Prime Time - Jane Fonda [61]
I don’t believe that you need, necessarily, to show your writing to anyone else. Just the act of writing for yourself, in an openhearted, thoughtful, and detailed way, can be transforming. Nevertheless, there may come a time when your children or family members will find great benefit in reading what you write, the way I benefited from reading what my mother wrote when she was admitted to a mental institution before she died.
My friend Nathaniel Bickford, now sixty-five years old, began writing a book about his life right after he retired from corporate law. Two traumas had happened to him during high school that had haunted him all his life. First, a teacher who had been Nat’s hero turned on him for no apparent reason and emotionally tortured him until he was forced to change schools. Then, in his new school, his best friend turned out to be homosexual and made a pass at him—this was in the mid-1950s, and it traumatized Nat. Not knowing what else to do, he told the headmaster, and his friend committed suicide.
“I was sure if I had handled it better, he would still be alive,” Nat told me one day in his New York apartment. “Therefore, I felt I was a direct cause of his death. Not having been able to talk to anyone about it for so long a time, I wanted to write the book to try and figure it all out, including trying to understand the psychology of the teacher who so tortured me. What did I do that made him so mad?” I asked Nat if writing the book had helped him understand that the teacher’s behavior had nothing to do with him.
“It is amazing,” Nat answered. “You can say you are not responsible, that the man obviously had some other problems. Intellectually, you can do that until the cows come home. But you really can’t get rid of the residue of whatever emotional damage it’s caused—scar tissue, whatever—unless and until you really almost relive the whole damn thing. So I had to write what my friend was actually saying when he was embracing me, and it was just horrible, but it was the only way. I had to go through it again in order to then be able to understand my young self. A curious thing happens when you go back: The little you becomes a third person, and you can forgive that little guy. That little guy was really not responsible for what happened. He doesn’t have to go through all that now. And that works. It does. It is really amazing.”
I told Nat how moved I was hearing him recount this because I, too, had not been able to expunge certain demons from my life until, in writing my life review, I saw that I had to go into enough detail for things to become embodied experiences—I had to feel them again.
Nat’s book, Late Bloomer, was published in 2008 by Tidepool Press. Now Nat is free of his ghosts and is moving on into happy retirement with his wife of forty-six years.
So, I challenge you to be like Simone and Nat, to gather all that you have done, have been, all that you have had—things on the outside and internal things—to claim them, gather them all together into your center so as to possess who you are. All this is not to revisit what others have said you are, what others want or need you to be; the point is to get at who you feel you are in the deepest recesses of your soul. What things happened to you when you were little? What experiences were bad and scary? What was beautiful? How did you feel when you walked into your first school? How did the other kids make you feel? Did you do anything you were ashamed of or don’t like to think about now? Did you have a teacher who made you feel wonderful and curious? A teacher who made you feel dumb? Did your parents make you feel safe? Proud of yourself? Accepting of yourself? Take hold of your experiences. Feel them. Go into them in your body and then make notes about them so you will remember. Don’t edit; just let the ideas flow. Turn them around, slowly, in the light, and try to see past the surfaces. If you are like me, experiencing the transition into elderhood will be far more meaningful and enjoyable if you see it in the context of the full arc of your life, with