How funny it is that the writers all come from some kind of dysfunctional environment. We all have our demons, we all have the selves we have tried to bury deep, but didn't succeed. We all are wearing masks, which come down when we write and when we put down on paper our real selves.
Have you ever met a writer who is a happy person? With white picket fenced 3 bdrm, 2 bath, 2 car garage house, 2.5 children and a dog, perfect husband, a white collar worker, and the writer herself is a happy chipper stay at home mom, feeling completely fulfilled in her perfect Stepford Wife/Martha Stewart role? Her parents, the middle class, peppy, normal, mentally stable and happily married even until now, organizing the family reunions in their house in Connecticut or Martha's Vineyard?
No you haven't, and if you did, this writer is hiding behind the happy mask and is on the way to the mental breakdown, or is not a very good writer. Why would a happy-go-lucky Physical Therapist want to write anything? She'd rather spend time watching Entertainment Tonight or Dancing With The Stars and feel content eating badly prepared greasy overly sweet Chinese takeout and think she's had her fill of being multicultural for now.
The writers are creatures with the overactive imagination, bordering on mental disease or actually suffering from it. The writers are conquering their idiosyncrasies one day at a time and are praying that whoever lives with them doesn't up and leave because they are fed up of putting up with all this daily insanity. The writers are bleeding inside and are writing out their wounds with their own blood on paper as a way to heal themselves, whether their work will be seen or not. The paper or monitor becomes a channel to God, the pen or keystrokes -- the prayer through our fingers. The paper doesn't judge, it tolerates anything. Sometimes it's our only friend who doesn't ostracize or recoil from our blubbering hysteria.
Interesting! I don't know if I wear a "mask" per se when I write, but I do feel like I have a certain personae that I have created through my writing... although not so much a happy personae, more like a bumbling, hapless personae... a version of me but maybe not quite me.
ReplyDeleteNot to be on an Elizabeth Gilbert kick lately, but have you seen her talk on TED. She talks a lot about genius & sanity and how the two are connected. It's a really great talk for writers. Definitely check it out if you haven't:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
Actually, I think I meant that we writers wear a mask in real life to hide the real suffering soul inside, which comes out only in writing. I watched the partial Liz's speech on TED. Thanks for the suggestion.
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