Unearthing Layers of Meaning

The surprising evolution of an Instagram post

Barbara: This post is an edited transcript of a conversation that Elizabeth and I had early on, when we were first starting this newsletter. Elizabeth often posts images of objects from around her house with short personal stories about them on Instagram. We thought that following her through the process of creating a post might illuminate how layers of meaning can be unearthed through writing. So, Elizabeth picked a special sweater and wrote this story about it for Insta:

Elizabeth’s snapshot

I’ve had this sweater since the summer I was 19 and traveling around Europe with my college boyfriend, Ernst, when my parents thought I was studying in France. I keep it in my dresser, where it reminds me of what I think of as the great romantic adventure of my youth (long before I met my husband!).

Leaving home for college and finally being free from my parents’ critical surveillance, was bliss, even without being in love, and a taboo love at that. Ernst’s being German gave him a transgressive appeal: he was utterly unacceptable to my parents who—like many Jews in those days—couldn’t bear anything German. But the thrill of defiance took two terrible tolls.

The previous summer I’d discovered I was pregnant, and the illegal abortion Ernst arranged was discovered by my parents, who made my return to college conditional on giving him up for a year. The abortion released me from the terror of having a baby and of ending the open road of my imagined future. I’d kept to the deal and saw Ernst only once. He’d heard about a car accident I’d been in and rushed to the hospital, where I was paying a heavy price in facial injuries for not wearing a seatbelt.

The second summer, the ban on Ernst not quite over, I traveled to my college’s outpost in France, where he secretly met me in his new, red convertible, and off we fled. We found the sweater in an outdoor market run by Roma. I was wearing it the delirious day we met up with my closest, male, highschool friend, and we three coasted down a mountain in silence, the motor off, the roof down, and the wind in our hair, like characters in a Truffaut film.

But later, in the Nuremberg garden of family friends of Ernst’s, the elastic, umbilical pull from my parents reached its limit. Suddenly I saw myself on enemy territory, amidst conversation, not a word of which I understood—or cared to. My joyous sense of freedom was an illusion, a dream, and I knew it.

The sweater connects me to that dream, to the fantasy that I could escape my parents, who indelibly shaped me, as all parents do. I’ve worked hard to get as far from their template as I can, which I realize, the older I get, is not very far at all.

Barbara continues: I started our conversation by asking Elizabeth why she chose the sweater. This was a typical psychiatrist’s open-ended question, a way to get started without placing limits or expectations on what the person might say. Elizabeth takes us on her inner writing-journey. Here’s how the conversation went:

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Elizabeth: The sweater represented a youthful romantic adventure that lives on in my dresser. I started out thinking I was going to write about the sweater’s connection to my youth — and I’m astonished at where it took me. Which, I suppose, supports the sense I had that it was “loaded,” that there was more to unpack. I want that feeling when I choose a subject.

Barbara: We are totally alike in this. There has to be something you don’t know yet, that you want to figure out. 

Elizabeth: I associated the sweater to the rapturous image of coasting down the mountain in an open car with two male friends. But when I started writing, I quickly realized the romance of it was more about freedom than about love. 

My earlier risky behaviors of unprotected sex and not wearing a seatbelt were entirely unlike me; I was rebelling against my parents. I escaped the pregnancy, which could have upended my whole life — in those days an out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a catastrophe, nothing like it is today. But, I couldn’t escape the scars left by the accident.

The following summer, when my parents’ ban on Ernst was still in place, I was breaking my promise to them when I took off with him in Europe. And we drove right off the map, or so it felt. This was before cell phones; I wasn’t in touch with my parents, and for the first time in my life, they had no idea where I was.

Barbara: What did it feel like?

Elizabeth: Exhilarating! Ernst bought me the sweater on that trip. And the silent coasting down the mountain in an open car was so beautiful and cinematic. I felt like the star of my own movie — well, we all are, aren’t we? — and at that moment intensely alive, full of possibility, and free.

Barbara: I’m not sure everyone sees themselves in a movie, although certainly some people do.

Elizabeth: But as I was writing, a snapshot-like image of the garden in Nuremberg, with its glamorous society-people, came to mind. It was in that garden that I realized I was on enemy turf and that it was the end of the road. 

I don't at all share my parents’ anti-German views, but my intense feelings about the Holocaust were aroused in that garden. I couldn’t suppress fantasies about the hosts, wealthy Nurembergers who’d lived through the war (doing who knows what?). My profound sense of being in the wrong place made me see that I’d been pulling against an elastic connection to my parents — and that I’d gone too far.

Barbara: You were rebelling against your parents, but everything you did was in opposition to them — in other words, it was about them. You were not yet autonomous…making decisions based on what you wanted — until then.

Elizabeth: Absolutely. Later, when I went back to revise the piece, I returned to my original statement about the German conversation, “not a word of which I understood” and added, “or cared to.” Just three little words, but they felt like an emphatic assertion of agency, like planting a flag.

Barbara: So this was really a turning-point in your life. How did you know you had come to the end of the story?

Elizabeth: Well, I’d been in search of “the point,” all along, watching where these visual images and associations were leading. And they led straight to the recognition that my sense of being free was an illusion. I hadn’t been free at all. In fact, I had failed to cut the umbilical cord. I wasn’t able to feel free of my parents until long after their deaths, when I wrote my memoir! What I wasn’t able to do at 19, I wasn’t able to do for another 50 years!

What would a reader take away from this?

Barbara: Well, I think they would see how your process of writing works in parallel with personal discovery. The hope of uncovering deep personal insights is what drives your writing. 

Elizabeth: This example does seem to illustrate our notion that the process of putting thoughts into words in writing can open up a path into your inner life. Everyone will do it in a different way. I follow visual images that appear to me. Someone else may hear words or songs. Things come into your mind because you're struggling to articulate something, and that effort is an engine for this kind of internal discovery. 

Barbara: I just realized, there's a progression here. Your first two attempts at freedom failed and were dangerous. You got pregnant. You were injured in an auto accident. Then your rebellion became more benign. You found this sweater, ended up having a glorious experience, and then realized you’d run too far. Your pursuit of freedom ended with your writing your book, which was the rebellion through which you became an autonomous person. And that wasn’t dangerous in any obvious way. In fact, writing the book was a way of transforming emotional pain into something productive, what a psychiatrist would call sublimation. It's the highest level of defense.

Elizabeth: What’s amazing is that I chose the sweater as the subject — when we had just started out on a mission to understand (among other things) why writing my book was transformative. I could have picked many other things. I picked this sweater.

Barbara: New patients often ask me, “Where should I begin?” To which I say, “It doesn’t matter!” All roads lead to Rome.