Save Yourselves: How Writing Saved My Life pt. II
"The longer you wait to find your own voice, the less likely you are to find it at all..."
I have reluctantly become a fan of the term “safe space.” As terms go, it falls under that sort of recent “woke” category, for which I have no real tolerance. I hope you’ll indulge me as I tie in how writing saved my life, and helped make me a teacher. This was, in essence, what I hoped to create in my classroom. It’s what I still hope to create every time I sit down to write, whether about a winery, or about travel, or about Christian apologetics. So, if words means things, and they do, then it is a “safe space” I want to create when I’m teaching writers, or facilitating their, or my own writing. But, it’s probably not what you’re thinking…
The safe space I want to create is not some kind of inner sanctum away from all of the outside world. It is the opposite of that. The safe space for a writer is a space that allows you to confront yourselves, your inner demons, literal and figurative, who work constantly to haunt you away from expressing your voice. In fact, I would argue that a safe space for writers that seeks to block the world outside will have the opposite impact. Writing is not in and of itself a safe act. Good writing, at very least, is good thinking and it is processing a way to think through one’s life, or the challenges faced by the very outside world one is trying to avoid.
But that avoidance allows the outside world to grow stronger without the addition of the writer’s voice. The whole basis of writing is to engage that outside world and to face it with your true self. In that way, writing is therapy and it is a direct conduit to who you are, who I am. If writing is a choice you make, at some point you will have to directly ask yourself who you are and what you believe on whatever level. So the safe space I want to create for writers is one where it’s OK to be you—it’s OK to question what you want, where you stand, why you stand there and how you intend to behave in the world. And who knows? You may actually come to accept yourself for all that you are, good and bad, contradictory and commensurate.
I said in pt. I of sharing this idea that writing saved my life and that my time in Waltham, MA was a crucible for me. It was a place and time where I had to confront what was happening to me, namely my parents’ divorce, my moving across the country and my illness that was preventing me from pursuing the next phase of late adolescent life. And because I had mononucleosis, and was prevented from going about daily activities, I quite literally and figuratively went inside. That’s when dad brought the typewriter back to the hotel room, and I started writing. That hotel room, which closed in on me and at times in my darker memories, still does, opened up when I sat at the keyboard and it become a safe space for me to confront myself.
It’s important to point out, too, that the pieces I wrote, all of them fictional, were not great works of art. I remember them pretty well, but I have no copies of them that I’ve been able to find. They were analogies and metaphors of all that I was facing, and by writing them down, I was beginning to take control of them. I was beginning to see that I had a say in what was going to happen to me, and I wasn’t just a victim of circumstance, or of someone else’s choices. In fact, I remember that being the first time I entertained the thought that the people around me and in my life will always make choices that I may not agree with. And it was the first time that I remember accepting such an idea, that it was OK to differ from what my loved ones thought and still maintain happiness that worked for me.
So the safe space I want to create for you, is not one I can create at all. You must create it, but if you do—then start with the notion that it’s a safe space because it is where you will confront yourself, not where you will block off the world. The world outside needs your voice, even if it disagrees with all the others, even if it disagrees with mine. Your work in this safe space is the work of knowing yourself, and of accepting yourself and of allowing that self to meet the world undaunted, full of the courage that self-knowledge can bring. For me, that self-knowledge opened up a world that before, I hadn’t really considered and it also opened up a considerably strong sense of faith in God that to this day remains a cornerstone of understanding myself. Regardless of what you find as you confront yourself, all of it is worthwhile and all of it helps to build an authentic individuality that is so vital, especially now when so much group-think has become de rigeur.
If the walls are closing in, then there is only one remedy for it, and that is to recognize that they never had any authority over you anyway. The safe space where you can do that is inside of you and it isn’t a retreat. Rather, it is a confrontation of your surroundings, the reality which you must live with every day, and the recognition that your authentic self is an answer to every confrontation that awaits you, whether with your keyboard, or with your heart and mind.