Looking at Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past" with an Expressive Arts Phenomenological Framework: Healing Trauma Through Autobiographical Writing

"I often wonder that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are still in existence? And if so, will it be possible in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it- the past- as an avenue lying behind, a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it's only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start."

-Virginia Woolf' A Sketch of the Past' 1939 

Introduction

It is an innate human need to be able to understand and share one's own story. When, as Virginia Woolf says, "strong emotions must leave its trace," she speaks to the need to communicate as a way to make sense of these experiences. Finding peace and healing internally (within the self) and externally (within one's community and physical environment) is a natural impulse from our primal human consciousness. The notion of making sense of an event or feeling by expressing and sharing helps us feel in harmony with our surroundings. Resilience, the ability to navigate the ups and downs of life, to feel whole in body and mind; the ability to thrive, and to take care of oneself and others; all stem from a balance of inward and outward health. But healthy thriving is much easier said than done. It doesn't take an in-depth investigation into the reality of human experience to see that the way toward resilience is an uphill journey. The mess of human experience, tension, self-doubt, anxiety, violence, marginalization, self-harm, war, anger, disease, subjugation, and any other namable personal or collective trauma complicates our way into that healing. Before the therapists' couch existed, humans turned toward that innate healing power of beauty and art for comfort and companionship. Art making, music, dancing, sculpting, drawing, painting, written language, printing presses, and reading, writing grew from these drives to express. Each art modality, a world unto itself, stemmed from the forward movement body toward some restorative and resonating harmony of relief.

If the collective lessons of human trauma have taught us anything, it is that we are not designed to be continually burdened by unexpressed feelings. We are social creatures, and the act of communicating our experiences is a remedy to unburden ourselves of the haunting memories and experiences of trauma. Seeking out communal sharing is an instinctive step toward healing. Unwinding ourselves from the tangled narrative threads that make us who we think we are, takes courage, awareness, and inspiration.  

We have the tools and knowledge to trace the connection between the body and the creative process. Art making in any modality is a step toward healing and is available to anyone. By design, the human consciousness holds imaginative and innovative solutions to soothe even the direst situations or circumstances. The myth that one needs to be a highly skilled artist or writer to approach clarity through art-making is just that, a myth. We can use words and language to illuminate clarity into our painful circumstances. 

Using words as an art modality to guide our thoughts and actions toward relating doesn't even need an intellectual explanation or reason. We can activate ourselves into this healing space only by tuning into our inner voice. If our own words are not available, we can look to writers and artists as sources of inspiration toward that healing journey.

How do we activate these self-exploring words to prompt healing of that psyche? Or better, how do we use the cathartic power of words to lift ourselves out of trauma? This inquiry will explore Virginia Woolf's short autobiographical essay, 'A Sketch of the Past,' as it relates to the process of self-inquiry in autobiographical writing. The essay will simultaneously introduce the theoretical foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy and Phenomenology, associated with writing and Autobiography's modality as an avenue toward self-healing. 

I first read "A Sketch of the Past" in a graduate literature course on Virginia Woolf in 2007.  I felt immediately connected to her work, point of view, depth of imagery, and the indescribable beauty and depth she could navigate herself and her characters. Reading her work changed how I saw myself and how I could embrace the waves of moods or memories with my own fluid understandings. 

The affirmation of Reading Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past,' as a compelling suspension of reality, the experience permitted me to join the discourse, beyond a theoretical dissection or scholarly dissertation, but to wax poetic in a state of warmth, connection, and understanding toward my literary muses. I felt free to embody my own words, inspired by my literary heroes, and to activate the records of my own past, in order to shift toward a more in-depth understanding of myself.

I view Virginia Woolf in a sort of reader-writer kinship with a beautiful symmetry of thought and connection, even with decades and centuries separating our lives. Discovering Expressive Arts- is further solidifying this connection. I feel called to explore text as a study of how reading, appreciating, and creating literature, story, and poetry is more of an exchange of living information rather than a passive mechanism.

My appreciation for Woolf's writing has become an "in-point" toward discovering the creative process itself. Expressive Arts Phenomenology offers a and foundational philosophy based on practicum of methods of self-improvement and affirmative healing. The deep and sometimes wild and sometimes familiar interconnection between author and reader meets via the text, even centuries apart, offering opportunities toward further exploration. The process of Autobiography itself acts as a living and informative cue toward personal and communal insights into the process of memory and self-development and an interest in further discovering what literature and human behavior can teach us about how to recover from our past experiences.

Founded by professors of psychology, Paolo Knill and Steven Levine and practiced by many hundreds of individuals and communities all over the world, Expressive Arts Therapy aims to create a research and science-based paradigm shift on how to open therapeutic arts modalities such as writing, literature, poetry, painting, music, dance, theatre and literally every artistic classification to heal the world from the inside out.

This essay has three aims. First, to take a look at the mode of autobiographical as Virginia Woolf approaches her memoir, as well as to see how this autobiographical exploration fits in as an Expressive Arts Therapy modality. Second, to explore specific passages of Woolf's text from 'A Sketch of the Past' from a literary and an art-healing perspective. And third, to entertain the idea of communion between author and reader as an example of how reading, witnessing and shaping our own stories can also become an act of mutual and personal healing.

Virginia Woolf's words, particularly of her memoir, 'A Sketch of the Past,' are compelling- especially toward her own writing process. Written over the course of a few months at the beginning of April 1939, and completing around November 1940, mere months before she took her own life in March of 1941. 'A Sketch of the Past' came about as a prompt, shared with her colleagues in The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club in England in the late 1930s, and originally not intended for publication.

The 75- page piece of writing reveals a personal reflection on remembered instances of family history and relationships, memories, and several traumatic experiences of sexual and physical abuse. The memoir vividly depicts the grief and loss she experienced upon her parents' and siblings' deaths. Her steam of consciousness narrative swirls in and out of memories and reflection towards a foundational and conceptual philosophy. To make sense of these key experiences, she calls them: 'Moments of Being.' This name derives from the description of particular sensations of emotion and aliveness and a phenomenon of hyperawareness surrounding these key moments. Her narratives weave seamlessly between sensory perceptions about her childhood and her current retrospective knowledge from the present (as written in 1939/1940). This circular sensation of time allows Woolf to tell her story in a way that reaches toward her readers as active participants in her shared experience, as relevant then as if one were to pick up her book and start reading it at this very moment. She seems to know and trust her reader intimately. Her connective style, apparent through all her work, draws her readers close and rests on the intimacy of her memories, activating the senses with detailed descriptions, all while revealing her creative process.

Woolf's recollections make for an intriguing study of the body and mind in a state of remembering past traumas, especially related to phenomena of how the mind takes a lifetime to reflect on where it has been and the subjective and elusive nature of memory itself. As her readers (even well into the 21st century, we can picture her in the process- not only as she is telling it, but as a full-bodied empathy with the functions of shaping and re-shaping her memories into profound insights about herself, her life, and her artistic process. Her willingness to share her process makes for an unparalleled model for self-healing through Autobiography.

