When Writing Is Right

I had been thinking of writing a blog for quite some time. Unfortunately, I never was able to get it going, to moving from thought to action. Sure, I had composed who knows how many pages worth of material on multitudes of topics, mostly “written” in my head while settling into that sweet spot where body and mind fall away on my long distance runs. Most of the time, the magic ended when the rhythmical movement of feet and arms ceased at the completion of my runs. The trouble had always been the transfer of words from head to paper. Even those times when I rushed inside to put ink on paper, I was never able to capture the full flow of words in proper breadth, depth, and completeness that had spontaneously played out in the interiority of my head. My words had had their momentary being and that moment of fullness was gone. Last week, I finally realized, i.e. brought into reality, my ambition to begin my blog. Why was I able finally to get it going? Simply put, motivations are as complex and multi-faceted as people are. And thus I have no simple answer. But let me begin to unpack this question, and in doing so, share some reasons to write.

I love books. I have a hard time letting a book go once I have read it and it becomes part of my personal library. Books are old friends who keep me company in the quietude of reflection. Whispering in the shadows as the evening sun slants through the windows and as I scan the titles on my library shelves, they converse with me in internal reflections and dialogue. Reading is one thing. Writing is another. Writing is an act of love. It can be difficult, daunting. I have a tendency towards perfection that I continually unlearn. Words can be great medicine. When crafted with love and care, they engender, embody, and enliven great beauty, subtle wisdom. When done well, a precocious placement of words on paper, with its rhythms and rhymes, its sounds and subtleties, is an art that is every bit as sensuousness as the brush of paint on canvas. First drafts are the easy part. Every word choice, every punctuation mark, variable lengths of sentences, together contribute to the experience of a text. Baptized in this mystery, the thesaurus has become my friend; it too has been my enemy, always taunting that there exists a better word, perhaps, one more precise, more poetic. The play can be endless. A writing is never finished.

But yet I write. One writerly motivation that I am not immune to is to write in order to have an audience, to create an audience, to build it up. Books. Magazines. Journals. I have done a little of that. It is unequivocally pleasant to see another writer quote with approval the ideas that you have proffered up for viewing. There is something satisfying to know that others have read your words, appreciated them, convinced them, impacted them. Chasing that high can be counterproductive to a self, an ungrounding. The world of the internet, moreover, is even more ungrounding, filled with a lure of the quick fix. With an overabundance of blogs, the thought repeatedly crept into my head whenever I seriously considered embarking on this path: “How many people will even see the fruits of my labor? Why put so much effort, so much metaphorical blood, into the writing process when the probable payback is so minimal?”

In my grounded moments, I know that writing can be done too for the self. That has been an experiential truth, at least in part for the few pieces I have published, and more so for those words that sit only within the confines of my notebooks, sketches of thoughts and ideas put down in exploration, sometimes content with their playful, unfinished manner, but sometimes with an idea of polishing and putting these pieces out there. Writing done in the right spirit is therapeutic. It explores, motivates, clarifies. Such writing provides insight and awareness of self and world in ways not un-similar to conversations in the therapy room. Talk and writing work well in tandem. I frequently encourage and ask the people I work with to engage in this process. This is true for me as well as for hem. We live our worlds, but we also write them into being.

A supervisor once shared with me a question that he asks new clients in their first session of therapy: “why now?”. In this spirit, why start my blog now? Why at this moment in time? Most good answers are experiential in nature. As is mine. In the past few weeks, two of my newer clients stated that they reached out to me for therapy because they liked some of the things I had written on my website about myself, my bio, and my beliefs about the therapeutic process. As these recollections flitted through my mind one evening, the reason and motivation to commence my blog crystalized – my blog writings – via content, style, personality, etc – will give prospective clients more information and further insight into who I am as a person and as a therapist, to give a means of measurement, to gauge if I might be a good fit for them in the therapy room.

In the end, having a wide internet presence would be nice, but it is not enough of a motivator for me. Writing as an end in itself is an enjoyable and intrinsically productive activity, but at least for me, it is sporadic in motivation and insufficient to push me to adequately develop and polish my thoughts. Writing with the other in mind, with the aim to share aspects of self in thought and in practice, indicates more concretely who I am as this person and this therapist. I want to show (not just tell) that the/my therapy room is an inviting and comfortable place. 

I have proofread and polished this writing several times. It is not yet perfect. But it is good enough.