As I Write

To ask a writer why he writes is to ask a very personal question. If he actually knows something of why, the answer becomes an even more intimate one.

I write because I am afraid I will not be able to write.

I could say that I want the freedom I experience in writing. The solitude it provides. The way I have conversations with myself and with others I will never meet. The community of writers I feel recognized by and a part of. The opportunity to contribute to the literature of psychoanalysis. All of this is true. But it evades a fundamental truth: I have a dread of not being able to return to the unique state of consciousness I find when writing.

It has taken me a long time to know what I mean by these comments. Twenty-five years ago, during a painful period of my life created by a trauma, I was made all too well acquainted with feelings of helplessness and of a sense of alienation. For a time, I lost the capacity to view myself and others in my world as complex characters. I no longer saw in colors or felt a sense of the continuity of past, present, future. I saw in black and white, two-dimensionally. Fortunately, this was a temporary state of mind. But my memory remains of it as a sort of locked-in experience, one I did not have the capacity to work myself out of at the time.

I discovered during this period that reading works of literary fiction provided a kind of preserve: a protected space in which I felt less alone, less cut off from myself, more alive. I could again appreciate complexity, imagine my universe in colors. Here I felt less defined by a single moment in time. This benefit was temporary. So I kept reading. The more I read, the more I wanted to write. I began writing as a means to understand how this process had worked for me (Griffin 2005, 2016). Along the way, I wrote about my painful experience as a piece of autobiographical fiction