Not bad, but not excellent

My 8-year-old daughter has enthusiastically latched onto the phrase, "in other words" recently. Most conversations between us these days are sprinkled with her new-found expression, usually in the form of a question; she wants to to check her understanding of something I've just read to her in a bedtime story, for instance. Or sometimes, she uses the phrase to cut to the chase and clarify that when her request to buy a new trinket is met by my diatribe about other recent trinkets, the frequency of trinket request, the cost of said trinket, and the overcrowded and cluttered nature of her room, that what I'm essentially saying is, "No."

This morning, though, she used the phrase as an opening to a sentence that would change how I looked at my day. We had just climbed into the car for our weekday morning trek to the bus stop for summer camp, and I was admittedly frazzled. It had been a morning of unusually plentiful frustrations and delays (disappearing permission slip, dropped breakfast bowl, morning phone call interruption, to name just a few), and now I was worried that I would not get her to her bus in time, and therefore, not get me to my work on time. So when she asked from her booster seat in back, "Mom, how are we doing this morning?", I gritted my teeth and said, "Well, we'll probably be late."

After a few moments, she piped up again from the back. "So... in other words, not bad, but not excellent."

It probably wasn't an intentional pearl of wisdom. Most likely, she could tell how stressed I was and was trying to placate me.

Yet, her words took root in me. True, it had been a morning of small frustrations. Yes, missing her camp bus would set off a series of unwanted consequences. But she was heading to a camp she loves, excited to be on the Yellow team for Field Day. And I was headed for a day of work that I find interesting and compelling, with potential opportunity to help people, which has always been rewarding for me.

So much of life, situationally and in segments of time, is the juxtaposition of good things and bad things. So much of how I feel at any given time depends on which things I magnify or throw a spotlight upon.

In other words, my happiness today is determined in no small part by the attitiude I approach it with.

Why creative people need to create

People who know me well know that I am not doing anybody any favors when I am not writing creatively on a regular basis. Which is to say, I am not my best self at those times.

There is a certain feeling that comes over a creative person, whatever kind of artist they are, who is not making the time and space in their life for creativity. My artist friends, as well as my artist clients, have described it to me again and again. It may not be an identical feeling,but the idea of loss, lack, and absence is there. Something is missing, and the artist has lost their emotional or mental equilibrium as a result.

For me personally, the experience feels a lot like loneliness.

When I am lonely, I feel separate and apart, disconnected from people. When I'm not creating, I feel, interestingly enough, disconnected from my own self.

Growing up, I saw creative pursuits as leisure activities, or, for a lucky few, a vocation. As an adult, I have learned much about how central creative writing, and to a lesser extent other artistic pursuits, really is to my identity. Now, I know that it is an important part of my self-care. That to abandon or neglect my writing is to abandon and neglect myself.

So here's to everyone who feels not just the desire, but the need, to write, paint, dance, make music. Know that it's alright to make doing that thing a priority. Know that we artists of all kinds are simply our better selves when we do exactly that.

Revision and that slippery thing called memory

Sometimes I think about the writing life with such reverence that I forget how much it parallels the rest of life. Which is to say, sometimes this writer's skills and tools seem adequate for the job of getting through a sentence, a paragraph, a page. Other times, I'm left mucking around on a heavily-marked page, feeling like there isn't a paragraph indent, a change of words, or an ellipses in the world that can help me move forward with a particular work-in-progress.

Yesterday, I received the revision suggestions for a personal experience essay I had written. The editor's feedback was very detailed and constructive, at least in terms of what to change, if not how. The trouble is that she wants me to ground my essay in more specifics about my situation during the time period I had written about, more sensory details. I immediately understood her point and how revising in this way would make for a much stronger piece. And yet.

The truth is, there are many details about that time period which are very fuzzy and sketchy for me, and many, too, that I don't want to remember. There was some pretty awful stuff going on (which are not the focus of the essay) in the background.

Another truth is, a personal experience essay which lacks details does not amount to excellent writing.

The whole dilemma encapsulates questions which have become increasingly important to me as a person, a therapist, and a writer. How important is revisiting and/or clarifying specific memories? To a person? A therapy or recovery process? A piece of writing which is overtly about something else?

A friend told me of the time when he had tried, as a teenager, to tell a trusted adult that he had been sexually abused as a young child, but had only sketchy memories and disturbing nightmares about it at this time. He hoped the adult would connect him with a mental health professional. Instead, he was told, "I think you've seen too many after school specials." The memories sank to the bottom of a well, largely inaccessible to him from then on, apart from bad dreams and a lingering feeling of dread about life, the idea that the world is unsafe, that people cannot be trusted.

What are the costs and benefits of revisiting banished memories? What are the costs and benefits of keeping them away?

