Writing is Done, but Insights Keep Coming
The power of the written word in three short examples.
In the last post, Barbara and I talked about using associations to reach deeper feelings and layers of understanding. Barbara mentioned that the process of following associations can lead you to “places” that are a complete surprise.
At the risk of exasperating our readers, I want to stick a bit longer with my little Instagram sweater story. As you may recall, I wrote the piece as a vehicle for our close exploration of the writing process. Now, I can’t resist sharing three personal insights I later gleaned from having written what was, in effect, a mere 398 words on a subject I’d chosen on a whim.
For me, writing stories on Instagram is the perfect exercise for working to get deeper, because I start with an image and go where my associations take me (something I understand a whole lot better since the previous post!). Insta’s character limit of 2200, turns the writing into a kind of game for me, as I’m forced to cut to the bone and count every letter and blank space.
The first insight concerns my car accident. The sweater story relates how I rebelled against my hypercritical parents by falling in love during my college years with a German boy; this choice was guaranteed to horrify my parents who, as Jews who’d lived through WWII, were hostile to anything German. On top of that, I got pregnant at the end of my freshman year and had a secret abortion. And as if that wasn’t enough, a few months into my sophomore year I was in a car accident and, as I put it in the Insta post, paid “a heavy price in facial injuries.”
Living with these injuries was easier than you might expect. A seat belt would have prevented them, but I did not torment myself with regret, which would have been only natural. Years later, when my husband Michael was thrown from a horse and broke a hip that healed very slowly, he replayed his fall, over and over, trying imaginatively to undo whatever mistake he might have made. His reaction made me wonder all the more about my own. Why had I accepted so easily the consequences of my negligence?
The answer came with my associations to my accident after writing the sweater post. First I recalled my shock in the car when I touched my face and felt my injuries. Then, I had a visual memory of my rather fierce father (a dentist who did surgery) removing my stitches and his eyes filling with tears. And next, I remembered being frantic and unable to assess the scale of my daughter’s injury — which was, in fact, very minor — when she cut her lip in a fall, at age five, and needed stitches. It became clear that my nonchalance had concealed considerable anguish.
Slowly it dawned on me how much I had made my parents suffer. I thought of how I would have felt if my daughter had gone off to college and experienced the disasters I’d brought about. I’d wanted to get back at my parents, and I had. But rather than facing my guilt at hurting them, I’d accepted my scars as the punishment I deserved. Would I ever have come to this realization if I hadn’t written the story?
The second insight involved the unusual difficulty I had finding the right words to describe, in one sentence, the turning point in my runaway ramble around Europe with my German boyfriend. What exactly had prompted my realization in that Nuremberg garden that I’d gone too far?
Everyone was speaking German without concern that I didn’t know the language, but all I could remember thinking was: “What in the world am I doing here?!” All my attempts to capture this sense of displacement in words failed. In fact, when I tried out, “I didn’t belong,” I suddenly felt my heart pounding, because it seemed so wrong. The wording suggested a yearning to be included, whereas I realized that all I’d felt was a powerful wish not to be there.
This led me to face that, although I had no reason to think ill of the cheerful people in the garden, I couldn’t help imagining them as possible Nazis. And from the Nazi perspective I didn’t belong. Had this been 1940, I’d have been frantic to escape Germany, a thought I hadn’t previously allowed myself. Instead, I’d been insisting to myself that the Holocaust, which happened before my boyfriend and I were born, had nothing to do with us. But in the garden, with wealthy, older Germans who’d actually been there during the war, it was much harder to suppress such thoughts. Eventually I settled on this simple sentence:
Suddenly I saw myself in enemy territory, amidst conversation, not a word of which I understood.
But later, when I returned to the sentence, I felt impelled to add three little words.
amidst conversation, not a word of which I understood — or cared to.
“or cared to”: words a reader would scarcely notice. But typing them in felt like a declaration. “You would reject me? It is I who reject you!” And when I hit the period key at the end, I felt a surge of defiant pride, as though I had planted a flag.
Trying to articulate my then emotional state, had put me back in the garden feeling estranged, trapped, and becoming aware of the terrible history I’d been denying. Typing the three words (not just thinking them) gave me a small, physical sense of pushing back against my former helplessness — 60 years after the fact! How strange is that?
The last insight — and the most surprising of all — concerned the abortion I’d had during the summer following my freshman year of college. The sweater story covers a lot of ground, and I was struggling to get down to the 2200 character limit. At one point I tried cutting the word “having” from the phrase “having a baby” (a saving of seven critical characters) in this sentence:
The abortion released me from the terror of
havinga baby and of ending the open road of my imagined future.
And as I deleted the word, I was swept with such sadness that I buried my face in my hands.
At the time of the abortion I’d felt no loss at all, just an overpowering sense of relief. So I was stunned by what I experienced as I removed the word ‘having.’ The word ‘baby’ that remained on the screen took on a quasi existence, and the process of editing out the word felt like a re-enactment of the abortion — strange as that sounds. How could the mere deletion of a single word elicit so much sorrow, particularly since not having a baby was what I’d most wanted?
The abortion was a godsend for which I am forever grateful, but it was my only pregnancy. My much-later wish for a baby was fulfilled by two beloved children whom Michael and I were able to adopt. I wish I could have given birth to them, but I am their mother, all the same, and my children, around whom Michael and I have built our lives, are the only children I’ve ever wanted.
The grief elicited by the word-cutting was not for the fetus, which had it lived would have changed my future so utterly that nothing of the life I so love now would have been possible. But infertility, as anyone who has experienced it knows, means years of lonely, repetitive loss. The grief was from those sad, sad years, for the lost opportunity to create life.
To me, these examples substantiate what Barbara and I have been uncovering about the special power of writing and the creative process of association. I am amazed to see how much I learned from continuing to dig into such a tiny bit of prose. Above all, I am astonished at the impulse, the “whim,” that directed me to choose the subject of the sweater, without any conscious awareness of where it would lead.
Our project began with my wish to understand why writing my memoir had accomplished (what years of therapy had not), freeing me from the inhibiting bonds to my parents that persisted even after their deaths. So a story that started as a romantic adventure ends up — to my complete surprise — to be about the central struggle of my life, which was resolved through writing.
If you’ve had a similar experience, we’d love to hear about it. Please do leave a comment below.