When Feelings Aren’t Nice
I grew up in a family where strong feelings of any kind were not allowed. They were, in fact, distinctly not nice.
The message was never spoken, but I absorbed it with my mother’s milk. Tears were a disgrace. Exuberance was, at the very least, undignified. Affection was to be contained, doled out only in acceptably small portions. To descend into anger was to lose the argument, whatever the argument might be. To simply like something or someone without having a clear, logical reason for that liking was to lack credibility. And on and on, limiting my access to feelings of every stripe.
My parents were—as we all are—products of their generation and their culture. (In their case that meant born at the beginning of the 20th century and of English heritage, a bad combination if you’re a feeling wanting to be acknowledged.) And they both went to their graves without having the smallest clue that there might be any other way to live than with every feeling that might accost them tucked away carefully out of sight. At least, that’s the way it appeared to me.
And I, as a result of being their child, have spent my entire adult life trying to recognize, to understand, to accept, to learn to live honestly and openly with my own feelings. For much of my life my feelings have been a mystery to me. I don’t even know where they dwell in my body except that my body has an unpleasant way of reacting to them while I’m attending to other matters.
One would think it would be a handicap for a fiction writer . . . not to be tuned in to her own feelings. But in truth, I believe this foundational training has been an asset instead. I have come to suspect, in fact, that having little freedom for dealing with feelings head on is one of the reasons I turned to stories at a very early age. And it continues to be one of the reasons for my impulse, even as an adult, to live inside of stories, those of my own manufacturing or those created by others. Fiction gives me a safe place to go to feel.
I have no idea how common this phenomenon is with us storytellers. I know I have encountered it occasionally in working with developing writers. In fact, it was seeing the struggle in others that gave me understanding of my own struggle, and it was in reassuring others that I came to see, even for myself, that this disability might actually be an asset for a writer. It’s an insight I probably wouldn’t have come to if I’d only been looking at the situation straight on.
If I could more easily experience my own feelings out loud in the world, I suspect I would have much less inclination to climb into the womb of my study to feel them on the evolving page. So the repression of my childhood yields passion for my work.
And the control I learned from so early an age—careful! careful!—gives me better control over my stories. I never splash feelings all over the page. They are reached intentionally, meticulously, with full artistic intent. They are held close, close until the moment when they will have the most impact for my character—and consequently my readers. (And for me, of course.) So, interestingly enough, something that hasn’t been an asset for my life has become an asset for my art.
It’s a point I’ve never heard discussed despite all the self-revealing “writer talk” I’ve taken part in over the years. But I would be truly curious to know how many other fiction writers out there come from the same place. Uneasy with your own feelings, dynamite on the page?
Anyone want to comment?