Sturm Und Drang: On Writing and the Myth of Suffering

After eating and 20 minutes or so of vigorously chewing on her bone, Chalupa – my year-old English bulldog – finally collapses diagonally across her bed and begins to snore. Loudly. She is completely in the moment, responsive to her environment and tuned into her body.

She does not overthink. She does not overwork. She does not question her worth or her contribution to the pack. She just is. Mind you, this is not exclusively because of her canine nature; she also had the good fortune of being cared for in her first eight weeks of life by a kind and knowledgeable human, then brought into an equally loving family environment where she has enjoyed training, structure, and endless amounts of play and love. She has wanted for nothing.

For us humans, it's a wee bit more complicated. Even for those who had stability and nurturing as small people, navigating social expectations, encountering the damage inflicted -- knowingly or not knowingly -- by peers, teachers, religious institutions, and dominant culture, are so much of what wire our thinking and our beliefs about ourselves and what's possible or not possible for us.

We hold ourselves to either too high or too low of standard, expecting failure or demanding perfection without learning about the gifts that await us between these trap doors that lead nowhere. We get stuck in the past or fearful of where it's all leading us, without taking the time to fully inhabit our bodies in the present moment.

We measure ourselves against internalized standards of success, missing out on seeing and celebrating all that we've accomplished. And we are taught to diminish the pain we carry, to push it away, rather than seeing that it may be the gateway to our freedom, to sit with it, to get to know it, to ask questions and listen for the answers within, and to get clear on what we will and will not accept from others on our way.

Worst of all, we hide. Shame festers. We wonder what's wrong with us. Why does everyone else seem to have their shit together?

Each week, I talk with people who write. A brisk walk on the bike path, talking about the sense of paralysis and creative constipation that comes with sitting down to tackle a revision. A Zoom call across 4,000 miles and an ocean, making room for the truth to be spoken out loud, right alongside the fear of naming something about desire. A conversation with a woman deep in the writing of her first book, as she faces into the fact that there is no map and she cannot see what will happen next.

I am at my worst when I overthink things. It's where I am most likely to get hopelessly tangled up in self-doubt, questioning everything, and feeling confused about where I am, who I am, and what I'm doing. In other words, it's a closed loop. It's unproductive and unpleasant and something that feels difficult, in the moment, to disrupt and redirect.

Many of the remedies I've found work best for me for recovering a sense of inner stability and capacity involve quiet and/or movement: Reading or writing in a room without voices, getting outside for a walk or a run -- no headphones, no music, no podcast, no phone. Whether I'm on the beach, in the woods, on just going around my neighborhood, getting the roof out from over my head often helps me return to myself.

If I can get quieter inside, I'm much more likely be able to listen for some useful questions or simply start writing. It's only when I'm making myself jump through a thousand hoops as some kind of sadistic self-imposed hazing ritual that I begin to feel hopeless.

Look, writing and life are not for the faint of heart. It takes a certain degree of grit and devotion to show up, time and again, with no guarantee of any reward other than knowing you made room for yourself, you honored your experience as worthy of exploring on the page, and you created some boundaries around that work. If you don't do it, no one will do it for you.

And, there is also something else. Let's call it gentleness. Call it ease. Call it the possibility that it doesn't have to be all Sturm und Drang in order to be "authentic." While the great Russian novelists may have ascribed to "salvation through suffering," perhaps you have suffered enough. Perhaps you don't need saving.

These lyrics from "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová come to mind:

You have suffered enough
and warred with yourself
it's time that you won.

I look down at Chalupa. She's so cozy, so safe, snoring away, her face all smooshed up against her soft bed. You, my dear reader, are a human being, wild with complexity. You might feel invincible one day and frightened the next. You might need lunch with a friend or just a moment to hold your hand over your steadily beating heart. Your way forward is yours alone. No one has the right to tell you to speed up or slow down; only you can know the pace at which you will move, write, open, close, pause, listen, act, retreat, rest, create.

The poet Anne Sexton, who died nine months after my birth, wrote these words: "Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard." They guide me and remind me that the listening is my home, just as the journey -- to paraphrase Sexton's contemporary, Muriel Rukeyser -- is my home.

Today, instead of questioning and doubting yourself, ask yourself: Where am I making things hard? What do I know to be true?

Then, in your own timing and in your own way, listen. You'll know the way.