Autobiography: The art of self-questioning

The word 'autobiography' literally means self+life+write. Within the intrinsically human process of storytelling and sharing, 'making sense of self' memories functions as the brain's response to experience. Roy Pascal describes, in his work Design and Truth in Autobiography, "Memory itself performs the shifting process and is the most powerful unconscious agent in shaping the past according to the will of the writer: "memory is a great artist" […]The autobiographer has a double character. He exists to some degree as an object, a man recognizable from outside, and he needs to give to some extent the genetical story of his person. But he is also the subject, a temperament whose inner and outer world owes its appearance to the manner in which he sees it […]The events recorded in Autobiography have a double relevance, relevance of the authors' historical life, and relevance to his present self; they are symbolic of both." While Pascal leaves this exploration of Autobiography at the corners of a self-questing literary genre, Expressive Arts Phenomenology seems to be a fitting framework for picking up the significance of meaning-making, and most importantly, of the artistic metamorphosis of one's own experience, as a launching place for self-healing.            

The art of writing one's story suggests a contrived or an element of fictionalization. While telling a story to oneself is the starting line of expression. Autobiography is not a conclusive process. A simple prompt such as "write a significant memory" may stem from various purposes or motivations and may evolve into infinite formats of expressions. Autobiography is less a literary device and more a point context for where one is in dialogue with their own experiences.

Good writing pulls away from subjective conclusions about oneself and others and puts good faith in the reader to self-define or even join the dialogue. The appreciative symbiotic communion between reader and author is a sacred relationship. All humans want to be invited, not told. As an art modality, memoir writing draws from the same primordial motivation to share one's own story as an instinct of communication. There is a particular safety in communicating on paper, which might feel threatened or hesitant to communicate directly. On paper, one can tell the details of their experiences uninterrupted or uninhibited and share (or not) with an audience in an indirect way. Writing is a private and autonomous task and allows the author to gather a sense of one's own truth. The environment needed for productive writing provides a barrier of protection while allowing one to gather and categorize experience, make reflections, and ask questions that might point to some sort of conclusive truth or revelation about the human condition. 

To share one's story comes with the threat of vulnerability, exposure, or loss of anonymity. However, having the courage to share might override that fear when there is a sense of service toward fellow survivors and a sense of solidarity within community empowerment. Using Autobiography as a tool for survival, legitimacy, validation, self-worth, and emotional healing is part of the recovery process.

'Making sense of memories' Autobiography as an act of poesis

The literary medium of Autobiography sets us apart from other animals. However, human beings have evolved to take self-expression to an artistic level. 'A Sketch a Sketch of the Past'- is documentation of Woolf's own lived experience. Expressive Arts Philosophy is rooted in the concept of Poesis, which is, as Steven Levine describes, "the act of responding to what is given." The notion of "creating something out of the chaos" as it relates to our human experience of "being in the world." At its root, the drive to make meaning out of chaos is beyond an intellectual process. The "nature of aesthetics" does not require writing tools, nor even refined language skills or even any literary knowledge at all.

At its core, Autobiography is a process of self-reflection to make sense of one's own lived experience. Poesis is the push and pull between the chaos of pure expression and the order of organizing one's experience through art-making. In this case, creative writing is the art modality, and this tool creates a bridge toward a therapeutic breakthrough. Woolf notices this connection herself when speaking retrospectively about her process of writing 'To the Lighthouse,' a novel inspired by memories of her mother. The latter died when she was a child: "I suppose I did for myself what psycho analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it, I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of "explained it"? Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker?" (MOB 81)

Expressive Arts Therapy uses the artistic modalities not merely as a resource for arts. Still, art modalities become the outward channel for the feelings themselves, not necessarily the naming of the senses, but more as a mode of connecting toward the self's inner revelations towards empowerment within a troubling circumstance. 

The ritual act of writing connects our physical body with the emotional psyche and the ethereal, temporal experience of memory. Storytelling is a primordial act of reflection and communication, a logical function of what the body needs to do to survive. Communication, in the basic sense, is necessary as protection from danger. In Principles and Practice of Expressive arts therapy, Levine writes, "Therapy is a time out of time, a pause in everyday life in which habitual behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs can be examined and transformed. However, for a therapeutic change to occur, there must be a process of de-structuring in which one's old identity comes into question and is taken apart." (P&P 45) 

Expressive Arts philosophy was born from an important diversion from the traditional methodology of psychotherapy. While real transformation calls for 'free association," decentering allows space to reformulate the grasps of a distressing experience and transmute the energy into a physical outlet. Traditional psychoanalysis objectifies the patient/therapist process with an interpretive framework. In this scenario, the hierarchy of the interpretation of one's feelings is given to the therapist, objectifying the client out of their personalized understanding and meaning of their own experiences. "Being vs. non-being exceptional vs. ordinary; second-hand authoritative interpretations of experience, are all parallels of a dichotomy where the author storyteller (the-self), gives in to the objectification, the retelling of their story by an outside force. The subconscious subversion of giving up one's own experience toward another is the very definition of the patriarchal system. Observations of other authors- non-being offers context to being- particularly toward the experiences of violence and sexual abuse, leaves the author out of the story of their own embodiment. 

Empathy as a path towards healing requires a balance between objective observation toward the client. The 'author' speaks toward their subjective experience of documenting the experiences of the self as a continuation in the lived experience and is both object and subject. Aesthetic responsibility is embedded in the writing – telling, interpreting, and sharing the story, even in a communal environment, regardless of acceptance by the community. Sharing becomes a way of upholding artistic integrity, offering the literature as a piece of public dialogue, with free interpretation and opinion to other individual subjects, shaping, in turn, their own aesthetic responses and allowing the sharing to inform their own experiences.

Virginia Woolf is known for her mastery of the "stream of consciousness" style of writing, in which the narrative seems to follow the authentic present time pathways of the human mind. The very notion of "past" and "present" is in flux. First proposed in the philosophies of William James, the phenomena of a stream of consciousness describes internal dialogue and stream of thought. Writers around Virginia Woolf's time began to experiment with the psychological novel, turning the authority of authorship, timeline, dialogue, and even linear narrative itself to reveal a more organic and rawer evolving consciousness of the human mind and interaction. This phenomenon of 'Stream of Consciousness' writing would be a form of what Steven Levine describes in \ Expressive Arts Philosophy as poesis. Poesis is derived from the interplay between the chaos of Dionysus and the order of Apollo. Poesis manifests as "a performance of healing in which the spectator is brought to an understanding and acceptance of the ground of his or her existence a finite temporal being." (Levine P&P 37)

 In 'A Sketch of the Past,' Woolf plays the role of narrator to her audience, creating a communal exploration along this edge of chaos and order, with masterful precision, and her readers are fully immersed in and entrusted to her guidance. Within the literary experience, a skilled author can seamlessly reveal an imaginative world toward their readers; the trusting relationship built between authors and readers is nearly a model of the trusting relationship built between client and therapist.

Woolf's memoir is an artifact of her lived experience. Even some 80 years on from her writing and some 150 years on from her described experiences, readers still look to her influence. The accessibility of her memories, artifacts of the past, mixed with present tense reflections, creates a meta-experience that seems to reach beyond the bounds of the physical text. The artifact memories serve a function in real-time towards the practical purpose of healing on both a personal (internal) level and communal (external) level. Her readers are free to use her words toward their own liberation narrative. The reader is a co-experiencer, making personal discoveries alongside the author.

Writing childhood memories to activate change 

Virginia Woolf shares her experiences in 'A Sketch of the Past' less of a chronicle of her childhood and more of a non-linear contemplation of candid and "in-the-moment" realizations about her indelible connections between the moments of her life.

            One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed past the little creature;  one must get the feeling that made her press on, the little creature driven on as she was by growth of her legs and arms, driven without her being able to stop it, or to change it, driven as a plant is driven up out of the earth, up until the stalk grows, the leaf brows buds swell. That is what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static, for no sooner has one said that this was so, than it was past and altered. How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby, who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5, 1895- now almost exactly to the day, forty-four years ago—when my mother died.

