Talking, Thinking, Writing

Los Angeles, California

I keep a Blog Posts note page in my phone where I jot down ideas. I also have a Writing page where I often put quotations and excerpts from articles and books I have read. I have been known to pull over to the side of the road to enter something onto these pages. If I don't write them down, I can lose ideas that I fantasize might have been utilized to create my best pieces of writing. Say goodbye to a rare chance. And losing an idea that seemed brilliant at the time can throw you into thinking about Hadley losing the valise that contained Hemingway's writing. Ok, allow me a delusion of grandeur.

Today, when I went to the note page, I found this note: Talking, Thinking, Writing Jordan Peterson Canadian psychologist. See, part of the problem with this method is that, in reading the note, I want to say: Can you say more about this? Like, where did that come from? I sit with rapt attention during the homily at the church I attend. I listen to podcasts, including On Being which offers perspectives on faith and philosophy, and Marc Maron's podcast, WTF. I listen to Fresh Air on my local NPR station. I watch Bill Maher's Real Time. And, like magic, as I write this I remember. Jordan Peterson was a panel guest on Real Time.

Backstory aside, this concept of talking, thinking, and writing really, really speaks to me. I try to spend time talking about my thoughts (though it is difficult in this day to have an in-depth discourse with my friends) and listening to others' thoughts. I am exceedingly fortunate that Joel is always there to listen to me in our discussions, knowing that this requires stamina and patience on his part. And my best frister, Lynnette, offers me the same patience in our conversations and in some ways even more so because, unlike Joel, we don't agree on some issues. But from the start, we established a friendship that offered time as well as an ear and shoulder. So, with the way everyone rushes around these days, our conversations are golden. And after these, and conversations with other friends or even brief discourse with workers or strangers I encounter, I take time to wander around my own mental circle, pondering. And after that I write.

Peterson was speaking about how we approach issues in our lives. The comment may have been generated about political issues. I don't recall. But the point was that we need to do that trinity of process. We talk a lot. Much of that is inconsequential, but some of it, sometimes even just a stray comment here and there, can be profound. And to subsequently really think about these things in some depth, and to further flow those thoughts into written form, creates a necessary organic system. And perhaps a path to understanding when we are on different or even diverse sides of an issue.

I have dealt with anxiety since I was eleven years old. My joke is that before that, I was just nervous. I have spent a great deal of time in therapy, and I do understand the origin of that anxiety. Recently I read an article about PTSD and it addressed writing therapy. In writing therapy you write about your trauma experience over and over again. I write a lot. Not just here, but in a personal journal and in long emails to my pen pal. I have always written. It is my thing. But I have never specifically written about that first panic attack that set me on a lifelong path of confronting and dealing with anxiety. In fact, I don't recall that that first panic attack ever came up with any specificity in my many years of therapy. But, probably because of the tools I acquired through that long process, I have finally honed in on what generated that first episode. It is now as clear as glass to me. So, have I written about it? Uhhh, no. Not yet. But I will.

There is so much trauma in our lives and in our world. I recently met three of my girlfriends for breakfast and our conversation turned to the conflict in Israel. I was the only non-Jewish person out of the four of us. And after listening to them, I came away with an understanding that their experience in being raised by Jewish parents who lived at the time of the Holocaust was very different from my own upbringing. It was instilled in them that hate could and would be in front of them, just because they were Jewish. That the Holocaust could happen again. When she was young, one of my friends had told her parents that she didn't believe it. That times had changed. But now as we see an upsurge in anti-semitic behavior in our own country, all of these friends were feeling wary and concerned. I came away from that conversation thinking a great deal about it. I don't think I had ever really gotten that. I grew up with Jewish girlfriends who lamented, sometimes sourly, the profusion of Christmas all around them. I have a friend who, when she was a child, had someone burn a cross on their family's front lawn. I knew these things, but I never truly got the fact that they had grown up differently, with the installed cognizance of the tragic history of anti-semitism. All I could do to try to understand this was to compare it to my upbringing as a girl. Throughout my life, I had often tried to explain this to men (who also probably never got it), that I was taught by drill that, as a girl, I always had to be vigilantly aware that the potential danger of assault came along with being female. That, through no fault of my own, there was a heightened risk of becoming a victim, due only to my gender. I assume these girlfriends got that warning as well.

While reflecting on all of this, I recalled seeing the film Julia which in part dealt with the Nazis and the start of the war in Europe. In the film, the Nazis broke into a university in Vienna. Part of their assault was to swing students like two people can do when throwing you into the pool. Only they threw them over the balcony to their death. I was so disturbed by that scene that I wanted to run out of the theater. And the blatant inhumanity it showed stayed with me to this day many decades later. As a result, I never saw Schindler's List. I wanted to. But I just could not.

I was not raised with that intensity of mindfulness about the Holocaust. Yes, I knew Nazis were horrible. I knew that my father had served in the Pacific and that at that time in the US, the Japanese were equally feared. But neither fear was really instilled in me. And, frankly, I know more about The Civil War, because of Ken Burns and because we always got there in my American history classes. Especially in high school, we lagged behind and just didn't get to World War II or later.

And so, afterwards I thought about what I had learned at that breakfast. And I talked about it with Joel. I wrote about it in brief form to my friend, Larry. And I am writing about it here. How important is it to take time to think and to distill those thoughts garnered from spoken word? And to cement those words into written form? It is a way to approach all that swirls around us in our lives today. Life has been complicated by so many factors over the past two decades. The harmful side-effects of the internet and the now-known toxicity of "social" media, with a significant percentage of our country devolving into a base-supported madness. And on the other side, extreme and significantly harmful wokeness. But some of our problems have been around much longer. And after my breakfast with three friends garnering better learning of their experiences, I felt that benefit of talking and thinking. And subsequently, a reinforcement of the vital importance of writing.