Fear & Knowing

how creativity opens us up to ourselves

Brave Space SCHEDULE this coming week - 11/6-10/23: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday at 12pm EDT; Tuesday at 10am EDT.

All Human Brave Space on Tuesday at 7pm ET. Men are welcome on Tuesday evening.

Time change - those of you not in the US, we are falling back 1 hour on Saturday, so please check your time. I don’t want anyone in Northern London or Italy or anywhere else to miss a session!

Playwrights Workshop starts January 3rd for 10 consecutive weeks on Wednesdays from 6-9pm ET. I’m taking 6 people max. We’ll hear about 1300 words x6 each night. By the end of 10 weeks, each participant will have shared a full length play. Smaller cast plays work best in this format, up to 6 characters (unless we’re doubling). If you’re not finished with the play you’re working on, that’s okay. You can use the workshop to give yourself a deadline so you’ll finish by the end of February. And the workshop will inspire you to continue to work on the play. We will talk craft based on what’s brought in & beyond. I will be available to each participant during those 10 weeks for personal feedback. $500.

Many of us have a creative process that begins with having ideas. Then we want to try to figure out how good these ideas are. Or we want to implement them in the best way with the most knowledge. Maybe we feel afraid we’ll do them wrong. Maybe we’re told we need a degree to do that thing. (I got my MFA by accident, long story.) But most often, we’re hindered from the very beginning. And the impulse to create often becomes something we push aside, or identify against (I’m just not creative, who am I to try that?), until the impulse (phew!) passes. 

Yet I find it almost impossible to have an idea and then to implement it. Usually I write nonsense until the writing starts to become something from the physical act of writing and the mind’s (or soul’s?) insistence on creating meaning. Often I don’t understand what I’ve written until after I’ve written it (and even then it might take some time). I let writing come through me. I don’t know what I am about to write.

(Inwood Hill park, we do not regret the egret.)

Implementing ideas would probably bore me. If I find out too early what the ending is I stop. I want to be surprised. I want to be figuring it out as I go along. This means I’m probably also ADHD, but it’s hard to get a diagnosis of both even though many Autists are also ADHDers.

I’m not saying this is the only way to write. Lots of writers plan and outline. I do that afterwards, once I have a bunch of words, then I find the order. And I love craft and revision—to me that is the most amazing part, second only to the actual discoveries of the first draft.

But as a human, I spent most of my life completely lost and clueless, as in I didn’t even know I was lost! Okay, I kinda knew something was wrong, but the professionals often just reassured me and sent me on my way. I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was almost 56. There’s a lot of overlap with cPTSD, so it’s “hard” to diagnose someone who has both. What’s the trauma, and what’s the autism? (And then probably ADHD?!) Well, it’s all just me to me! I thought the professionals actually knew things, but apparently they didn’t, or they didn’t until very recently.

I also have struggled with alexithymia (an inability to recognize or understand emotions, very common in autistic folx). Until my late 30s, unless I was writing, I had a very hard time articulating how I felt. I started psychotherapy at age 8. It took me decades to understand emotions and how they arise and exist in my body. I also had to learn how to identify emotions in others. I did this by training to work on a suicide hotline.

I’m not saying I didn’t feel or experience empathy; I’m saying all the feelings arising within and from others got locked inside me in a very uncomfortable way. It was like living in technicolor internally, as if I could feel waves of everyone’s feelings all the time without the ability to manage them, an overabundance of feeling that couldn’t be sorted. I used and still use writing to figure it all out. (Just like Joan Didion - I wonder if she was autistic. The biases of our world insured that no female of her time would have been diagnosed that way. And what good would a diagnosis do? What good does it do me?)

So maybe I’m writing and training others to write in a way that stirs fear in people, and because I’m autistic and alexithymic, I don’t always understand or register the fear I feel. But the more I heal, the more aware I am, and the more I can make sense of the feelings. Sensory input can get in the way. For example, I used to hate the sensations of the air on my skin. It was almost unbearable. I needed layers to walk outside. A hat, a scarf, long johns under everything. Now a breeze can be intensely enjoyable. But what causes these shifts? Where are the researchers? Maybe we all have feelings and sensory experiences, and we’re aware of them, and we write to explore them further.

