Taking Stones from My Pockets

One final nugget of wisdom that the unnamed magical realist gave to his audience of young writers was that “Writing is the only true form of therapy.” He said you could pay someone to take you into your subconscious and show you your issues, but they’ll slap a diagnosis on it, which will only give you distance. Writing keeps you all up-close and personal with your problems. No distance. Just you and your subconscious. I have another word for that: wallowing.

One of the things I seemed to absorb from a very young age was that artists are tragic heroes in their own stories. From Vincent Van Gogh and Virginia Woolf, to Heath Ledger and Robin Williams, I used to think that to be an artist meant you had to constantly suffer, which was good, because I felt like I had that suffering part down. It was bad because that meant I had to keep suffering if I wanted to make anything worthwhile.

It wasn’t until I studied Virginia Woolf in undergrad that I finally started to separate the artist from her mental illness. I had just started going to real therapy with a real therapist and taking real pills to account for the real chemical imbalance in my brain.

As I learned about her and read Mrs. Dalloway, I didn’t see a beautiful, artistic martyr anymore. I saw a woman who was very sick, like me, and her sickness killed her. I remember thinking she was brilliant, and she could have shared so much more of that brilliance with us had she not killed herself. But I noticed it is this sort of analysis that perpetuates this stupid idea that people are art factories, and sometimes there are casualties. Mourn Virginia, not the work that could have been.

I like to imagine Virginia at home with the resources I have: taking pills in the morning, going to therapy. She isn’t happy-cheery all the time, but she is alive, and she doesn’t want to die, and she isn’t fundamentally unhappy. She writes because it makes her feel good, because it makes her happy. I find this imagining more heartbreaking than the piles of volumes that she could have written in misery.

Writing can be deeply therapeutic, but it is not the best, or even only therapy at an artist’s disposal these days. Art does not come from suffering. Artists deserve to be happy. I deserve to be happy.

I write because it is healing, and because it makes me happy. If it didn’t do those two things for me, it would probably kill me, and that’s not worth it.

This is part 4/6 of the preface to my MFA thesis. Click below to read other parts as they are posted.

Part 1: Tomato Smoothies

Part 2: Finding the Cabin in the Woods

Part 3: The Irrational Fear of Genre 

Part 4: Taking Stones from Pockets 

Part 5: Fantastical Zoology 

Part 6: I am not Picasso