I waffled about this post. Writing it. Sharing it. But here’s the thing…I committed writing this blog to address the process of my own writing practice.
Working through (pushing through) during points of resistance is very much a part of the process. And writing about it here helps me to “see” it and understand it better…and, I guess, work with it.
Pushing through resistance is part of the medium.
Recent (i.e., used in the last couple of weeks) strategies that (intentionally? unconsciously? yes) slow or detract from writing towards the long project book-length work underway:
- Veering off into researching (just this week it has been: where/when the belief about photographs stealing souls came from; oxytocin (attachment hormone) and its relation with social emotional functioning; long term impacts and consequences of men who experience trauma witnessing their partners giving birth (the heart of what I’m avoiding writing about); liberation psychology and its founder, Ignacio Martín-Baró)[1].
- Reworking a very small piece of writing (<250 words) for submission to River Teeth Journal, specifically their submission window for Beautiful Things.[2]
- Participating in a focus group, as well as being part of a panel to talk about starting creative writing sessions in public libraries with the Writer’s Collective of Canada[3].
- Attending physio appointments to help heal my left wrist (stupid injury: scooting fast across Princess Street, carrying two bags of groceries, I tripped the lip of the sidewalk and came down with all my weight onto my left wrist and right elbow…strawberries went flying…eight people lunged to try to catch me but I was too fast for them…gawd it was embarrassing. And I haven’t injured myself in years!). Bonus: the physio guy is a very beautiful man; I’m mesmerised watching his fingers manipulate my forearm while he regales me with epics about he and his wife travelling in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Egypt[4].
- Signing up for a couple of local creative writing workshops[5].
- Writing this blog post during time “reserved” for long project writing instead of writing it on a weekend[6].
Huh. That’s a longer list than I thought.
Researching (#1 above) is my default. Yes, I remain curious about so many things …but it’s also a way for me to feel comfortable, hiding behind the metaphorical wall of academic knowledge (and its seductive illusion of authority). [Deleted: paragraphs of run on writing trying to escape having to lay out the next sentences here.] One (the main? I have no idea) thrust of my book-length work is to illuminate, as authentically as I am able, using a fictionalised approach, my own experience of how the birth of our first child impacted sexual intimacy between my then-husband and I.
The emotional vortex associated with this forces me to be blunt and factual. Lillian’s birth, 25 years ago, was three days of labour, an ambulance ride between two hospitals, the use of high forceps with the physician’s leg up on the mattress/table for leverage, ripping and tearing of my insides and outsides requiring substantial stitching, inside and outside[7]. My husband believed I would die. He thought the baby might die too, but in the moment this was a lesser concern. The pain was so intense, I wished and wanted to die. I probably screamed that out loud. My changing body during pregnancy and the violence of labour and birth impacted my husband’s attraction to me as a woman…read: he was no longer attracted to me. We did not talk about the fact he was no longer attracted to me because we did not know or understand the emotional rupture was caused by the physical one. Trying to have sex with someone who you are no longer attracted to reduces the frequency and quality of sexual intimacies. My husband explained he was not attracted to me because: I had put on too much weight; I gave too much of my attention to raising our children (which, I did); I was no longer the pretty young woman he had fallen in love with. I felt deeply ashamed and…surprise…deeply unattractive (so I flirted, though not outrageously, with other men but never crossed the line into consummating an actual affair…though I fantasised several in my mind during our twenty-five-year marriage). We never spoke about this…it never came up in ten years of marriage counselling because we did not acknowledge—to ourselves—the arresting of sexual intimacy due to the violence of giving birth as “a thing” at the root of so many other issues. An insidious pain.
When I finally had the ability to voice a version of the previous paragraph to my therapist (circa 2020-21?), it came out as a hoarse whisper in a voice that was physically painful to move up and out of my body[8]. It was as if I were hauling out a heavy bowling ball from my stomach, squeezing it up through my esophagus and rolling it past my teeth and out my mouth. A physical pain becoming voiced.
Why is my long project devoted to this? I guess it’s for three reasons. The first is so that I can understand the whole experience, “in the round”, for myself[9]. The second is that this is a subject that is rarely acknowledged or spoken about. In researching, I was interested to discover there are support groups for people having experienced or witnessed a traumatic birth in the UK. There are supports in Canada now too, though they cost money. For me, the difficult birth was only the beginning of pains to come. The third reason I’m writing this is because I can’t seem to write anything else without related themes and pains bubbling up and out of me to the page. Read: I need to write this to get it out of the way so I can write other things I’m also interested in. Or maybe to be able to tell the same story better, more eloquently, more elegantly, with beauty. I don’t know. At present it’s expressed messily …there is no other way I seem to be able to pull it out of me.
A fourth reason: by writing this long form I am learning how to write long form.
Another issue I’m struggling with is trying to portray Fanboy (the protagonist’s husband in the story) in a balanced way. I don’t want him to be villainized; I want to present a complex character with qualities that are sensitive and kind. My issue is that, so far, I’ve been unable to write him this way. And when I do write him, he’s coming out worse …more unkind, more insensitive[10]. I think that’s why I wrote the short piece about my father, trying to cram some pill shaped analysis of growing into a compassion for a person who, in real life, has been very broken by the effects of war and revolution and immigration and racism.
