The Doctor is In

Friday + Dr. S O'D = Writer's Therapy

I occasionally give workshops and seminars in my Brooklyn Heights office on topics of interest to writers. If you would like to be notified about upcoming events, email me at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

I was surprised not to get a letter on this topic, because it has come up in nearly every conversation I’ve had over the past several weeks with clients and friends who are writers.  Although the phrasing varies, the gist is as follows:

“I wish I were a doctor/millionaire/big politician so I could actually do something to make a difference. The world is falling apart, and I sit at the computer in my bathrobe and write stories. What a loser.”

If the speaker is a client, we talk about problems with self-esteem, about the childhood origins of feelings of impotence and despair. These are important issues and are always worthy of exploration. But just for today I would like to take off my therapist hat and share with you what is in my heart.

Books saved my life.

I am not being melodramatic. I had a miserable childhood. This was not necessarily anyone’s fault; I was simply born into a family and a community that didn’t embrace dreamy introverts like me, and where I never felt I belonged. I spent most of my childhood and adolescence feeling lonely, unseen, and wrong. I had a few friends who shared these feelings. For the most part, they slipped into early alcoholism, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy. I read.

I don’t mean merely that books entertained me and served as a safe means of escape while I waited for my childhood to be over and my real life to begin—though they did serve that purpose. They did more, though. They introduced me to the reality of a community that transcended the boundaries of geography, ethnicity, and even time. I made friends, first with Betsy, Tacy, and Tib and the Railway Children; then with the March sisters; and, in my adolescence, Mrs. Ramsay and Isabel Archer. Dostoyevsky articulated the dark ruminations I would never have voiced to a living being; Oscar Wilde made me laugh at the pretensions in my community and my own aspirations. Books were my teachers and guides; they became, in their way, a secular religion, one that has sustained and fed me when the harshness of life for so many has made it hard to embrace more conventional beliefs.

And I know I am not alone. I have spoken with gay men from small, repressed towns who contemplated suicide but instead discovered James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg. Women who are not conventionally attractive have told me about being “saved,” first by Judy Blume, then by Charlotte Brontë. A client from a desperately poor Caribbean family, who had felt like a pariah throughout his youth, educated himself about propriety and social interaction by studying Jane Austen and Judith Martin. (His manners were exquisite.)

It is not an accident that so often an invading army’s first triumphant act is to sack and burn the libraries and museums. A people without access to its art and accumulated wisdom is indeed vanquished. It is significant that dictatorships make a practice of imprisoning dissident poets and novelists. Real artists—people who distill and communicate the truth, often at great personal cost—are the most dangerous figures in a repressive society. And that is why you are needed, desperately, now.

There are other actions to take, and it is important to take them. Volunteer for a political or social organization. Write letters. March. Enlist your writer friends to organize a cross-cultural benefit reading, as Leora Skolkin-Smith is doing this September.

But don’t stop writing. And never, ever qualify what you do with the words “only,” “just,” or “merely.” Not even in your own head.

Please. Lives may depend on it.

Susan O’Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Comments

[Leora Skolkin Smith]

Sue, I'm going to frame this. You have written so poignantly and powerfully what I feel, too. In these weeks of vividly witnessing the bloody battlefields of the Middle East through the media, of reading and hearing the polemical and self-righteous politics of both sides, and of resisting those claims which purport to explain or justify that which is incomprehensible and unjustifiable (because war itself is so), I kept wondering why all I wanted to do was read literature again. Shut down, turn off the tv, stop reading the papers,I mean. In many ways, only literature and art can de-politicize and thereby dissect and expose the anatomy of this heartless beast we call "war". Literature gives us back real, human people walking and behaving in an imaginary world more truthful than the one we see and feel and hear on the news. And more healing than the absolutes and rigid "positions" we read about in the endless commentaries about the war. It frees us from the trap of being hollowed out of empathy for the "Other",I think, and from mistaking our own opinions for certainties, closing down our minds.

I especially was re-reading Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night".
So much now to read. Thank God it's all there from writers before us.

Bless you for reminding us.

[T]

Beautiful, Dr. Sue, and a potent reminder that the making of art isn't something that should hide at the back of the room during difficult times--it should claim its rightful place in front.

[Kate Maloy]

Thank you, Sue. I know I'm not the only one who needed your words this morning.

[The Zero Boss]

Awesome piece. Thank you for this.

Your advice about not qualifying what you do is excellent. As a writer, I'm always amazed at who I reach with my words - and what pieces reach them. You never know whose life you're touching when you publish.

[katharine weber]

Thank you Sue, for this marvelous column. I would only add that just as writers should stop calling themselves ineffective losers, they should also stop calling their early drafts "garbage." Be willing to love your work! Respect it for the intentions that drive you to the page every day. Even when it's not finished. (That doesn't mean have no standards or settle for second-rate work.)

[Karla]

Thank you so much for this post, Dr. Sue...thank you, thank you, thank you. It's so timely and so pertinent to what's going on in my life right now, I can't even begin to tell you. But I'll try.

Immediately after college, I did the MFA thing at a major university. Since graduating six years ago, I've been trying to recover from it. It's still immensely difficult for me to not judge my writing as it emerges, or to not crumple it up the second it does. It's not "feminist enough," I tell myself, or "literary enough." I sound like an asshole, or a racist, or a rube. I sound like myself, and that's a terrible thing.

Thank god for blogging. It's helped tremendously to be able to just hold my nose and plunge in, to write without worrying about impressing the famous author who's my workshop leader, to say the hell with the so-called "arc of the story" so many MFA-ers are so hepped up on. I have no idea who, if anyone, is reading my blog, outside of two dear friends of mine who declare themselves rabid fans. Since I still want to become a writer, that part rankles, but it's still a relief to be able to free myself up to make sense of things for the first time in my life.

As Neil Young said, keep on rockin' in the free world.

[Lauri]

What a beautiful tribute to the friendship of books. Thanks so much for the reminder that stories matter.

[Terry Weyna]

To all who write: I'm a lawyer. I'm in a position, many would say, to make a difference. But I don't. I'm just more grease in the wheels of commerce, and no one will ever miss me when I go.

You, on the other hand, you: when I think of making a difference in the world, I think of being you. I spend my days in my office wishing I were you. I spend my days in my office wishing I were reading, reviewing, writing my own stories. I spend my LIFE in my office wishing I could move just one person the way so many of you have moved me, over and over and over, the way you've saved my life when I couldn't bear to bill one more hour, the way you've taken me away from a wretched existence to which I'm chained with golden handcuffs.

I'm doing something to change my present, to make me more like you. Just know that, even though I've met many authors, and I can see that you're really people and that you probably put your pantyhose on one leg at a time just like I do, to me you're still something so marvelous that looking at you is like looking into the face of the sun.

And remember: lawyers aren't usually prone to hyperbole.

[JM]

Thanks for this.

[UYGU]

http://www.hugechoiceof.com/