Woolf's writing takes a deep sensory dive into this embodiment experience, not just at the moment of trauma but also looking back on it. It is more than just a writerly mission to look back at her past, "Moments of Being." It is the nature of being and non-being itself, a query of consciousness itself into the essence of bodily existence. Woolf calls attention to sound, visual imagery, texture, and emotional sensation. This highly poetic language and its association with memory is a perfect testament to Wordsworth; she enacts "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," showing their "origin" by recollecting the emotions in the "tranquility" of the present moment. It is the imagery that is the most familiar within her work. The simplicity of nature in its most basic primordial form, she described as a painting or an indistinguishable collage of sights and sounds, colors, sensations.

In her article, Reflecting Surfaces: Mirrors and Autobiography, Diane Cousineau describes Woof's writing in the sketch as "rational inquiry into the complex issues involved in life is combined with an impatience with the constraints of logical connection and a desire to break free of the strictures of biographical form and speak from the deepest layers of bodily experience."

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl, without a doubt, stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking one two, one, two behind the yellow blind." The scene goes on to describe the fullness of her sensory experience is at the core of her understanding of self, as an artist, as a writer, and as a human being as a vessel of these experiences and feelings. "Those moments – in the nursery, on the road to the beach -- can still be more real than the present moment." (MOB 67)

Woolf transcribes her significant moments, not only for their beauty but as activation of her own consciousness. The expression is not just an exercise of looking at the past but a real-time connection with the self, which fuels the process of healing. This liminal experience is a direct link to the same phenomena on which Expressive Arts Phenomenology is based. For, writing is a ritual of change. 

Rituals of Change, according to Paolo Knill, explains in Foundations of a Theory of Practice, "the suffering that results from disconnection from fellow humans and the consequent loss of binding within the community, usually accompanied by conflict and crisis. The ritual containers that are in place to restore well-being are often characterized as 'healing rituals,' and change agents are in charge of them need special empowerment." (77) The method of decentering looks toward this chaos in poesis as an agent of change. In this case, Woolf's method of writing around personal experience allows for a guided and methodological framework of "falling apart" in order to reconstruct the psyche towards a transformational new understanding of life. The process of writing is simultaneously constructing and restructuring. Ritual in the organizational sense, is a natural inclination, a notion for the body to separate from the loss and processing the self towards healing. Woolf's process, outside the references of expressive arts methodology, shows this decentering process happening in real-time. The writing is a record of this process, which can be referenced by inspired readers, thus connecting a community outside the boundaries of time itself. The transformation is both within her personal and individual process, and the witnesses, appreciating her experience.

Writing to unlock trauma of sexual abuse

Even though 'A Sketch of the Past' was written in 1939-40, it sat in amongst Woolf's archives, unpublished until 1985. Perhaps there was a bit of reservation to reveal the family secrets, which the author opens up toward in the time since it was written. Since it was published, decades of feminism has taken stride after stride to open ears and eyes to the reality of sexual trauma. She approaches the subject first through the contemplation around the issues of shame and self-consciousness. 

There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe, I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I had got in into the habit of looking at my face in the glass. But I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. A strong feeling of guilt seemed attached to it. But why was this so?[...] What gave me this feeling of shame, unless it was some opposite instinct?[...] This leads me to think that my natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral dread[…] I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. (MOB 67-68) 

Within the ellipses and long meandering passages leading through the contemplation around Woolf's own shame and self-consciousness are references toward family, propriety, and meanderings around femininity. But what is revealed next is the memory- the confirmation of many feelings and discomfort around this body shame:

There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there as he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts too. I remember resenting , disliking it- what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on Jan 25, 1882 but was born many thousands of years ago; and has from the very first encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past. (MOB 69)

The mirror has become a trigger toward the traumatic memories connected with being molested by her elder half-brother, Gerald Duckworth.  However, her written response to the trauma seems to respond with the full force of the female experience. Time and humanity stand on her side. Barbara Claire Freeman offers an interpretation of how this passage connects with Woolf's writing as an activation toward healing:

"Although the Duckworth incident helps to explain the reasons Woolf abhorred her own reflection, it remains the case that self-reflection is precisely the activity in which as a writer she chooses to engage here writing repeats the affect she cannot feel. Writing Autobiography, in contrast to other genres, heightens the parallel between inscription and observing oneself: as an exercise in reflecting upon and observing those aspects of her life, she cannot forget, writing the memoir is the symbolic equivalent of looking at herself in a mirror ."

Freeman highlights an interesting intersection of symbolism; the mirror as a physical object of discomfort and association, the mirror as a symbol of self-reflection within the psyche; the mirror of writerly self-reflection. While Autobiography is indeed that relatable symbolic gesture of looking in the mirror, it is easy to get caught in the literary interpretation of the text. The mirror is the tool, an objective point of seeing things exactly as they are. The long passage leading to Woolf's revelation of her own traumatic experience of incestuous sexual abuse at the hands of her brother; and the very eloquently described lead up to this naming as an act of heroism on behalf of all women and long before it was considered socially acceptable even to mention the notion of sexual abuse. Woolf's awareness of the collective trauma of the female experience brings the significance of the writing as an inspirational healing text. As Woolf places herself in time, it isn't lost on contemporary readers that this notion of sharing one's own story is a form of self-empowerment. In situations of sexual abuse, the solidarity found in sharing such experiences resonates clearly into contemporary timelines and toward the #ME TOO movement.

Writing through the trauma of loss and self-harm

With writing as her tool, Virginia Woolf shapes her experience into a symbolic order, out of chaos. The text is the direct link to her inner work. Here, she reveals three significant instances connected with traumas of the past. She not only reveals the memory but why they are meaningful and how the mere writing and connecting of them is a healing act: The first revelation takes place in the following passage, where readers can see her making order out of chaos. The first passage shows her memory with experiences of violence, powerlessness and directly after, the adjoined passage shows how she notices her own oneness.

"As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed as St. Ives and nothing made a dint upon me. Then for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. I will give a few instances. The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn; We were pummeling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person?  I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed. 

The second instance was also in the garden at St Ives. I was looking at the flower by the front door; "That is the whole," I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part earth. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later (MOB 71).

Embedded within the poetic recalling of these two memories, the role of being a writer is at play as the ultimate interpreter of her becoming wholeness. Freeman draws an interesting parallel between Woolf's emotional experience of being beaten and how this experience impacts her as the writer, observing in retrospect:

"The shock of a beating occasions Woolf's knowledge that rupture may function as a form of revelation; its reception initiates a drive to repeat in words the impact and imprint of the blows she has received. Being beaten not only provides her with a paradigm for being but institutes a reciprocal and necessary relationship between beating and writing in which the one elicits and engenders the other. (Freeman 71)"

While Woolf's experience of being beaten triggers the emotions associated with violence, the traumatic experience also necessitates the catalyst for the state of being, as a feeling of 'aliveness.' 

Woolf describes a third instance following the passages, where she encounters another type of traumatic moment, this time involving the suicide of a family friend. 

Some people called Valpy had been staying at St. Ives and had left. We were waiting at dinner one night, when somehow I overheard my father or mother say that Mr. Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr. Valpy's suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night – in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed (MOB 71). 