I have the habit of writing now. I don’t live a day without it. It’s how I process and exist in the world. I’m grateful for writing, or I’d still be lost to myself. But the writing I share with the world should do more than help me understand me.

The fear I notice in other writers seems to come from a lack of trust. It’s as if we are taught not to trust ourselves and not to dare. Writing is not carving words into stone. We’re not using dangerous tools. We won’t slip and cut ourselves or anyone else. If we write something shocking or hurtful, we can delete it. We don’t have to share everything. And if we’re keeping secrets from ourselves, chances are we will continue to do so, and our writing will be hard to decipher. Believe me, as a living Elektra, writing incest play after incest play, I never owned my own history until I was ready to do so. And it wasn’t writing that opened my eyes; it was reading.

Let’s start to know if we nailed it or failed here or there. Let’s know what we really want to say, or what we really mean, (once we’ve written it). Let’s know when it’s safe to share and with those who can offer kind yet honest responses to what the words did to them as they read or heard them. This can help us see how near or far we are from what we want. So when I tell my writers to trust and allow whatever is arising to get to the page, I mean it. Not to scare them, or cause fear, but to share with them the delight in discovering what’s arising inside.

The ancient Greeks asked travelers to Know Thyself as a way to begin to know the world. Writing is one way to start knowing.

The Brave PROMPT on Feelings, what do you want your audience or readers to feel? How do you write emotional moments? Do you experiment with this aspect of your writing? Restraint: Some writers (like Pinter or Carver) provide subtext with minimal surface language, leaving a lot for the actor/director or the reader to interpret and fill in. Opposition: Some writers (Brecht, Churchill, birch) write against feelings or purposefully spark a kind of opposition in the audience or they create complicity in surprising ways. Identification: Other writers (Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilson) expect the audience to identify with the character and what the character feels. Williams and Fornes use heightened language and symbolism to evoke our feelings. Williams layers feelings of hope into that glass menagerie and shatters it all with the breaking of the unicorn. (Objective correlative, anyone?)

What is your go-to for evoking feelings? Have you tried different approaches? Take a look at an emotional moment in your work, something you’ve been trying to craft one way, and see if a different approach might help. If you’re creating something new, try the opposite of what you’d usually do. It’s only paper, pixels and time. You might discover a superpower you never knew you had.

Wholeness Tip: If you are working on healing, whether it’s an autoimmune disease (I’m in remission from 4!) or trauma or depression or anxiety, have you tried yoga nidra? It’s the only yoga practice that involves a sleep-like trance in a comfortable, prone position, great for before bed or in the morning, or both! Here’s a link to the 10 minute version I do when I don’t have time for a longer practice. I lie down and get super comfy and do the guided practice. She asks for a sankalpa which is a resolve. Instead of an intention, it’s more powerful than that. It’s the resolution that we already are who we want or need to be to fulfill our life’s purpose. For me, that means whole and healed. (Whole and heal come from the same root.) What is your sankalpa? Put it in the present tense, as in “I am whole and healed.”

Onward,

Emma

And for those of you in NYC interested in some fabulous physical comedy… Karen Wight’s one-act comedy Use Your Words! has three more performances! 
November 12th at 3pm and 7pm
November 13th at 7pm
@ The Tank
312 West 36th St, NYC

Use Your Words! is included in TDF's recs for Exciting & Inexpensive Theatre: 15 Shows to See Off-Off Broadway This October Performances continue through November 13, 2023 at The Tank NYC. 

"USE YOUR WORDS! is refreshing and funny as both physical storytelling and a personal but universal account of the early phase of motherhood. This style and this topic are seriously underexplored, so this show is a gift." Ian Morgan,  Associate Artistic Director of The New Group

THE TANK CALENDAR
https://thetanknyc.org/calendar-1/use-your-words

FOR TICKETS
https://ci.ovationtix.com/35658/production/1177750