For the first time in a few Decembers, I approach the end of the year without a knot in my stomache, without a brain scrambled by the to-and-fro of this and that. This is not to say that I’m not busy, that I do not (as I type this) sit with a few plates spinning above my head. This is also not to say that I do not face an onslaught of tasks once the merriment of New Year’s Eve has ebbed.
I feel compelled these days to start putting things in perspective. Perhaps this is what happens when you turn 40 – perhaps I am being cliché. Seeking context and sketching narratives seem like writerly enough goals to aim for, but even as a writer there are a lot of things – tangents, curves, frays, tears – to reconcile within that task.
A strong influence stems from my current study of psychotherapy, which requires that I be in therapy also. You find yourself relating a story from your past – from your childhood, from your 20s – and you find yourself saying something you realize you haven’t really mentioned to anyone before. Not necessarily secrets, but impressions of events. Sometimes events themselves. It allows you to discover how unintentionally secretive we can all be.
I have been struck by as often as I have been able to dodge the things thrown at me in life. Sometimes you don’t have a choice: I think that’s one of the first things you learn, but the hardest to reconcile. That is, if you don’t want to subscribe to fatalism (which isn’t to say that everything should boil down to some atheist/libertarian screed). Ultimately, life has but one author, and if you do not have a hand on the pen there is a problem.
It is thus, in the spirit of pen holding, that I try to take some time over the next while to add to the picture of my understanding of my self, with the aim of broadening that understanding (as opposed to solipsism) so that the rest of the (human) world may not be as strange and foreboding as it can seem.
Perhaps, some day, we will see that we are all artists.
I think it's a nifty thing – a big change, yes, but learning psychotherapy doesn't seem to be all that big a jump from film making and writing. Another form of story-telling, I guess, with a different aim for meaning making.
Meaning-making for sure. I'm running out of metaphor space in the warehouse that is my creative brain at the moment.
I think it was a good decision to pursue the course I'm on. If indeed I follow this route and end up practising as a psychotherapist down the road, as a writer I will have already benefited from a greater understanding of human motivation and the nature/nurture struggle.