Here the focus of the apple tree, the etheric and symbolic image of living, becomes tied in with the encounter of loss. The hopelessness and paralysis of death is an interconnection and vividly remembered in the present. This merging, the beingness as real as the trauma itself, is a significant point of awareness in her consciousness. 

The three moments that Woolf describes contribute to Woolf's experience of wholeness. Like watching the flower and seeing it as "a token of some real thing behind appearances." Woolf goes on to say that the only way to make the experience "real" is to "put it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps by doing so, I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together." Here again, the writerly role is a guide through connecting the memories toward a point of understanding:

 These are three instances of exceptional moments. I often tell them over, or rather they come to the surface unexpectedly. But now that for the first time I have written them down, I realise something[...] Two of these moments end in a state of despair. The other ended, on the contrary, in a state of satisfaction[…] It strikes me now that this was a profound difference[…] between despair and satisfaction[…which] arose from the fact that I was quite unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other; that a man I had seen had killed himself. The sense of horror held me powerless. But in the case of the flower I found a reason; and was thus able to deal with the sensation. I was not powerless. I was conscious—if only at a distance that I should in time explain it. 

these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive […] this explanation blunts the sledgehammer force of the blow […] though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable (MOB 72).

Her words articulate the multi-layered sensations of sadness, pain, awareness, which emerge as poetic imagery. This transference of feelings of her witnessing by overhearing a traumatic moment releases this heightened sense of being. She shows how the emotions can become entrapped in the body as memory. The writing is an extension of that consciousness; the interconnection of life to death is the locus of transformation, which in turn is the expression itself, wholly relatable and communicable in its raw form. From this process, there is an emergence happening, not just a recalling of memory, but a rejoining the lost pieces of self.  In Expressive Arts Therapy, decentering is the process of falling apart. The artistic process is a method that leads away from analytical into a primordial understanding. Being immersed in any art modality creates an opening in the psyche, releasing the emotions entrapped within the body. 

It is imperative to note here that art as an expression of trauma is not to belittle, cheapen, make light of or exploit the seriousness or intensity of those feelings and circumstances surrounding traumas such as violence, death, suicide, or sexual abuse. Woolf's enriching descriptions of her traumas come with complicated consequences. What is not shown in the text is the actuality of her writing of the memoir comes about a year before Woolf took her own life in 1941—approaching the epitome of a long struggle with mental illness, self-harm, hopelessness, and despair. It has been documented that Woolf probably took her own life, motivated by her fear of a Nazi occupation of England. She feared for her worsening mental state; she feared that she would be immobilized from her creative habits and become a burden to her family: hopelessness- a desire for control over one's fate. 

If we consider Woolf's writing as a record of her ongoing healing process, it might prompt the question about what memoir can do?  While we cannot retract to the past to save Woolf from her fate, we can use her narrative as a canvas of inspiration toward our own interpretation. Woolf's legacy, embedded in the writings she's left, can be readily referenced by inspired readers. She has connected herself towards many lifetimes of future readers, and her experiences live within that shared experience of healing.

Author and Reader as Community 

Woolf's offers her readers an informal relationship, where the reader feels welcome to contemplate parallels of their life in comparison. "Various manuscripts of 'A Sketch of the Past' shows that its tentative form, its quasi-journal appearance, and pretense of being only notes or raw material for art, is actually deliberate and permanent (McCord 250)." Woolf's language skips the pretense of fiction, even casting aside her own primary writing to dive-deep into the mind at the moment, and the revelation process becomes a shared experience with her reader. "Moments of Being" are a heightened state of awareness, in which all things are possible. The moments encapsulate the feelings of trauma, the pain of death the mystical experiences of un-linear remembering. Woolf's confidence and skill in holding the narrative give the reader permission to participate in the moment and draw a parallel with their own experiences. This unspoken allowance prompts ease of the process, not as an authoritative narrator, but as a guide through the revelatory processes of the mind, creating "a truer idea of her sense of her life as a tentative structure, always in construction, taking shape as she narrated it" (McCord 252)

Perhaps it is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.  From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mind; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet and Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. (Moments of being p 72)

Her revelatory narrative shows her readers toward an inclusive whole. Through the writing process, she reveals herself to be breaking free from the careful construction of work and, in so doing, breaks the "fourth wall" as it were to address her readers directly. The choice to speak directly to her audience is significant. In this direct address, she establishes trust with her readers. Her willingness to trust the readers themselves drawing upon that familiarity, she bravely strides toward some innate knowledge and depth of self, which drives her readers toward their own contemplation. The revelatory process of sharing and reaching toward an authentic relationship; toward an in-depth knowledge of the internal narrative of self; as well as a deep trust and understanding of the external narratives of her world and position; she fits herself and her experiences as the key piece which may unmask the veil of loneliness. 

Reading a memoir, seeing an author reveal their true self dips into the phenomenon of how human beings relate through narrative experience. Sharing stories is a catalyst toward self-revelation. The vulnerability and braveness that is revealed by sharing becomes a catalyst for the awakening of the witnesses. The vulnerability of confessing one's own truth is both fearful and empowering. The exposure of the personal truth creates a significance and purpose toward the validity of the human experience. 

There is an opening in Woolf's words for exploration beyond the literal facts and values of the text; she seems to write with the intention of revelation and inspires her readers to become the authors of their own lives in order to bring themselves closer to their own memories, to seek their own embodiment. Her words call for participation in a revelation about the human process, trusting that she is not alone in her feelings and experiences. She trusts the reading community, even, seemingly, outside the bounds of time or linear history. In the moment of writing, she seems to be fully aware of the shared consciousness of the female experience. 

In the larger context of psychotherapy, Autobiography fits with the informed and intentional application of words- acts- rituals of self and social acceptance as a method of healing emotional pain. Expressive arts therapy transmutes experience beyond autobiographical knowledge and remembering and uses art to create a new pathway toward a shift in consciousness and perception about oneself. 

Even the act of reading an experience like moments of being (or numerous other autobiographies like it) can be a sort of a witnessing, prompting us toward the exploratory knowledge of the self. It can be immediately applied toward making sense of one's own piecemeal narratives. The value of Woolf's words provides a jumping-off point for pulling ourselves out of the claws of isolation, into a place of interconnection and self-healing. This intensely personal quest, exemplified by Woolf, explores the boundaries of consciousness and relationships and narrative as if she is pioneering herself forward, to push out old ideas and concepts, and make way to a new way of being in the world.

In Principals and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy,  Levine discusses James Hillman's idea of honoring depression: by "allowing it to manifest itself[…] through an awakening of the imagination, and attending to of the forms of the soul wherever they manifest themselves […] as "our fragmentation can become experienced as a resource of fertile multiplicity, a source for renewal of the psyche." (P&P 54)

The simple act of witnessing a personal autobiographical narrative; puts us into a relationship when we are granted open access to someone's thoughts (within the parameters presented to us). The passive witness becomes part of the conversation and recognizes the intrinsic incompleteness and comparisons and parallels of their own life without being told to so. 

The simple call to make sense of one's memories is humbling and worthy task. One might take this as an initiative to think and remember and record memories and, in so doing, create a context for one's healing process, or to leave a mark towards one’s way of thinking and being. There is, indeed, an innate human need (even merely for one's own sake) to reveal or review the significant events of one's own life. 

Woolf's writing can inform and insight us into writing as a tool for healing in which we can gain our own unique insights. We travel through our own memories and the recorded memories of others toward some quiet and satisfying understanding of ourselves and our world. 

