On writing and healing, voice and authority

I’m not sure I stuck the landing on my last essay. Or rather, I’m not sure that’s the landing I really wanted to stick. That’s the problem with this kind of writing: the narrative drive to make a single main point. To find or create or name just an appropriate level of complication and then resolve it neatly. To have something clever to say, leaving the reader satisfied. Perhaps surprised but not confused.

In fact, the world is messy. Especially the social world we humans have created. And the wild worlds we live in our heads.

Mostly, I think I was too glib in saying “Heal your childhood wounds.” I absolutely believe that this is key to healing the world. Otherwise we keep trying to get our old unfilled needs met in ways that hurt others, ourselves, and the planet. But it’s easy to say. And not at all easy to do.

Voice and authority

Substack (especially the notes) is full of pithy, profound pronouncements. I find much wisdom there, and regularly “heart” the authors’ cheery attempts to tell us what really matters. But there’s rarely one that I couldn’t question. “Really?” “Always?” “You sound so certain. So confident in your world view. How do you really know?”

In the research world I move in, scholars do something similar. We measure, map, observe, interview, analyze, and present our “findings” to the world. We assert claims and make generalizations. We learn to defend our positions, and attack others’. We sound so sure of ourselves.

It took me a long time to assert a pontificating tone of authority as a teacher and a scholarly writer. This voice doesn’t come easily to people who weren’t raised thinking our voices count in the world (women, people of color, anyone outside the dominant cultural path).

But now, I’m trying to unlearn it. Instead, to ask questions. “I wonder…” “I notice…” “Is that how you see this?” “Tell me more?”

Mind you, I don’t want to disparage academics’ search for patterns, predictability, and solutions to social problems. I don’t mean to reinforce the idea that we can’t really know anything, so everyone gets to have their own (sometimes bizarre) truths, and we can never agree on anything. That idea seems to be doing a lot of damage in the world right now. There are ways to have some degree of confidence about what we know - enough to make decisions, to take action in the social world, and hopefully, to come to some collective agreements.

But a lot depends on what questions are asked. Turn the question upside down and the answers don’t fit anymore. Ask different questions and new possibilities appear. Start from a different set of assumptions and the old ones crumble. Talk to different people, and the issues don’t look quite the same.

When I shared my last essay with my siblings, two said they didn’t remember any of the things I wrote. Choosing rides at Paragon Park didn’t seem to keep them awake at night back then, or now. They remember different things. They’ve made different meaning from the circumstances we shared.

I guess that’s why I’m a qualitative researcher. I don’t want to just prove what I already believe to be true. The outliers are so much more interesting than the central tendencies. I want to know how and why, and ask what if. Mostly, I want to be surprised. Wow! That’s a new way of seeing things!

I suppose that’s why I’m doing this kind of auto-ethnographic memoir writing now. Finding surprises hidden in my own past. Trying on new ways of seeing my own life. Letting go of some well-worn stories.

On writing and healing

Writing was one of my paths to healing from some big ruptures in my own life. I began by enrolling in a “Writing the Healing Story”course offered through UCLA extension. At the time, I thought my story was about facing cancer during the year I got divorced. It would be one more cancer survival story, with a twist. I would proclaim my rebirth after facing disease and death of different kinds.

The more I wrote, however, I saw that cancer and divorce were just the surface of other wounds that needed healing, other issues that called for resolution. Writing about what happened to me during my year with cancer, and in the long process of recovery, while undergoing a multi-dimensional healing process, pushed me to un-cover things I hadn’t wanted to see. As I wrote, I discovered new parts of the story that asked, quietly but insistently, to be written. This took me back to childhood, drafting essays like the one I shared here last week.

When I shared drafts with others, or re-read them myself, I discovered gaps that would push me back not just to the storyboard but to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual work that needed to be done in order to get clearer on just what my narrative was about. The healing and reconstructive process was a long, slow, and non-linear one - one that continues to this day.

Invariably, new writing segments would begin in a confusing tangle of ideas. Working with the raw material, I would order and reorder the threads, each successive draft giving me more power over my past. I played with verb tenses as I moved back into these experiences and through my reflections on them, which morphed and changed over the years I wrote and re-wrote my words, as I sought to give some kind of closure to different chapters of my life.

Re-writing some of those words here, for the umpteenth time, as I look out on a world that seems filled with trauma, I don’t want to diminish the challenge of the healing work we need in the world. In my own small life, I couldn’t just “let go” of some of my old stories, or re-write them, until I had allowed myself to feel their pain. That required getting out of my head, not further into my own story. Into my body. And into nature. But writing was part of the process.

I wish for something similar for the world. To learn from the past in order to create a better future. To remember in order to re-member, recover without re-covering. To heal our individual and collective pain in order to keep it from poisoning ourselves or from letting that poison continuously leak out into the world. To write and re-write our individual stories until we can tell the one we really want for our collective future.

***

Thank you for your time reading this footnote to my last essay – or perhaps, just watching these fireworks from my brain - before I continue to share whatever insights I think I’ve garnered from playing the game of Life. Next up: More about family size, birth order, and growing up Catholic in a white working class suburb in mid-20^th century USA before I get to what I really want to write about: lessons for the present from the Solidarity Days of the 1980s. And then some stuff about Academia. Healing modalities. Mosaic art! Oh, yeah, and there’s the cancer story that started this whole thing…