Writing, Practice, and Self-Awareness

Words and freedom

I’ve been quiet for a bit. I haven’t written much of anything in weeks. I worry less about my output during writing lulls than I do about how these pauses affect my emotional state.  Writing for me, in addition to all of the career and personal benefits it can produce, is meditative.

When I don’t write, or write very little, for extended periods of time, I experience a kind of unsettledness that is frustrating and distracting. I get irritable. Fidgety. Off-kilter.

As that sensation begins emerging, I try to nip it in the bud, but forcing myself to write can be just as anxiety-producing, and trying to distract myself with other things often exacerbates a pointless shame spiral, only making things worse. I have to find ways of absolving the guilt and knowing the words will be there for me later.

So, because I can identify lack of writing as at least one of the proximate triggers of my unease, it seems reasonable to ponder why, exactly, the practice of writing serves such an important role in my life. The act of writing itself is value-free. It is ultimately a task. It is work. For many people, including myself, it can be a necessary and unpleasant chore. Why does it also comfort me?

I’m both more eloquent and more compassionate when I have this conversation with students than I am when I have it with myself. In class, we often talk about literacies and the value of expression in building identity and self-understanding. At home, I yell at myself to get to work, in a mental tone that is less than pleasant.

---

Let’s try a different valence, a different frame. Maybe I can at least try to teach myself.

Writing is a vital way for me, in the most broad and grandiose terms, to project my introverted self into the world, but it is not the only way I do that, and that is not its only purpose. There is something different about it. It is different from music-making, another crucial medium of expression in my life. It is different from painting. Writing is assembling the symbols and signs that convey meaning in a way that gets as close to “concrete” as we have.

A word indicates a thing, an action, a quality, but language provides a malleability that produces nuance and possibility. We can hold onto a sentence. We can produce a one-to-one correlation between an idea and a real thing, but moving words around, changing syntax, sifting through linguistic memory to find alternatives, and playing around texturize the idea and give it shape.

The loving poodle, the sleeping poodle, the poodle that is looking at you with pleading eyes, the hungry poodle, and the poodle next to the pug all might snuggle with you. But they might do it for different reasons. The results might be different. You might have different responses.

Or they might all be the same poodle.

It can be as specific or broad as you like, but the art part of communication is in the order and specificity of the words.

Most of my work in writing has been in academia, as a professor, academic editor, and coach. Much of that work has involved APA, MLA, or Chicago style books, each of which has distinct guidelines that work to provide a common language for particular disciplines. Students and clients often feel stymied when confronted with the rules and regulations of academic editors, but one of the sources of great joy in my life is showing people that there is, indeed, freedom in the most rigorous and exacting of scientific writing.

The key is giving adequate consideration to the reasons those guidelines exist. More importantly, understanding that these guidelines reveal the impulses, ethics, and driving philosophical principles of disciplines can be liberating. They set the parameters of language in a specific context, but they do not remove linguistic freedom; they shape it. Reporting facts and figures does not remove your agency as an author. It just sets the stakes.

This concept is part of the initial ideation of Calamus Academy, which is currently under construction, with courses slated to start opening within the next few weeks. The relief and empowerment I’ve seen in students and clients when they begin identifying and understanding the underlying motivations of specific styles prompted me to think of ways to bring that demystification to larger audiences. Calamus Academy is designed to break down the guidelines and principles of various writing contexts to put them back together in a cohesive way. When you understand the “why,” the “how” becomes much easier, and sometimes even fun.

I think the mental reordering and reconceptualizing allowed by language is what eases my fidgets, my disorientation, my anxiety, my heaviness. Words have meaning. Within that meaning is more meaning created by structures, descriptions, relationships to other words, memories, cultures, moods. It is art with specificity, but also freedom to create contour.

When my mind is flitting around from worry to worry, task to task, moving words around provides focus and control, while simultaneously affirming creative distinctiveness. My next door neighbor and I can say the same thing, but we will likely do so in different ways. That is because we are different people, and language is part of identity. That is empowering not only for me as an individual, but for me as part of a community.

Writing makes things less hard, both in that it makes things easier and in that it softens the harsh, brittle world.

Like meditation, writing is a practice. It needs to be repeated. Just as my fingers flop clumsily on the piano when I haven’t practiced, decreasing my self-efficacy and general mood, failing to practice writing makes me lose language that has to be reclaimed.

So, there, I practiced.