Birrento, Ana Clara. "Virginia Woolf- Moments of Being. Virginia Woolf: Three

Centenary Celebrations. Marian Candida Zamith and Luisa Flora, ed. Faculdade de Letras de Universidade do Porto: 2007

Cousineau, Diane. Reflecting Surfaces: Mirrors and Autobiography. Life-writing, the 

Body, and the Mirror Gaze: Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past" Is There Life beyond the Looking Glass? Letters and labyrinths : women writing/cultural codes. University of             Delaware Press; London; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, Newark,1997.

Freeman, Barbara Claire. "Moments of Beating: Addiction and Inscription in Virginia

Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past." Diacritics, vol. 27 no. 3, 1997, p 65-76. Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/9464

Gottlieb, Laura Moss. Ginsberg, Elaine K. eds, Joanne Trautmann (Intro) Virginia Woolf:

Centennial Essays. Whitston Publishing Company. London. Jan 1, 1984.

Hite, Molly. "Virginia Woolf's Two Bodies." Jan 10, 2000 Genders 1998-2013.

https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2000/01/10/virginia-woolfs-two-bodies

Knill, Paolo. Foundations for a Theory of Practice. Levine, Stephen K. "The Philosophy 

of Expressive Arts Therapy: Poesis as a Response to the World." Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. Jessica Kingsley Publishers; London; Philadelphia, PA.

Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. 

1960.

McCord, Phyllis Frus. "'Little Corks That Mark a Sunken Net': Virginia Woolf's 'Sketch

of the Past' as a Fictional Memoir." Modern Language Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 1986, pp. 247–254. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3194904.

Van Manen, Max. "Phenomenology of Practice." Phenomenology & Practice Volume 1   (2007) No 1. Pp.11-30. The University of Alberta.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. Jeanne

Schulkind, editor. Harcourt, Inc. San Diego. 1985.

Gordon, Lundall. Woolf, Virginia: A Writer's Life. Little Brown Book Group. London.

1984.

The importance of knowing what you want

All creative journeys begin with a touch inspiration and a are filed on by tons of hard work. Sometimes, the initial heartfelt spirit of a creative endeavor can be quickly overshadowed by an overwhelming anxiety. Overthinking tasks, and feeling the stress and burnout of emotional and physical energy required to fuel our creative seeds, (particularly when we are following the path of a desire to write and record a story). Writing is a labor of love, with potentially zero payoffs. A time consuming and sometimes obsessive venture that battles our very best judgments, time management, money, sleep, and self-esteem. The consequences of our choice to write that book we’ve been dreaming about requires adherence to work habits and the narrow avoidance of being entrapped by comparison to our peers and mentors and worshiped literary idols.

We look at the blinking cursor on the screen and unravel at the notion that we might not have what it takes to complete the project. How can we avoid that fateful easy to slip down the slope, straight into the den of self-sabotage, where all our well-intentioned dreams go to die.

Knowing what you want and reminding yourself of your goals and accomplishments on a regular basis might just keep you from falling into the unhealthy habits that lead into an uncreative rut.

When someone I really care about asks me, “Hannah what do you really want?” I tend to feel stumped by this question. In my personal and work relationships, I am usually the one asking others “What do you really want?” As a writing coach, I this question as a prompt to help my client remember why they are going forward on this creative journey. What happens when we are asked by others, or even better, ask ourselves, “What do I want out of this experience/situation/relationship/life?

The question of “what do you really want?” Is easy to ask and hard to answer, even as I have been busy helping others achieve their dreams. The first answer is “I don’t know what I want.” Which is sort of a thinly veiled response for: “I don’t know what I deserve.” People feel put on the spot for even having to verbalize their own magnificent desire. The challenges of adulthood bring most people to a point where they feel like it isn’t going to happen. Yet the challenges of adulthood also prove, that it is important to give it a shot, even if you end up with not much to show for the hard work.

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a catastrophic event, like divorce, the loss of a job, loss of a loved one or a near-death experience, to really prompt that life-changing questions into motion. There are countless examples of people who come to a crossroads and are in fact forced into the question of: “What do you really want?” 

• Do I want a sense of oneness with the universe?
• Do I want a more fulfilling relationship with my family or significant other?
• Do I want more satisfaction with my job/career/business/creativity?
• Do I want to feel more confident around others or within myself?
• Do I want to take better care of myself physically/recover from an illness/become more physically fit or have more balanced nutrition?

When I think about all the ways I wanted to better my life, and what I have to show for my accomplishments, it’s hard to rectify our little expectations with our big reality. There is a pressure coming from within me to fix all the problems at once. I have been in situations where I felt that the areas where I felt lacking in my life seemed to meld into one giant cloud of anxiety and confusion. This cloud of anxiety pulls us in and leads us to be attracted to things that would help us into temporary or even long-term escapes. These temptations are real and they are tied to deep fears of inadequacy. The last thing we want to do was examine my own shortcomings, or be present with dark, sad, angry feelings.

So here we find the cycle of the writing life. Sometimes the very thing that pulls us down into despair, the sensitivity to the fragility of life, the awe of the world around us; is the very thing that will pull us out of our grief, and into a connection with the world.

Most of us begin our adult lives with a strong sense of what we want and who we want to be, then the trials of adulthood hit hard, life experiences and circumstances come, seemingly out of nowhere, to challenge all aspects of who we thought we were or what we thought we wanted in life. 

It seems that everyone comes around to this reckoning sooner or later, and for some, it is easy to feel defeated by the uncharted circumstances or situations that life brings. It is also easy to look around at a room full of people, and think that you’re the only one who doesn’t have their shit together. 

We all have someone in life that we look up to, envy, idolize or revere, as setting a standard for our own work. We look for the stories (sometimes unconsciously) unfolding on our friends facebook pages, on the glossy pages of vanity magazines, airbrushed sexily on a billboard, deep within the pages of our favorite books, or flashing across the screens of our new favorite TV series.

We spend our life feeling cynical, depressed, inadequate, self-doubting, anxious and self-loathing because we can’t live up to the images and narratives that we allow to flood into our heads. We struggle to rectify the things we absorb in the fabricated world of social media, and the real-life playing out before us… opening the door to the chronic dissatisfaction that our era seems to be making a reputation for. 

We accept more work, longer hours, less time with our families and loved ones with the idea that the hard work is going to pay off in droves, once we make it past a few goal markers. There are a lot of messages out there in the world, telling us to work harder, to set goals, to make plans, to get ahead, to compete for the things you want, to strive forward toward that perfect ideal of health, wealth and wisdom waiting on some distant cloud in the future. 

Some people feel conflicted when they pass through they seek those golden eggs of inspiration, only to encounter the hard work waiting on the other side: the distractions, faulty plans, missed connections and the ever creeping monster of self-doubt coming in to spoil every good intention, cutting us making us feel defeated, sometimes before we even begin the monumental tasks of simply living by our own truth.

There is an old cliche that it takes great mental instability to create great art. An artist has a bit of a masochistic death wish; to see the truth of life one must have the aptitude to ride through the waves of insanity, all the emotional turmoil, going up and down on doses of self-importance and recognition, followed by bouts of depression and self-hatred.

But there is a silver lining. The most important thing to do, when you feel the creeping sense of self-doubt is to take care of your body. Drop this idea that you must attain some perfected version of yourself. Be about your feelings without pushing them away or hiding from them or losing them in the false narrative of what the world says that life is about. 

