Writing and Healing: Year 2

Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill: A Washington Post article by Charles Barber

[the sixth]

I found this article via a blog by Liz Spikol.  She’s an editor at the Philadelphia Weekly, a woman with bipolar disorder who writes an informative, well-written, and sometimes personal blog about mental health.  Her blog is well worth visiting, but right now I’m taking a closer look at the article by Charles Barber to which she points.

Each article or story poses its own question.  It’s kind of like Jeopardy.  You read the answer and you have to figure out the question.  The question that Barber’s article is answering?  Or some of the questions?  Here’s what I think:
Who gets to speak about healing?
Who gets to be an author when it comes to healing?
And on what is that authority based?

Charles Barber’s primary source of authority?  He’s been there.  His initiation into mental illness occurred when he was a freshman in college and began developing disturbing and intrusive thoughts.  His other primary source of authority?  He found a way through the disturbance, found a way to make a life. Barber is also a journalist, which means he has writing skills, and investigative skills, and experience.  And he’s done years of work with others who are mentally ill. 

And now he’s telling some of his own story.  Describing it as “a winding, agonizing road to stability.”  That’s what interests me about this article—the winding, agonizing road.  It's a story that’s important to put out there.  Over and over again, it’s important to put this kind of story out there.  Because the counter-narrative—the narrative that we frequently see on television—in programming as well as in commercials—the narrative of the quick fix—this can be so incredibly seductive.

Barber begins his article by touching on this counter-narrative.  The television commercial with the man or woman, first in agony, and then taking a pill: transformed.  A new person.   A person “walking in a park, awash in sunshine, surrounded by grandchildren, a golden retriever nipping at their heels, while lush music plays in the background.”  The restitution narrative that Arthur Frank names and writes so well about.

And then Barber shares something of his own very different and much more real story.

Medication was helpful—as was cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly early on—but what ultimately made the difference, what really made me want to get well, was finding a sense of purpose in my new life, a life that had been reconfigured by illness.

The critical moment in my own recovery was my decision—very unpopular at the time—to work full-time in a group home for people with severe developmental disabilities, young men my age who could not talk.

It’s hard not to think here again of Arthur Frank—his third narrative.  The quest narrative.  The narrative in which some meaning is found through the experience.

What interests me most about Barber’s article is where he lands at the end of it.  What he believes allowed him to find his way to a meaningful recovery. 

He writes:

This leads us to the final lesson I’ve learned: Treatment is most effective when the patient is in charge and the ultimate expert in his or her own recovery.  There is evidence that when patients feel in control, the results of treatment are better.  Treatment works best when the doctor or therapist acts as a kind of expert consultant.  As Home Depot puts it: ‘You can do it, we can help.’

That’s what I found in my own process.  That my journey was a self-directed path, one in which I saw myself as the author of my recovery [emphasis mine] rather than a passive recipient of a pill, made all the difference.

He continues:

But these complex lessons about the arduous realities of attaining emotional health, as told not by doctors or companies but by patients, have received little traction in mainstream health care and the mainstream media.

Perhaps.  And perhaps I’m being overly optimistic here, seeing the cup as more full than it actually is, but my own sense is that these narratives are gaining more traction than they ever have before.  Certainly, they have more traction than they did—or than I was aware that they did—when I went through my own medical training twenty-plus years ago now. 

Narratives which tell a complex story of healing—of a troubled mind and/or a troubled body—these are beginning, I think, to gain more traction.  And I, for one, would like to do my own small part to help coax that process along.

Thus the links above.  And I’ll repeat them again here:
The Trouble With Spikol by Liz Spikol
Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill by Charles Barber

The Magic Land: A Garden Design Book by Julie Moir Messervy

[the fifth garden]

I find myself stopped at the entrance to The Magic Land, at the first two paragraphs, passages in which Ms. Messervy speaks directly to the reader.

I’ve come to look at your property to help you design a garden.  I walk in, shake your hand, and look around, enjoying your house and its contents while getting a sense of you through what you have already created in your home.  We sit at your kitchen table and talk about what you want.  You explain that you’ve lived in this house awhile and have made it your own but you’re completely unsure about what to do with the outside.  You don’t know how to begin.  We stroll around your site while I continue to hear your story and ask questions.

What should your garden look like?  I see it as a place distilled from the elements of your imagination, your memories, and your dreams.  It is my job to help you realize and grow this garden; to help you give birth to it and to give it form.  But first you must supply the seeds that will provide its character and its structure, and you must nourish and love it into being.

The perfect garden designer?
The perfect writing teacher?

The way that Ms. Messervy describes herself working here is entirely reminiscent of the way I was taught to work when I first tutored in the writing center as a teaching assistant, nearly twenty years ago now.  The writing center was a free service offered to undergraduate and graduate students, a service that I believe most universities still offer.  Before we were set loose in the classroom as teaching assistants to teach full classes, we each worked at least one semester in the writing center.  It was there that I began to learn, student by student, how to teach writing.  I was taught, and I learned, to listen, to ask questions, to listen some more, and, above all, to resist the temptation to take a student’s paper over.  To remember, over and over, who was the author of the paper.  And then, over and over, to discover—students always knew more than they thought they did about the papers they were writing.  They said, first, I don’t know.  They said, I have no idea.  But the more we talked, just back and forth, it turned out they did know things.  They had ideas.  They always knew more than they thought they knew.  And, often, there was a particular kind of delight and energy as they began to discover this.

