It's Not Guaranteed To Work But Neither Is Seeing A Shrink
LAST YEAR when I took the advice of one of my quite young nieces and took an online writing class it turned out to be one of the better things I've done in the past two decades. Geezers who refuse to learn from the young are stupid.
Not that it's made me a better editor, it hasn't. I'm not even convinced it made me a better writer. But it gave me even more of an appreciation for the value of People writing, putting down significant words in writing, even if they have no intention of anyone but themselves reading what they write. I'd written fiction before, with a pencil, in notebooks, I'd written poems and even a couple of plays, all for my own entertainment. If I'd had more wit than I do, when I first tried a word-processor and increased my typing speed, I may have realized the biggest advantage of putting your thoughts in writing, there is nothing that has helped me clarify my thinking like writing those out in words, reading them, changing them to make them clearer, all of it has been very valuable to me. And it's a good and potentially useful hobby. It's enjoyable.
But this is about the use of writing fiction as a means of understanding ones own personality, of ones understanding of other People and situations, those in their own lives, those in others lives that we haven't experienced. Fiction can help with that when the substance of non-fiction that might do that isn't available to you.
I wrote about the assignment in that class to write a story about football that the teacher said he assigned because if there are men in the class he wanted them to write about something they knew.
Well, as I told him, I have always disliked sports and especially despised American football and the cult of sentimentality and cloying dishonesty about it. I gave him the facts, from head-injury, violence against Women and others, exploitation by coaches (I HATE TED LASSO). . . He wisely didn't give in and allow me to write on another topic but told me to write a story about that aspect of the cult of football. I did write a story something like that - "Jesus, you wrote a novella, not the short story I asked for!" - and it taught me a lot. He had the same assignment this time and I wrote a second, much shorter, story and I learned a lot about it, too. And I hate football as much as I ever have.
This last year I had someone who knew I had experience of dealing with and living with family members who are severe alcoholics ask for some advice on how to cope with the terrible drinking problem of her granddaughter. I have written about that experience several times though this person didn't know that - my online writing is known only to a couple of people in my family who really aren't interested.
Thinking about what to tell her from that experience, from the experience of alcoholics I've known took a long time. I didn't tell her that I doubted the 28-day spin cycle that they were putting their hopes in would work, it never did for anyone I saw. The three-day dry-outs are only good for keeping someone from driving for that long. I had no right to suggest that those might not work for her because I have no idea if maybe they would.
I am entirely skeptical of the talking-therapy industry, especially the pseudo-sciences of psychology and its allies, especially the drug-prescribing racket of psychiatry. Those have an abysmal record of treating alcoholics and other substance abusers. One of my family members who died of his severe alcoholism went to one for eight years of three-figure per hour payments and all he got out of it was an addiction to happy pills on top of his alcoholism and dumped as a "patient" when he lost his job due to his drinking and, with that, the insurance that paid for his "treatment." I told her that but said her granddaughter might find just the right one for her.
I DID tell her that I thought AA was something that she should encourage her to try and that if one of the many local meetings didn't work for her, she should try another one. Though its success is far from 100% I am entirely in favor of AA. I told her that if she tried pulling the atheist supplied excuse my brother did, "I don't believe in a higher power," she should point out that she has made the alcohol molecule her higher power, one that rules her and is destroying her life. They won't tell you that in the "secular alternative" mounted by atheists in opposition to AA, which is a Potemkin village false front which exists not at all except a few of the largest cities and which isn't any more successful than AA where it is more than a mere figment of the imagination of ideologues.
On top of that, I suggested that she recommend that the girl try writing stories about people who had lives like she'd like to have, only that the character she wrote as herself (if there's one thing I'm sure of, every author always puts themselves in their fiction) should totally abstain from alcohol and other drugs. Perhaps someone who successfully stopped drinking. That she should write every day that she could manage, should read what she wrote, should edit and change it to make it more like she would like it to be. How she would change things to make her life better. ESPECIALLY THAT SHE SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW OTHER PEOPLE HAVE DONE HER WRONG. And she shouldn't use her depression as an excuse and a reason for drinking. I think that that is one of the worst things that the psychologists and psychiatrists and other psych industry hacsk do, they hand alcoholics excuses they didn't have, depression, guilt, blaming other people, for continuing their substance abuse.
I said it might not work but if it didn't at she wouldn't have lost any money to the mountebanks of the psych industry and she might have found something out about how to become sober the consequences of not imagining herself as sober.
Everything we think about ourselves, how we consciously manage our behavior is a product of imagination. I don't think you can change your life for the better without having a strong and detailed imagination of what you want to change it to. One strong enough to make a difference in your real life. I don't think talking therapy, especially that which obsesses on the past, can do that to you nearly as well, as readily available, as cheaply as this kind of self-generated writing and, if you use a password on your computer, as privately.
Last year I got some hate mail because I said writing was too important a practice to allow the professionals to restrict everyone from doing it, the pseudo-grammarians and devotees of mechanics and standardized spellings from inhibiting People from doing. Trying to save our lives when we imagine ourselves into or fail to imagine ourselves out of trouble is even more important. I don't think anyone with a professional ideological concept of how we are to be is likely to be much help to us and that's what the psych-industry is founded in. I think you're more likely to find help for that in a number of other places, maybe in reading theology of the right kind, though there's lots of that that wouldn't help, either.
The cheap, stock-image of the drunken author might show a possible danger of being dishonest with yourself. But that will get me onto the stupidity of the pulp-writers like Hammett and Chandler, even too many of the better ones. They were, for the most part, dishonest writers. It will only work if you try to be honest with yourself. I think keeping it to yourself instead of trying to make money out of it, using a password on your computer, might help to make it useful instead of an exercise in degredation.
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