Go back to what YOU want for yourself establish a clear idea of what you really want, even if your self-critical mind thinks it is far-fetched or unattainable. Don’t believe anyone who says they have it all figured out, they’re probably lying to you, or worse, lying to themselves. Those same folks who appear to be on top of it all, the perfect careers/finances/attitudes/bodies/creative productivity is probably deep within their own internal battles.

Know what you want, and write what you know. This simple truth can wake us back up into our inspiration. Telling stories and producing great, authentic, creative work is driven by our innate human need to feel interconnected to our community. Us humans have an insatiable appetite to find meaning, love, connection, and reliability in all aspects of our life.

Dealing With The Mixed Blessing of Social Media and the Demanding Presence of Technology

If you are a creative or sensitive person, you know this feeling. Technology creeps ever more closely into every single aspect of our lives. With every click or swipe or like, we put our human fingerprint on the digital universe. We live and socialize by our screens, letting the hours melt away in content detachment from the quickly passing lives. Even the internet slang acronym “IRL” meaning “In Real Life” seems to suggest that we have this duality of existence. One is the avatar we create in the digital world, and the other is the living/breathing person that still has needs;  food… water... physical contact… exercise…shelter… work. There are also a great many of us who feel that some kind of artistic expression is also part of their natural human need, as well as spending some time outside in nature.

A recurring theme that has been discussed in my writing coaching sessions and within the Weeds & Wilderness Meet-up group, is the often confusing role of social media and continuous exposure to technology plays within the creative life. Everyone seems has a very individual relationship with social media and how they involve technology in their everyday lives.

Many artists, writers, and musicians like me, rely on media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, youtube and Spotify, and personal websites to sell their music, communicate with a fan base or viewers, discover new opportunities, network for jobs, meet new people, date, get directions, pay bills, work, earn a living. Your media platform is the face you put to the world, having a poorly setup website is kind of like wearing your pajamas to work, you might be amazing at what you do, but if you show up looking messy and unkempt, people might perceive you as unprofessional.

Technology can also be the greatest tool for inspiration or the greatest distraction. What may begin as a simple google search can suddenly become a youtube video extravaganza, leaving crucial creative or work hours squandered into wasted time. The flashy screen, with its algorithms priming us like helpless addicts. The internet is the perfect tool for stress avoidance. It takes our bad days and sorrows and anxieties and whisks us away into another plane of existence. We humans naturally crave comfort in times of stress and it takes huge truckloads of self-discipline and self-reflection to get away from distractions, and re-connect with our creative influences and begin to really work toward those creative goals.

On the flip side of inspiration is disconnection. It is easy to go on social media and look at snippets of other peoples lives and begin to fall into comparison. We others who seem like they are cruising through their beautiful experiences; making our real lives, seem small, insignificant and boring. It’s easy to forget that social media is an illusion

When we live our lives in comparison to social media standards, we can begin to feel anxious, that we are somehow not enough. We start telling ourselves that we will never be as good as our idols, and this can lead us to some dark places. In a state of comparison, we see darkness, irritation, lack and disgust with our own shortcomings. We get frustrated and feel ignored by a world that is already saturated with beauty. We think: “What’s the point of being creative when there are so many others who are better at this than I am.” 

These dark thoughts and feelings quickly turn into inaction. We feel overwhelmed with the idea of living up to the impossible or illusionary social standards and we sabotage our own success, feel doubly guilty for letting go of our dreams and goals. It’s difficult rut to recover from. The feelings of self-doubt get deeply embedded within our psyche

I’ve had to learn that self-acceptance means accepting with some of the dark feelings like; fear, sadness, depression, anxiety, self-sabotage, anger, ill health, mental imbalance, and all kinds of other dissonant conditions. It takes a lot of uncomfortable self-reflection to re-route your mental habits away from self-abuse. It takes a willingness to risk coming out of the default comfort zone, to see beyond the present circumstances and into greater possibilities. The process is also counterintuitive because we naturally want to protect ourselves from vulnerability. In the days of the caveman, early humans learned to hide vulnerability to stay alive. If you showed vulnerability, the lions/snakes/neighboring villages would come get you. Humans had to be strong, healthy and confident in order to survive a harsh winter or impress a mate to ensure future generations.

Fear and anxiety come directly from the survival instinct, and sometimes, in order to move forward, we have to call on other instincts to override the feelings that make us want to run away or give up. If we can sit with and acknowledge our loneliness, anxiety, fear, and incompleteness; we can better appreciate the moments of contentment, balanced health, special time with friends and loved ones or even an afternoon of fair weather, or most importantly, focus our minds for producing creative work.

Social media can be our greatest tool, but it can also be our greatest weakness. Social media can build our business or ruin our reputation. Social media can connect us with the people we love, or pull us into battles we don’t want to fight. Social media can inspire us out of a creative rut, or it can enable our avoidance for important movements forward.

So, what should a creative person do when they feel overwhelmed or isolated by the fluctuating relationship with social media? Here are some options:

• Take some time to log out. Choose a day when you can unplug all day, and take a survey of what you have done. Revisit old journals or things that you have done before. Remind yourself of what you are capable of.
   
• Ask yourself what you really want from your life. Write down a list of your goals in detail, and focus in on the steps you need to do to achieve them. Make those steps a part of your daily/weekly routine.
   
• Get outside the normal routine. Seek out new experiences or try new activities. Go for a walk in a town you’ve never been to before. With your camera/sketchbook or journal, and record what you see. Life experiences fuel creativity. You may get some new insights, or see the world differently, just by paying attention to the small details.
   
• Meet people face to face and show them or tell them about your work. 
   
• Reach out to leaders and experts who inspire your field of interest, and ask them questions about their artistic process. You may not be surprised that their journeys and questions might be similar to your experience. 

If some of your mentors (like mine) were alive centuries ago, visit the books and artworks they created. Think of it as their special gift to you; they are expecting you to be inspired and they will be flattered that you are creating something new out of inspiration from what they created in their lifetime.

The most important piece of advice is, take ownership of your own voice and choices. Remember that inevitably only you can speak for yourself. As a writing coach, I can help lead aspiring writers down the right path, but I will never truly be able to know what is best for everyone. We are our the experts on ourselves and what we think is best. The ultimate gift that all creative artists can give the ability to convey your own unique perspective to the world.

The Artful Procrastinator

I have always been a bit of a daydreamer. At least that's how I have always seen myself. I didn’t do particularly well in school. It wasn’t that I lacked intelligence or interest in my studies. I would attend class and attentively listen to my teachers and try my best to understand what was taught. But when it came time to demonstrate my newly acquired knowledge or complete a carefully constructed assignment. I would put off completion until the very last moment, choosing instead to get lost in my own world. I would read only books that truly interested me.

I was a poet from the onset, obedient and observant to the outside world, but willfully determined to create my own inner landscape, filling myself in with words, literature, artistic sensibilities, art, friendship, favorite movies nature, travel, and not a lot else. I wholeheartedly indulged in my own fantasies and was often willfully ignorant of what my teachers and parents thought I should be learning.

As I grew into a teenager, and my inner world began to be bombarded by increased adult responsibilities and increased emotional anxiety. Like many American children of the 80’s and 90’s, my parents' divorce was the impetus of many of my childhood grievances. Growing up in a broken home, while there was plenty of love and togetherness, and my parents absolutely did the best they could with what they had; there were many times when I felt lost in the dramatic episodes of split family life. I was a lonely kid and I felt like I had to hide my pain and sadness. I used writing as an outlet for my heartache, mostly through journaling, art, and poetry.