Working with my therapist (man, she’s come up a lot in this post…I’m very fortunate to be working with her) we have managed to narrow down my experiences of anxiety to a distinct presentation pattern: it kicks off when I’m trying to voice my own thoughts or opinions about something that is deeply meaningful to me, in public.
So.
Here we are at the root reasons for my resistance. Unpacked, dancing around so nakedly here in the mirror, my writing reticence shows itself as A COMPLETELY HUMAN ANIMAL REACTION to working with difficult emotional material. I wish I could write it better. I wish I could write it beautifully. I wish I could write it straight.
Suzanne: give yourself some grace.
I’m writing it.
Thank you for reading; it keeps me writing. Really.
[1] Reading this list, I realise how much pressure I’m putting on myself to try to integrate some of these learnings ….which is in complete opposition to the flow necessary for loose creative writing that will offer up the gifts of creativity. I am driving myself nuts most days just trying to loosen up …not be so tightly wound…let go…
[2] This piece is about my dad and I in a canoe …I’m very young, too little to paddle…the piece pulls in the imagery of the tornado shape and sound made in the water off the tip of a J-stroke and compares that to the emotional storms in my father’s body having been witness to atrocities during the Hungarian revolution…how he wrestled with anger and a hair trigger temper raising his kids …but I wanted the piece to encompass the idea that in sharing those beautiful quiet moments with him in the canoe…they allowed me, as an adult, to understand his anger was born of fear, to allow that as a person, he was complicated. The writing in this short piece failed to capture what I was after …and the writing itself, poetic and cryptic and stuffing images on top of images…I’d reverted back to my (default?) pattern: too much for the reader to take in at once…missing crafting in breathing space/white space for a reader to settle with an image or an idea and feel it. And ha ha …had to admit…how the hell do I remember tracking the whorl off his J-stroke when I would have been sitting in the middle of the canoe and he would have been steering from the back? This means someone else was in the canoe and he was in the front …but I have no idea who that would have been. Piece is shelved for now.
[3] In both of these zoom calls, gathering volunteers from across Canada, I experienced, again, attacks of anxiety …deeply uncomfortable—it feels like a knot of cold in my stomach, coupled with an inability to breathe…wait, no, it’s the feeling of not being able to breathe but the body still continues to breathe, though it labours to do so—also extremely embarrassing as my voice fails to project and I work very hard to get what it is I’m trying to say out of my mouth.
[4] I am starved for touch.
[5] For me, this is a sure sign of …was going to write procrastination but no, that’s not the right word…resistance is the right word. Worse, maybe it’s pining for validation. Ugh. For one of the workshops, the author was a no-show (eye roll). The other one, scheduled for October, is for a full day workshop as part of the Kingston Writer’s Fest. I have a chip on my shoulder about the KWF…it boils down to feeling like an outcast whenever I’ve attended sessions over the years. Obviously, this speaks more to my personal insecurities as opposed to the KWF. If I’m honest, part of the reason I applied is that it’s a competition for one of twelve spots in the workshop and maybe I’m looking to feel and confirm a certain level of outrage when/if my writing (the application required submission of 1000 word fiction example) is declined. I know, this is a very bad reason to sign up for writing workshop. If I get in, I will be an angel and support the other writers who are there, I promise.
[6] I wish I was a person who is not so regimented …I’m tempted to make a joke about being tightly wound (the beautiful physiotherapist called me “special” because my muscles are so tight “they should be written up in a textbook”)…but the deeper truth of it is that I grew up with a lot of unpredictability; adhering to a schedule makes me feel calm and comfortable, conditions necessary for creative work. It also reduces the number of decisions I need to make in a day, and it ensures that I make consistent, small-step efforts toward my creative work. A critical ache in me taunts me to wonder whether adhering to a schedule means I’m a lesser artist. I try to ignore this ache, stupid for so many reasons. This too requires energy.
[7] I healed completely. Physically.
[8] Writing this paragraph was also physically challenging: thumping heart, tears, difficulty breathing, cold in the stomach, shaking. It took an hour. More. I have, in recent years, spoken to friends about the experience and I have discussed it openly with Lillian and Willa, my two daughters, too.
[9] Yes, writing it is a form of therapy. I rarely articulate what I’m specifically writing about with other people, instead I describe the writing as exploring the dissolution (disillusion?) of a marriage nested in my family’s stories. A fictionalised version. Many people will quip: So, it’s a form of therapy. And this feels…minimizing…I receive it a s a sort of criticism…that what I am writing is definitely not literary and definitely not interesting to the majority of readers…it’s simply navel gazing. It stings because there is truth in it: I am navel gazing …my head so far up my own ass, I’m looking at you from the inside-out, from the gut punched belly buttoned knot of my bruised insides.
[10] Having a lot of cognitive dissonance over this. Is it because I’m angry at my husband IRL? Am I? Not really. Is it because I don’t know what kindness might look like? That can’t be right. Is it because I don’t have enough distance? Is it because I’m unskilled rendering character into words? Do I lack imagination? The questions spiral dark and deep to pierce the pain at its hot point: I’m infuriated…fucking outraged (!) at myself for staying in such a situation and being so fucking innocent and so stupid and not having the fucking balls to question it sooner. [I talk a lot about this with my therapist; she reminds me I did not have the knowledge then that I have now and that I chose to stay in the relationship to be able to raise my children in a stable environment. Yes. I know these things; I remain livid with myself. She says: give yourself some grace.]
Process Peace 