Prior to this journal-drought, I filled journals prolifically over the course of a year and a half, starting in September of '07, and filling up five and a half journals before this sudden, jarring stop.
Prior to this prolific-journal-period, I didn't journal. I stopped altogether. I was in an MFA program at Hamline University and yet I wasn't writing for myself. In the first nine months of 2007 there are only two entries. The first, written in January, a list of events along with corresponding months of every adventure, trip, or holiday that occurred since June of 2004, the date of the next most recent journal entry. The second, written in August I guess, though there is no date, is a three-page entry. On the top of the third page are the words "Can I love Shawn Again?" on the second, at the top of the page are the words "Does Love Exist?" and on the first page of the entry, there are no words. There is only a drawing, a collection of images representing the terrible personal crisis I found myself facing. I did not even have words to articulate my problems. I had only a few scribbled shapes, lines, questions marks, and, as I look closer at the image, I see there is one word. Trust. Crossed out so I missed it the first time.
It is significant to me to realize that after being married for a year and a half to my husband whom I had been with for four years prior to the wedding in December of 2002, I suddenly stopped journaling. We separated in August of 2007. Just before the flood of introspection began and I returned to journaling.
Mark Doty writes his memoir Heaven's Coast miraculously in the midst of and on the heels of loss. His partner ebbs out of life due to the increasing waves of illness that come crashing onto him from AIDS and Mark, somehow, picks up pen, and elegantly, records the journey. This both surprises me and feels natural.
His writing is marked by urgency, honesty, and a wish to preserve, to keep, to hold the twelve-year relationship he shared with his partner Wally. His writing anchors him in the relationship. It keeps Wally close.
In the prologue, Doty writes and rewrites, letting the reader see the rewriting. He says on page six:
If I write about it as if it's already done, that's because so much of it is--W. is less present, each week spends more time asleep, and is less and less capable of involvement in the stuff of mutual life. We're pushed into a different kind of relation.
Then he adds in parentheses:
(Those sentences were true when I wrote them, but this week he's much more alert--still unable to walk but ready to get out of the house, ready to shop for new shoes and
magazines...
This rewriting lets the reader see the progression and recession of the disease, the push and pull of the waves hitting them on the shore. It shows that the act of writing, of depicting, transcribing cannot but capture what is true in a moment, from an angle, and then let go of that image and accept the truth is new again.
For this reason, I find myself wondering why I am venturing out into this terrain of memoir and writing about what is personal. I don't like to do it. I lose all orientation in my personal writing. I lose my tight grasp of the control on the pen. I sense neither whether my writing is effective or of any importance to an outside audience, and for me, a highly critical reader used to grading, editing, revising, selecting, and critiquing, this is like being out in the deep purple water of the sea with no clue what swims below my thrashing legs.
My writing will not do anything but capture a momentary truth. And that only if I am lucky.
Doty likewise resists writing, a situation that manifests physically in back spasms and chronic pain. He writes on 132:
There is so much I don't want to write. I can feel the interior pressure of turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in--out?--if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart's desire, the wreck of love's body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to--I begin to write "dredge up" but it isn't at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It's that there's all that grief and anger right there and I'd rather not feel it than look at it directly...
I can relate to this feeling. As I began to write last fall, in October of 2008, about the sexual addiction that started filling up my marriage, eventually drowning it altogether in February 2008, I noticed that my fingers ached. My back ached. My eyes hurt. Writing, an even usually that fills me with optimistic creative energy, instead drove me to my bed. I would write for 45 minutes and then sleep for two hours. The keys pounding me back to that place of grief I was working so hard to ignore.
Why did I continue to write about my grief? About my failed marriage ( a term that leads me to plot many more essays in my head even as I type it)? What compelled me to the writing when it felt so painful?
Doty, too, confronts the push-pull, suck-spew power of writing. His writing, an elegy for his partner, his love, I imagine, compelled him because he wanted to preserve his lover, make an altar of their love. This does not mean it wasn't filled with the weight of pain. He writes on pae 205:
To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of survivng, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I'd write when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow-moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.
I am struck by the way he says writing was a way of surviving. In that sense, I feel like it is survival that draws me most to the field of memoir writing. A woman in one of my classes, after hearing yet another piece about my divorce, said to me, "You know, I've been thinking about your writing." I perked up immediately ready for some praise to assuage the anxiety I have about writing the personal. "It must be really good that you're doing it. Sort of like therapy, right?"
Writing as therapy. Definitely, at times. In my journal, when I finally came back to images, to lines, to question marks, and finally words, writing, I believe, saved my life. It was my life-preserver, the rope pulling me out of a sea of depression, a sea I fully believe might have swallowed me forever.
But what I am doing now is not that kind of writing. The comment stung. Especially as a critical thinker about writing, especially as someone who knows the tediousness of a particular type of narrative. I am not writing to soothe only myself. I am writing for an audience, though I don't know why. It is not meant to be therapy. It is not meant to be an account of the way in which I was wronged (far from it). It isn't really meant to be anything other than shared. I know I am writing for an audience, but only because I am compelled to. Only because I can't do anything else.
Again, I don't want to write about this subject, this, the most personal subject of my life. Writing about the pain of living with a sex addict, of seeing him choose pornography over me (a situation I now realize was not about me to him, but the pain of witnessing it definitely is what it felt like to me, not to mention the pain of realizing the choice wasn't even about me for him, that I was secondary, always, to his addiction) feels like returning to sea on the life preserver after making it safely to shore the first time. I know that I am safe, but I do not want to go back to the storm. Bad things happen out there.
Doty writes bravely in the face of death. He writes though it nearly kills him. As he writes about his final days with Wally, the foot-rubbing, the brief smiles, the simple "I love you, babe" he hears from Wally one last time, he asks, "How can this be written? Shouldn't these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in the hurricane?" (259). (Incidentally the tears are running now, down my cheeks.)
After Wally dies, Doty stops writing for a month. He stops.
Grief takes over.
So what I think is this:
We write when we are supposed to, when to do otherwise would mean destruction, when we know we need to; and when the writing would break us open, when we are not ready for the current world to drown, we stop. We wait. We gather our strength.
Then, when we are ready, we pour our story out into the world to swim with all the rest.
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