When I was a teen, there was a huge chasm between the way I articulated myself to others, and the thoughts and ideas I wrote down in my diary. I began to withdraw from the pains of family life and put more of myself onto paper. My artistry became an avoidance technique. I used writing to protect myself from the harsh pains of growing up. I was a sensitive and empathetic child growing into a sensitive adult. I was easily overwhelmed with the heated emotions of others and took those techniques out into the world with me when I left home for college.

My infatuation for poetry and literature and my propensity to procrastinate grew up hand in hand. Reading and writing poetry led me to a deeply romanticized sense of reality. I could be easily enchanted by ideas, philosophies, people, and places. I was also easily distracted and found it difficult completing tasks or work I felt was too hard or uninteresting. I avoided uncomfortable social situations and found myself easily overwhelmed by large crowds or events. I even found myself giving up close relationships and friendships when they became too hard or complicated. I was the type of person that could walk away and withdraw into my sad made up the world.  

In my 20s I had intense visions of myself in an idealistic future. I was optimistic I was going to be a great writer, a world traveler. A well-versed performance poet, a scholar, a theologian, a women's’ rights activist, painter and spiritual intuitive, and everyone was going to like me. I was going to plow through obstacles and inhibitions that stood in my way. I was surging with overconfidence and crippling self-doubt at the same time. I was also the type of person that would crumble at the first sign of rejection. I boldly sent my poems to a long list of paying literary magazines and then folded at the canned rejections. I sweat over some MFA applications and artist residences and relished in my horror as the world refused to catch onto my cool eloquence. I was gleeful and dismayed at the same time. Essentially, I had no idea that I had no idea who I was.

I marched into my MFA graduate program with my head held high and graduated four years later, with barely a dream and a song to count for. I had stacks of poems and a memoir manuscript that were strong in words but weak in ambition and courage. During graduate school, I began to cave under the shoddy walls of my romantic idealism. I caved at the criticism of my peers and the high standards of my professors. I shied away from big opportunities on the notion that they would probably be emotionally overwhelming and I would probably be shitty at them anyway. I secretly envied my colleagues and cowered in front of high caliber authors, whom I occasionally met on book tours. I also faltered in my mediocre teaching position. I resented most of my students (save for a few) and balked at the pointlessness of teaching the art of writing to unwilling and uncaring undergraduates.

I left graduate school in a shell of depression and confusion and mistrust for the whole collegiate academic system. I felt unprepared for the pressures of adulthood, balancing financial independence, career, practicality, hard work, motivation, self-care, relationships, ideas about the future. I felt dismayed and blameful of the world that had raised me. How could I have been seduced into the romantic notions of getting an expensive degree in Poetry, how and why did I think that was a viable idea that would make me a successful person at work and in life. I ended graduate school with these feelings and thus, let self-doubt slip into my daily routine, and went forth allowing myself to be filled in by anything other than the painful truth of the artwork I had once passionately wanted to create. I felt burnt out and disappointed by the fallibility poetry, and I put away my dreams into an unknown future.

There is a very specific type of anxiety that comes with trying to write well. Writing requires me to understand myself and the nature of my own feelings before I can march forward with my career and my productive hours of penning and typing. I needed a lull in my enthusiasm for writing to understand how the mind was getting get caught in the trap of self-sabotage. I had let the emotional wear and tear overwhelm me to the point of no return. I had managed to emotionally separate myself from writing, the thing I loved most, the thing I used to be the best at. I had to see and know how my own thinking was killing my inspiration. I had to feel not good enough or I had to feel failure, in order to begin the process of healing. The process of re-alignment with the true self can take a whole lifetime to undertake. I was caught in a perpetual depressive state and I let it steer me far away from what I truly wanted. I had to put precious creative seeds, poems, journals, rough drafts away in storage. In order to reconnect again with myself and my ambitions. Writing had become associated with the emotional challenge, and I wasn’t yet willing to encounter the deep sadness that had discouraged me.

After graduate school, I did very little writing turned my attention to the people and things around me. I got a job working with teens and children. I adopted a dog, I got married, I spent lots of time with family and friends, I spent time traveling and enjoying the outdoors. I learned how to meditate, I learned to cook, I read lots of books, I went to therapy and I also spent a lot of time feeling guilty about not writing.

It took a lot of rapidly changing life circumstances to come back around into a place where I was ready to be productive again. The slide started with some personal health crisis, a stint in the hospital for kidney stones, followed closely by a knee injury requiring major surgery and a long recovery time. Soon after my surgery, I lost my beloved dog to bone cancer, and not long after that, my husband took a work opportunity and I gave up my beloved nanny job. My husband and packed up our entire life, said goodbye to everything we once knew, and I moved to a new continent. While I welcomed my new situation, I was still recovering from the radical changes my life had gone through over the previous year’s time. I was having a crisis of physical body, putting on extra weight, and sinking into a depression over what next steps to take with my life. I didn’t embrace orienting myself in a new culture, I felt overwhelmed by learning a new language, making new friends and meeting new people. I sunk into myself. I rode the wave of procrastination all the way to the rocky cliffs. I distracted myself with visiting friends, weekend trips to Italy and Helsinki and Prague and spent long lonely weekdays in sad self-loathing, tiredness, depression, TV, tears, self-misery. I was terrified of trying to find work I longed to see myself in a position of professionalism and success, but I was also convinced that I had already missed out, I was convinced that potential employers would see me as a failed artist and immediately dismiss me for a better, more qualified candidate. I grieved over missing my friends, the little boys I took care of and beat myself up over thinking that I abandoned them. I even picked fights with my mother over e-mail and itched with contempt when I could feel my far away family worry about me, and wonder how I was getting on. I even at this low point, I wasn’t yet ready to forge ahead into my new writing self. I tried, I scratched a few stories here and there, but it was hard. I dug into my self-blame, I beat myself up for wasting a lot of beautiful time feeling scared and lonely and depressed. I hid away my blues and spent a lot of time not wanting to wake up in the morning.

After a few months of hovering around my self-doubt, I got pregnant and miscarried at 8 weeks, got pregnant again a month later and miscarried a second time again at 8 weeks. The roller coaster of joy, sadness, stress, depression and hormonal free fall all within that 5 month period was completely unbearable. I was already on shaky ground emotionally, and when the second miscarriage hit, I hated myself and my life in a way I never had before. I found myself in a state of intense depression, and barely saw a day where I couldn’t cry or totally detach. I had come so far and in a beautiful apartment in the city center of Amsterdam, I could barely make it out of bed. My brain was a mix of rollercoastering hormones, grief, self-doubt, confusion, heartache, and longing for the simplicity and confidence of a me that I thought had never and would never exist. I was saddened by the thought that the idealistic and expectant dreamer I was in my 20s would be disappointed with the confused, depressed, and now, failing to sustain life in my body. Who was this self-loathing person I saw in the mirror before me at 35? My 35-year-old self, in turn, hated my 20-year-old self for getting wrapped up in the romanticism of life and allowing herself to be seduced by the notions of beauty and poetry as a good career choice.

