1:59am July 7, 2014

➸ diversity, literature, & the audacity of writing

There’s a certain audacity required to write. There’s an audacity in believing that the story in your head, which is an extrapolation of something held as a deeper truth, might be interesting or important to anyone but you. There’s an audacity in believing that you can accurately transfer that story-truth into words on a page, and that those strung-together words will also be something beautiful. From where does this audacity arise? How do you develop a belief in yourself so strong that it can see you through to the end of a poem or the conclusion of a novel?

Adding this quote (bolding mine) from a bit later, because SO MUCH YES:

Why should parents have to embark on a literary research project and discard their televisions in order to create diversity in their children’s lives, to show their children that the world values people who look or talk or dream like they do? The audacity to write is harder to muster when you don’t believe you are valued.

I think for me what happened was twofold:

1. I have hypergraphia, which is a manifestation of a much larger condition sometimes called Dostoyevsky’s syndrome, which is compulsive creativity. Hypergraphia is a version where you write compulsively, it barely matters what you write, you just write, and you can’t help writing, and you can’t help writing a *lot*. (I also have non-writing-based compulsive creativity, but writing is what we’re discussing here, so hypergraphia.) There’s a great book on hypergraphia called The Midnight Disease by a woman who developed it.

2. I developed a burning desire to communicate what was in my head, which came from years and years and years of near-total inability to communicate what was in my head. Not because I couldn’t speak or write, but because I had no connection between the words I spoke and wrote, and the ideas in my head. And as time went on, this became so frustrating, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I knew that the signal to noise ratio in my writing and speech fluctuated wildly but was far worse in speech than writing.

And anyway… I developed this intense, intense compulsion to communicate. To really tell people what was happening inside my head. For real, not borrowed from a book, not borrowed from what somebody else said, but for real, the real thing. It was partly catalyzed by a horrible conversation in which someone made it very clear to me that my communication was constrained and hers was not and she was going to gloat about it openly in front of me. And so I developed this determination to communicate for real, and she has no idea to this day that her bullying is partially responsible for my success as a writer.

Anyway, the hypergraphia and the intense compulsion to communicate what was in my head, those things overrode any considerations about whether anyone was going to listen or not. I was going to write. I was going to write. I was going to write. I was going to shout everything I knew to the world, and if the world didn’t listen, I didn’t even think that far ahead. I worked on learning to communicate for real, which was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done, and involved, by necessity, communicating a lot with other autistic people who helped me in ways they still probably don’t understand: I needed to hear language as used by someone like me, because all my models for language prior to that were language as used by neurotypicals, and that meant not my language at all. So I learned more and more how to communicate, and I communicated more and more, and my signal to noise ratio went way way way up, and speech petered out, but writing, writing stayed.

So for me it was never a matter of “Is anyone going to listen?” If I’d stopped to even consider that I might not have got anywhere. It was just a matter of “I am going to write, damn it. And I am going to write no matter what happens and no matter what anyone says.” If all my Internet fame were gone tomorrow I would still be writing. If the Internet were gone tomorrow I would have a drawer full of poems Emily Dickinson style, unpublished except sometimes sent to friends. For me writing has never been about who will listen, it has been about who is writing. It has been about “Can I express myself in language, despite the fact that all language is foreign to me?” It has been about “Can I tell the world – whether they listen or not – who I really am, when all I have done my entire life is accept what the world told me about who I was, and try to be that person?” It has been about hypergraphia, the utter compulsion to write, probably tied to my temporal lobe epilepsy, and evident since I was a little child copying pages out of books because I had nothing else to write.

So maybe I’m a weird writer, in that whether anyone will listen has not been my first, or even my second, consideration. It’s become a consideration when I do writing that I need to use to influence people, like political and ethical writing. But… people are listening to me, and that took me so much by surprise when I realized the magnitude of it that I took to hiding under the bed freaking out. I’ve gotten used to it now. I’ve gotten used to being a very strange kind of writer, one who is compelled to write, who publishes hir writing on the Internet, but is sometimes scared shitless of hir audience. And who never knew sie would have any real audience at all, who was surprised when people called hir a leader, when people called hir a good writer, when people said sie was a popular autism writer, and so on. These things all came as surprises, and felt like they were beside the point of the writing itself. Which they aren’t, not really. Having an audience is important. But having an audience felt like going on stage naked. The exposure anxiety was too much to bear at times, and I sometimes have to pretend that my audience is either small or nonexistent, in order to continue to write with confidence.

I don’t know if any of this applies to anyone else. But I hear all the time that writers have to have some ego, to believe anyone will want to listen to us. And for me… I never believed anyone would listen. Being listened to wasn’t the point. Getting my communication out there in the world was, and is, a huge part of writing for me. The biggest part. It’s always been about whether I can communicate, not about whether anyone will really listen. People listening is great (if terrifying), but secondary to my goal of being able to take what is in my head and put it in words, and secondary to my goal of compulsively writing as much as I can. I suspect that my goals in writing are not uncommon in anyone who for any reason has been prevented from communicating for a large chunk of their lives. By communicating I mean real communicating, not just going through the motions, which some of us master but which is not communication.