Next month, I will begin taking a series of trainings about trauma and recovery. I hope it will answer some of my personal and professional questions about dealing with memories.

As for my writer questions on this subject? I welcome feedback from any of my writer friends about how they've navigated this issue. (Brave Creative Nonfiction Majors, I'm talking especially to you!)

In the meantime, it's just me, some shadowy memories, and some words on the page needing improvement.

Therapists: What it's really like

Each year, I vow I'm going to write a piece of fiction that does not have any therapists in it. after more than 20 years working as a therapist, I suppose I'm a little bored with the whole therapist as character thing. But even when I'm not focusing primarily on my novel-in-progress, in which therapists and clients are my cast of characters, therapists creep into my other work in big and small ways. Therapists fascinate me with their (typically) big hearts, their blind spots into their (our) own psyches, and the magnitude of what they must do each day, not just as people on the front lines trying to help clients with their most serious and personal problems, but as helping professionals working within systems of care which are often dysfunctional and oppressive. And where complex characters meet obstacles and conflicts, therein lies the stuff of great storytelling.

Practicing psychotherapy today is an honor, a privilege, and very often, a pretty bad career choice from a number of practical standpoints.  I continue to do it myself because I love my clients and it has become an inexorable part of who I am; also, because I can now balance it with a writing career, and because I'm at a point in my career where I can do it as a private practice therapist. But before this was 20 years of agency work in a lot of different settings. Agency mental health and/or addictions treatment work is, with very few exceptions, underpaid, undervalued, and structured in ways that neither serve therapists nor clients. As a result, there is frequent turnover and therapist burnout, isolation, and low morale.

If you're a therapist working in an agency setting, you typically have one of two employment scenarios. In the first, you are a low-pay salaried employee who must meet high productivity requirements (how many clients you see per day/week/month). Although you have benefits and are "allowed" sick and vacation days, it's difficult to use them without doubling up on work before and after to make up productivity points.

In the second scenario, you work fee for service, which means you don't have to jump through productivity hoops, but you also get no sick, family sick, or vacation time, and you lose your pay for the hour whenever a client fails to show up.

I have tried both scenarios over the years. Both are difficult in their own way. But when I became a single mother, working this way became impossible.

As I write this, therapists and other human service professionals from a local agency I've never worked with are picketing after months of unsuccessful negotiation efforts regarding terrible pay, unreasonable productivity requirements, and other intolerable working conditions. I feel their pain and frustration and hope they are able to win improved working conditions so they can resume providing services to clients who need them.

We therapists cannot give adequate help if we are not okay ourselves. When a therapist has to face relentless hardship just to do their job every day, that makes for great fiction. But it makes for a less than stellar quality of  life.

Did you hear what you just said?

In Zen Buddhism, the term "monkey mind" is used to describe the mental chatter that goes on in one's head when your brain is over-full, unfocused, and, well, just plain noisy. I identified with the concept instantly, knowing that in my own head, when my thoughts are a tangle of what to pick up at the grocery store, whether I'm saying "yes" to my daughter too often, how I'm going to discuss a particular issue with a colleague, and what I'm going to write about later in the day, I literally can't even hear myself. It is the opposite of mindful.

But while I knew I sometimes failed to hear the important thoughts in my own head amidst too much mental noise, I didn't realize that people (myself included) can manage to actually miss very important things they say, until I witnessed it in my work as a therapist. In the midst of talking a blue streak, a client would make a profound and revelatory statement, only to keep on talking, often about far less significant things, without missing a beat. Later, it seemed like their epiphanies were lost at sea, never to be revisited. After witnessing this a few times with different clients, I began to engage in gentle interrupting. "Excuse me-- hang on a second-- Did you hear what you just said?"

Almost invariably, the client hadn't heard him/herself, at least not fully.  In the quiet moments after I interrupted, the previous words seemed somehow amplified. Often, a rush of emotion followed. "Oh my God-- Did I just say that? I didn't even know I felt that way about it." Often, upon being helped to hear their own voice and their own words, a positive shift happened. A decision was made. A resentment was released. A shameful secret loosened its grip.

Knowing how this has played out in my office, it only stood to reason that I could be equally  deaf to my own revelations. So I should not have been surprised when, while I was having coffee in a diner with a friend, she interrupted me and asked, in regards to a statement I'd just made, "Susan, wait-- Did you hear what you just said?"

I hadn't heard it, of course. Not when it was just in my head, part of my daily jumble of noisy, competing thoughts. Not even when I said it out loud and then kept hurtling toward small talk. Only in a space made possible by the deep and caring listening of a friend did my message find its most important audience: myself.

We need one another in more ways than we know.