As I laid on the couch, hating myself binging on everything that my poor mind and soul could find, I wallowed in anger and sorrow and bitterness and for the first time, I truly didn’t care. I stood face to face with the pointlessness of life and genuinely asked myself if it was worth it. “What do you want Hannah?” My therapist asked me. I didn’t know and hated myself for not knowing. The question burned into me. The not knowing myself and what I want had burned into me because it seemed to represent my failure as an artist and as a person. I was angry at the world that I was trying to help and understand, I was angry at myself for not having it all together. In society, we praise and envy the people that seem to be winning at life. We envy the people who have the right words and ways to power through life with resilient ease, grace and gusto, and self-honesty. We hate ourselves for falling short, for not living up to the beautiful standards, that perfect cream and sugar added to bitter, black coffee. It’s that perfect Instagram filter that takes away the harsh blemishes and weird lighting and double chin.

So what now? Now comes the arduous task of rolling back into the state of the living. My procrastination has become a device which no longer serves me. The full on half of all creative writing activity is over, and I have to turn back to it as a form of survival.  Now comes the weeks of therapy and ripping off the band aid of self-delusion. Now comes the drilling in of what my life will be about, the figuring out of what I want for myself, the halting of temptation and ease that comes with taking care of everyone else ahead of myself. Now comes the work of tuning out distractions, and tuning into the radical truth of who I am and what I want. As I have found, climbing out of the whole is easy when you are ready. It takes being able to sit with the uncomfortable feelings for long enough to just let them taper out. It takes a little bit of self-awareness, a little bit of exposure in the form of honesty, to own up to those dark feelings, to face the critics inside and out and not be defeated by them. When the feelings are out in the open, they begin to dissipate.

Now is the time where I start making a passionate investment of time and emotional energy into creating something beautiful, regardless of its emotional weight or potential rejection.  Now is the time to follow the cheesy motto “Do It Anyway, even though it’s scary, even though it hurts.” My inner critic is sly, sophisticated, mean, tricky, self-deprecating. She is always looking for a line of reasoning to stop me in my tracks. She wears me out daily by moving the goal post, turning on the TV, telling me that I am too tired, or that I really should do the dishes instead of writing poetry. My inner critic maintains the baseline of fear, regret, comparison, jealousy, overwhelmedness, failure, dissatisfaction, blame and worst of all, self-pity. My inner critic plays the procrastination game hard core. My inner critic is not my enemy, she is also protecting me, keeping me alive, questioning my judgment, editing my work, and checking me on my runaway romantic delusions. She is also forgivable, and without her, I cannot be a whole thinking imperfect human being.

Originally setup to protect us from predators and bad weather and starvation, anxiety is now in the business of distracting us from putting our hearts on the line. Modern society gives us all the beautiful conveniences like food, shelter and love and social validation. When we feel secure, we begin to imagine ourselves as being more creative, letting our hearts sing, writing down our thoughts, and putting our ideas and experiences into shareable formats. Humans have an amazing capacity to create their environment into art. To self-reflect on their past and visualize a romantic future. We have a unique ability to create and portray fictional characters that we can love or hate just as readily as any human being. We do a lot with our minds and bodies. Creativity is an emotional act. Procrastination is one way for our own brain to protect itself from emotional vulnerability.

Since many of us sensitive folks have discovered the art of art making as a way to process our feelings, we are also deeply susceptible to rejection or limitless self-criticism. When we are afraid, our built in mechanism is to rationalize away our fear with excuses, distractions, unconscious habits, avoidance tactics, irrational comparisons, tv, computer and phone screens and worse, our own negative logic. The brain tricks us out of creative output by latching on to easy distractions like conversations with our partner, meals, chores, sunshine.

We invent excuses and tell ourselves we aren't good enough, not creative enough, not eloquent enough, not young enough, don't have the time, energy, productive spirit, knowledge, wisdom, experience, legal right, motivation, plot points, character development or life experience to complete the project that we’ve been dreaming about our whole lives.

The truth is, that we're mostly right about ourselves. That is to say. Once we start down the path of self-sabotage, the things we fear most about ourselves begin to manifest in our habits. Self-criticism and wounded self-esteem lead us to abandon hope and become depressed and become the very thing that we are afraid of becoming. Amid all of the silly invented excuses, we sometimes hit on nerves so deep that they will stop us in our tracks for weeks, months or even years, like an abandoned factory that has been sitting for years, collecting dust and ghosts.

The other truth is, that most master craftsmen (and women) of any trade, don't really have their shit together either. The one difference might be their level of commitment and focus. Just like an Olympic athlete, we need a sharp schedule, a sense of motivation, a strong stomach and a good coach, and a willingness to produce shitty work until it starts to smell like gold.

Be willing to write it all down, be willing to fill pages of crap in your journal or onto your word processor. The best writing comes when there is no expectation that it will ever be the best or even see the light of day. Write until you get to the end. Show it to anyone who is willing to read it, listen to their reactions and be willing to start it all again if you need to. Don't throw it away, just keep moving through it until it becomes something special to you.

Claiming My Writer Self

When I was about nine years old, I had enough awareness to think of myself as a writer and a poet. It wasn’t an urgent calling, but more like an understanding of the mystical bridges between the images and feelings of my world, binding together in the beauty of words. Soon my little rhymes turned into a serious passion, and by the time I was in high school, I was wearing a red beret as proof of my poet status.

I spent my youth and college years in a steady stream of undoubted devotion to writing. I explored all forms, sought out many poets (new and old) and filled many journals and typed pages with my ongoing observations. I rode on this poetic status right through graduate school, and on into academic readings, papers, teaching, and even further back into a thesis manuscript of poetic memoir and a free narrative exploration inspired by some stories in my family history.

In 2009 I defended my thesis, and it seems, checked out of my poet status. I, like many good graduate students, had reached a state of burnout. I lost touch with the romantic edge of poetry and found myself separated from the world which I had been blinded too.

Losing a passion for poetry is not unlike losing a lover. I found myself unprepared for life away from my graduate school foundations. I had little appetite for more school. I and loosened many contacts, as my fellow grad students went on to do various other pursuits. In this loss of community, I felt myself sink further into isolation from my former creative. I did other things:

I adopted a dog. I got married. I got a job as a nanny and another part time job working with teens. I turned 30 then 31,32,33,34 and on.

I tried, ever so slowly, to work on my writing, but I felt lost. The self-assurance that I had in my teens and 20s would have been quick to judge the 30+woman I had become, for failing her own high and charismatic expectations. I felt myself drifting into a place of excuses, and self-pity, and sadness

Moving to Amsterdam created an even wider gap between myself and my community. My friends and family were far away and I found myself in an unfamiliar place. There were new barriers of language, culture and my brain sweat to keep up with the steep curve of new experiences. I didn’t always rise to the challenge. I spent a lot of time feeling hurt and scared and alone.

As I have come to the first annum of my arrival. I had to make a commitment to get out of my lostness. I had to force myself to feel some sense of connection, or admit defeat and return home.

While I got some satisfaction out of returning to writing, there was an element of isolation that comes with being an artist in a new city. It is so easy to hide behind technology, inside Facebook, behind the safety of a screen.

I need face to face connection, and I need to create a community for myself and others like me. People need this type of connection.

There are so many things that make people feel separated: age, language, politics, religion, gender, life experience, beliefs, technology (to name a few). It is so easy to allow these separations to make us feel like failures. It is so easy to allow the loudest voices in the world to crush our beautiful sensitivities into dust.

Now is the time to stop hiding behind a screen. The best writing brings people together, inviting all who partake in the story to link together into a common world. A good story gets us in touch with ourselves, a good story shows us our commonalities. Returning to that childhood dream of being a writer (a dream that never really left). It has challenged me to quickly get out of my own sense of failure. I had to force myself into a revitalized sense of self.