was, there is a framework that exist that may be helpful to fill in, like colors in a coloring book.

If we don’t know we can find out by asking others some details about what they remember and then place those pieces together artfully, or we can simply use our imagination and use it to piece together memories in a way that is new.

Inquiry into our past often raises more questions than it answers. But those questions stretch a rich empty canvas before our eyes and we are left to paint personal history with broad strokes of what we think we remember combined with who we’ve become. As challenging as it is to get back into the headspace we were at working on a piece of writing we started a couple of days ago, it’s even more challenging to look back 20 years ago even while acknowledging these many selves who write a story have a better depth of knowledge together. Our inquiries certainly also don’t only include us, but include the people and living being around us, part of what Bessel Van Der Kolk, the author of the notable book on how trauma lives in the body The Body Keeps the Score, refers to as the ecology of our lives.

Some things to try to build that ecology of our lives that may help tap into the power of imagination – because writing begins in our bodies. It’s a solid way to start and we have to start and keep going if we want to build a sustainable writing practice:

·       Meditation helps calm the anxious mind: Per a study referenced on Healthline, “A meta-analysis including nearly 1,300 adults found that meditation may decrease anxiety. Notably, this effect was strongest in those with the highest levels of anxiety. Even taking a minute to close your eyes and release thought can be beneficial over time.

·       Going for a 20 minute walk in nature helps stimulate the senses, which can be good for tapping into them for writing. Some intriguing research suggests that going outside my also support our ever-changing microbiome “evidence is emerging for other non-visual pathways for nature experiences to be effective. These include ingestion or inhalation of phytoncides, negative air ions and microbes.”

·       After you get done with that walk do something simple that puts you back into your body, like rubbing your feet for a minute or so. The nerve sensors in our fingers light up. By taking a moment to do something beneficial for your body, you are in the space of remembering that your body has needs to. This small act can result in unexpected inspiration as we calm into a more harmonious state.

·       Don’t underestimate the epigenome. Our bodies have the ability to turn on and off genes in a way that can rapidly change things on a microscopic scale. What small choice can you experiment with try for a couple of weeks to see what happens. Maybe you want to see what your life is like without alcohol for a temporary time. Recording your results for five minutes a day may lead to something surprising.

·       Finally, we all have a hurt child inside us. What child have you met that doesn’t respond to a little fun? For me, a little time with some colored pencils and a blank sheet of paper goes a long way. Don’t try and make art; instead, feel the pencil as it brushes against the paper, leaving its waxy pigment as an imprint. I have made colored clouds over and over and over again. Do something that is fun, and also not on a screen.

What do you know that you don’t know you know – yet? 

There is no one on Earth that knows you better than you. You alone have been witness to all of your life experiences, whether you remember every last detail or not. You are an expression of history. One that does not get filled in without your penmanship. If it feels strange to be writing about yourself, it is. However, if you move past that strangeness, you can use your own life as a starting point for something vastly different from or larger than yourself. You can use the experience of being pregnant to discuss women’s rights or the health care system. Writing using your experiences can be the development of your distinct voice – one that can be used both on and off the page.

“You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly to lose them to time, to oblivion.”    ~Sigrid Nunez

Self-writing also helps us to process our experiences and move on, allowing them to be released from the conscious mind to someplace else means altering them in some way. When you write about your experiences, you relive them and they change and become something else in your memory. Is this a good thing? What happens when you remember a good memory? The potential for changing the memory is available. We all have something we feel was lost or perhaps stolen from us. How painful it is to remember. And yet it is perhaps the very act of remembering that allows this strange new thing to grow. The seed might be referred to as “perspective,” but to paraphrase poet Ed Bok Lee we meet ourselves again and again and again in this life. It can be a measurement of how much you changed to be able to transform a painful memory into art.

You don’t have to begin at the beginning

Arguably, to get back to the place where we unearth those wonderfully imaginative places within ourselves, we first have to get back to ourselves. We must push against the continual wave of noisy obligations (perceived and real) and social media by learning to quiet ourselves and then stay in that quiet place long enough to allow beautiful things to surface. From writing about the summer after second grade we can merge into describing how one afternoon all the neighborhood kids found themselves around a small injured bird and nursed that bird back to health, until the story becomes only about community using the bird as a symbol.

Simply sitting down with a pen, some paper and an idea creates entrance.

Larger ways to begin:

·       Things large enough for worldwide news coverage, such as 9/11, often make our senses so heightened we remember them in unique ways. What were you doing that day?

·       Looking for your “before” and “after” moment – something that affected you enough to change you as a person or perhaps how other people see you. Things like a divorce or an unexpected death. What about you changed?

·       Health crisis. The crisis can be our own or someone close to us. What are some things that come to the surface from that time?

Smaller ways to begin:

·       Write a small history of why your favorite is your favorite.

·       What are some things that happened in the summer of your 13th year?

·       Write about someone who is not in your life anymore but you wish was. This person can be living or dead.

Opening our hearts to ourselves

Starting from the self is an organizing principle. Then we can merge these two selves (or maybe many!) who already live within us, integrating our lived experiences with our wild imaginative dreams. The editing process by which we can transform our personal experiences into something more expansive and relatable through the process of reflection and connection. It’s grounded in empathy – for that of our own experience. We use our life as the starting point to transform what is messy into something that feels sacred – whether or not we decide to share it with others or not.