Creative Writing and the Psyche: Antidote to Depression

I came to writing late in life, and, as a result, I live life with the wind at my back. After several professional detours, including teaching, counseling, and currently a clinical practice in psychology, I returned in my early forties to poetry, my first love at 14.

More specifically, however, I came to writing poetry from the depths of a serious clinical depression. I had come to that place in life where I had everything I had longed for. I was married to a wonderful man whom I deeply loved and trusted; we had given birth to an adored son; I had finished my doctorate and established a robust clinical practice. I even had two wonderful homes — a rambling apartment and a house in the woods. I was deeply blessed.

At the same time, my good friend, Janice, was equally successful in her own quest for her fullest life — just one year behind me in her doctoral studies with two beautiful daughters and a devoted husband. President of her local Board of Education and Director of Guidance and Counseling at a prominent high school, she had just discovered a latent talent for tennis, which she dove into with vigor and delight. She was literally at the top of her game. The third member of our triumvirate was Kathy, a brilliant and zesty life force who more than filled up a room with her laughter and intelligence. All our meetings were celebrations. No one was more proud of us than we were of each other. We were family and they, my sisters.

Then Janice was diagnosed with kidney cancer. She was dead in less than four months.

Kathy and I were devastated. I fell into a depression so deep that I could not get out of bed. I reveled in nothing and no one. I cared for nothing and no one. Worst of all, I felt nothing when I looked at my glorious 2-year-old son. This terrified me. As a clinician, I knew how seriously sick I was. Nothing moved inside me, no life at all; I would have welcomed tangible grief—tears, rage perhaps… but no, only the endless tundra of days… into weeks… The isolation was palpable. I craved sleep. I thought only of death and how it waited for me around every corner. It would take me as it had taken Janice. In fact, it should.

I was already in therapy. I increased my weekly sessions and sought antidepressants from a pharmacologist I referred patients to. What became clear to me and my therapist was that, in addition to Janice’s death, I may well have been arrested by my own psychological inability to accept my full life. I had all that I had dreamed of but never believed I’d have. One who lives so long with a commitment to suffer and a sense that she is unworthy does not go gracefully into a robust and happy life — no matter how hard she works for it consciously. The commitment to leave childhood neuroses behind and to offer oneself greater possibility for fulfillment and pleasure does not take into account the unconscious investment in remaining unfulfilled and unhappy. Sadly, sacrifice and suffering were the bedrock of my self-worth. I’d been battling these issues for years and though progress was evident, the road was long.

I tried, as much as my imprisonment would allow me, to talk to my husband, not only my closest friend but an analyst as well. Alan was gentle but clear-sighted and firm. He raised yet another unresolved issue. I had nothing in my life that was completely my own. All of my activities implied a relationship with another — wife, mother, teacher, therapist, daughter, sister, friend. All were mirrors for me to revel in or castigate myself. My worth was the sum total of what the world thought of me: how I pleased, displeased; how smart I was (was I smart?), how kind, how selfish, how base. Happiness arrived only when the world approved of me. I had no place in my life where I tended to myself alone.

The only thing that had ever come close was my occasional flimsy attempts at writing. Periodically, during one of Alan’s late-night tennis games, I’d light some candles and pour a glass of wine and sit down to write a poem. I had always loved books and had a girlhood wish to write another Gone With the Wind, yet I was drawn to poetry. Given my repressed background, poetry’s pure unmitigated emotion was tantalizing — as were its rich romantic life themes and imagery. The economy of it—the demand for articulation — also lured me. Prose terrified me because of its endless possibilities; my mind was already a quagmire taking endless years to decode; I couldn’t risk the avalanche that a book of prose would bury me in. But a poem struck me as a finite thing. It started, led someplace, and ended — all relatively quickly. It seemed to have rules. Formulas. You used words and lines in seemingly predictable ways. There were things you could do and things you couldn’t in a poem (or so I thought). It was like painting within the lines — very comforting and very much in keeping with my rigorous Catholic background.

But my late-night trysts with poems were very disappointing. In the lucidity of early morning, I’d find that what I’d written was neither profound, nor particularly interesting—nor was the writing itself very good. Dilettante that I was, I’d collapse in a puddle of recrimination insisting that had I any talent, I’d have been able to produce something fine and lasting. Talent meant it was there inside me waiting for me, fully fleshed out. My frustration would keep me from trying again for several months; but then again, the same story. In that conversation, Alan pointed out that though I spoke of wanting to write, I never invested anything of myself in it other than a ceremonial hour or two every few months. I seemed to be waiting to be served. I took in as much of this as I could, given my frozen state, but I knew he was right. He had broken through.

As I attempted to reenter my life, I resolved to see if I could learn to write poetry. I needed to give myself over to something whole and alive — that was mine alone. Thus began my life with the possibility of poems. Therein lay my recovery. Slowly the lights went back on inside me.

Coming: Creative Writing & the Psyche: The Threat of Making Art III: The Beginnings of Speech