Once more, I feel compelled to write. Urge, compulsion, dire, desperate need. I don’t understand it, but my shrink seemed to. She encouraged me to write and I did and it helped.

I always have written and/or drawn to “self-therapize”, but I wrote hidden, disguised, and symbolic things for the first 25 years or so… my family was always finding hidden drawings and stories (usually illustrated) that were all thinly veiled metaphors for whatever was hurting me at the time. My mother once “jokingly complained” about the ‘pornographic’ drawings – drawings of people having sex - she found in my attic room at my grandma’s house. I wanted so badly, in the midst of my hurt, humiliation and trying to handle such rude exposure gracefully and lightly, to say out loud to all her family “Maybe it’s because you forced me to witness your own sexual acts so often.” But I didn’t. Right after my youngest brother was born, my father found an illustrated story about a girl who throws away her beloved older doll after she gets a shiny new one. It was stuffed behind his bed. He asked me if it was about feeling replaced in his affection by my little brother – and it was – but I lied and said no and he left it at that.

I suppose I’ve always needed an ear, a considering mind – an audience – to get the full effect of the therapy. I need a response, or just to know that someone got a glimpse of what I was feeling. What I AM feeling. Writing/drawing just for me helps too, and I do lots of that as well. I leave myself little notes and words of encouragement or reminder. Sometimes they are as brutal and surprising as the things I left for my parents to find. Sometimes I find things that I have no memory of penning. Chris has now lived with me long enough to see this happen. He has watched me sit and draw or write (or both) and then put it away somewhere and not remember – even the next day – that I did it. He finds them and shows them to me. It usually takes years for me to find them again, and I have no memory. They just seem like pieces by someone else. Those things/times are fortunately rare, but I write enough for myself that I do remember. There are dozens of notebooks and journals and drawings and sketchbooks – even just scraps of paper, in some cases, filled with my desperate attempts to make sense of myself and this life. Lately, I’ve been trying to keep track of my dreams and how they affect my mood each day. There is a definite clear connection between what I dream about and how I feel, and my subconscious is (luckily) as un-subtle as my conscious. My dream ‘symbology’ is boringly, comfortingly basic and clear, and it makes it very easy for me to see what my subconscious is trying to tell me I need to deal with. I wouldn’t have this simple but truly life-saving tool though, if I didn’t make a point to write it down. The dreams would slip away eventually, or even if I did remember them, I have a hard time seeing the clear facts and symbolic connections unless I take the time to write out and rationally consider my thoughts, feelings and ideas about them.

The fact is that without this outlet, I would go completely insane. I’ve been to the edge of it, maybe even dipped my feet in the water a time or two. All things considered, I’ve probably taken an outright long swim on occasion – but I’ve always written and drawn, even in the midst of it. The worst times, I probably stopped trying and gave into whatever complete soporific was available to me. I’ve tried many, and I have my favorites (believe it or not, books, movies and long tv series are the top three in the top five) , but nothing soothes – and helps make sense of – the madness like telling the story. Somehow sharing the story helps keep it honest and real. It’s easy to lie to yourself, but almost impossible to lie to others – especially witnesses.
I keep trying to explain to myself and others why I need to talk about it. I keep apologizing for it. And in the midst of these explanations and apologies I try to tell the stories, little by little, piece by piece, but that same old familiar fear steps smoothly in, every time, slick as oil sick and 10,000 times harder to wash off. The same thing that made me say no to my father that day; the same thing that made me play off my mothers’ cruelty and shame and be diplomatic and laissez faire about my own ‘transgression’.

I don’t care what the people who did this to me think. There’s even a part of me that wants to hurt them – if course. I do worry about how the other innocents in my stories will be affected, but I trust myself to guard them well enough. I even try to do that to some extent with the criminals, just to keep things simple. My real fear is much closer to home, and so huge that I can’t even make sense of it, and it’s hard to say out loud. It’s that big ‘why’. Privately, I know it’s because I NEED to, for many reasons, other than just compulsion, but that is strong. Publicly, it’s “Why?!” and the guilt of needing to share this, and the fear of no one giving a damn… of being nothing more than a whining nuisance… of not focusing ALL my time and power on others – and herein lies the rub. If I hold it all in, if I don’t tell the story and get the response, then I become useless – worse than useless, a burden - and all that mega-watt battery power that I burn and turn (often, consistently, joyfully usually and with much gusto) on others goes dead black fast.

Is that enough of a reason? It certainly is for me.