The more we just talked, back and forth—and, in the process, the more I was able to resist stealing authorship—the more, it seemed, that students made their own discoveries------

I’m tempted to paraphrase Ms. Messervy’s introductory paragraphs such that it might work for a writing teacher.  And, well, I’m going to yield to this temptation----thus, Writing and Healing Idea #48----(which can be found below or by clicking on the link).

Writing and Healing Idea #48: The Seeds of a New Writing Project

[with a nod to Julie Moir Messervy, author of the Magic Land]

I’ve come to help you design a new writing project.  I walk in, shake your hand.  We sit at your kitchen table and talk about what you want.  You explain to me about the kind of writing you’ve been doing over the last year(s), but, you also tell me, you’re completely unsure about what you want to do next.  You don’t know how to begin.  You hand me some pages that you’ve written.  I read the pages.  Then I set the pages down and I listen as you tell me more about where you’ve been and where it is that maybe, just maybe, you’d like to go next. Say, for instance, that you had all the time in the world.  I ask questions.  We talk.

What should your writing project look like?  I see it as a project distilled from the elements of your imagination, your memories, and your dreams.  It is my job to help you realize and grow this writing project; to help you give birth to it and to give it form.  But first you must supply the seeds that will provide its character and its structure, and you must nourish and love it into being.

Perhaps I give you an assignment as our time together is drawing to a close.  Perhaps what I tell you is that I want you to write about the seeds.  Just one sheet of paper, one side.  Or twenty minutes of writing if that makes more sense.  What are the seeds to your next writing project?  What seeds deep inside you are watching and waiting, right now, for good soil? What seeds are poised for germination?

The Armful: A Poem by Robert Frost

[the fourth garden]

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once.
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

I chose this poem this morning because my own arms are full and have been full for the past week.

Here are the lines that strike me especially:

Extremes too hard to comprehend at once.
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.

That seems to me to be one of the tasks of writing---as well as healing---to acknowledge the truth of something, including the extremes of that something, without giving in to the temptation to oversimplify.

And I love the image he leaves there at the end--sitting down in the middle of it all.  Dropping it all in the road.  And then stacking it again---whatever it is----stacking it again in a new way--------and perhaps giving oneself plenty of time and space in which to do so.

Letting everything fall out on the ground---and then re-stacking it.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

[the third garden]

This book, a memoir, is by a woman, a professor of English, who resigned her post at a university in Tehran, and, out of the void that opened up after this resignation, she created a sanctuary for seven of her women students.  She created this sanctuary in the dining room of her house.  And she did so with a series of novels, including more than one by Nabokov.  Thus, Reading Lolita in Tehran.  Perhaps the book is one with which you're familiar.

It’s 1995.  Outside that dining room, as Ms. Nafisi describes it, the streets of Tehran are patrolled by militia, the Blood of God, men with guns riding in a series of white Toyotas.  The women walking in these streets, are followed—watched—by the men in the Toyotas.  On the streets the women have to be vigilant.  They must wear their veils properly, without a single strand of hair showing.  They must keep their faces free of make-up, and be particularly careful not to be found walking in public with men, unless these men are their husbands or brothers or fathers.

Inside her home, Ms. Nafisi arranges the meetings such that no men are present in the house.  She tells the young women they can remove their headscarves if they like.  Some of them do.  That kind of detail—arranging the meetings such that her husband will not be in the house when they arrive and thus the young women can more freely remove their headscarves—that kind of detail seems important.  There’s a sense throughout the book, a sense that Nafisi is creating a climate.  A climate within which she will be able to create, with and for these young women, a refuge.

How does she do this?

There are clues in her descriptions:

Each would have a private diary in which she would record her responses to the novels, as well as ways in which these works and their discussions related to her personal and social experiences.  I explained that I had chosen them for this class because they seemed dedicated to the study of literature.  I mentioned that one of the criteria for the books I had chosen was their authors’ faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature.

She invites the women to write about the books.
She invites them to make personal connections with the books—to use the word I.
She chooses authors who believe in the critical—and almost magical—power of books.

She chooses, among others, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and Henry James.

She writes:

I had a frame for the class, and had selected a number of books to read, but I was prepared to let the class shape me . . . .  Often I ask myself: did I choose my students for that class or did they choose me?  It is true that I had some specific criteria in mind when I invited them to participate, yet it seems as if they were the ones who created the class, who through some invisible agency led me to the present configuration in my living room.

She chooses the students with some care.  (or they choose her)
She lets the students shape and create the class.
She offers a frame but lets the students move and grow and speak beyond that frame.

She offers snacks.
She describes breaking the ice and formality of the first meeting by offering “the calming distraction of cream puffs and tea.”

And there’s something she seems to understand intuitively—how talking about the books eventually gave these young women a way to talk about their lives in Tehran—how coming at their lives at a slant—through fiction—allowed them to find language.  As if the novels offered a new context and this new context allowed them a way in and around to their own stories.

Nafisi writes:

Where they opened up and became excited was in our discussion of the works.  The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the university and the morality squads in the streets.  There was a certain innocence with which we read these books; we read them apart from our own history and expectations, like Alice running after the White Rabbit and jumping into the hole.  This innocence paid off: I do not think that without it we could have understood our own inarticulateness.  Curiously the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

They traveled into the books and back out into their own lives.  They went through the books and out the other side with a new way of looking at—and speaking about—and potentially writing about—their own lives.  They traveled into the books and came back out less speechless—less inarticulate.

The notion that in order to tell or write one’s story one must first find a language with which to tell it.  And for some stories this might require an entirely new narrative frame.  Novels, it seems, can sometimes offer this alternative narrative frame.  And perhaps this is the reason that reading can sometimes release writing----a kind of call and response----