My Thought Paper

Dimensions of the Writer: 

    Evaluating Insinuations of Psychosis and Schizophrenia

         As an early writer, I always had it in my head that I had to solidify my identity through my writing, rather than lose it. I had learned about enough writers gone psychotic to know I had to be careful, but careful about what exactly? I wasn’t sure then, and I still am not certain. I was taught in school to become a simplified, definable person, easily categorized and placed into society where I was fit, and I despised this sentencing to a basic identity. I knew that I, like all others, had potential within in me to become something more than just that.
        Writing taught me that “I” was far more complex than I could imagine. Few of my thoughts strewn on paper were visibly connected, yet I knew they were all part of me and could make sense to myself and others if they were reordered or elaborated on; I wondered if I was crazy since I could not seem to forge these thoughts and perceptions into clean-cut pieces of writing. I decided that I probably wasn’t and started to think more carefully about the nature of these thoughts and perceptions, where I guessed they had originated and why they had anything to do with the rest of them. Eventually, I began to note the connections and, in various stages of revision, learned to make my writing more coherent and cohesive as my understanding of the ideas became apparent. I was improving as both a writer and a thinker, made evident by the results of my academic labor. I did not have multiple personalities, I concluded much to my relief, but rather access to a multitude of ideas I could consider outside of my own tunnel vision.
         I realized that my identity, along with everyone else’s, was fluid because of this possibility of differing perceptions and experiences within my own point of view. I was unaware at the time that this idea of a single identity was stifling my ability to process the stimuli the world presented to me. Breaking it down through my explorations in writing and revision started to reveal the wealth of “selves” I had been denying breathing room. In fact, I believe the need for revision signifies that there is no one true all-knowing self, but rather a self contingent upon the selves of all the people one interacts with and accumulates knowledge and ideas from over the course of the writing process. With this in mind, one can imagine how impossible it must be to pinpoint just exactly “who” they are.

        Theorists Walter Ong and Peter Elbow discuss this idea of a complicated collection of identities harbored within one human being. While Ong suggests that these other selves are fictionalized, thereby implying there is one true or base self, Elbow seems to hold that these selves are simply complex social and private dimensions of one’s being. I side primarily with Elbow because I dislike the notion of a fictionalized self; it perpetuates the stereotype of the crazy writer and boxes the writer into an overly simplified, unrealistic identity. Exposure to such investigation of the self was limited for me in my education, as I suspect it has been for most Westerners. The books of my schooling tended to emphasize the negative aspects of writers’ lives, presenting them as neurotic or depressed. We had few exercises allowing us access to other dimensions of the solitary self we assumed ourselves to be, and no explicit lesson that we had this potential to begin with. I think this is the type of education Ong hails from.
        Both Ong and Elbow are skeptical of personal diary-style writing as a solution to discovering one’s identity. They argue that one can be writing to an imagined self, an idealized self, a false self, a self he was, a self he will be, a self others believe him to be, and so on. Thus, the reader, oneself, is asked to “play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life” (Ong 12). These conflicting identities, discovered particularly through diary writing, suggest a life of constantly altered being rather than a life of stagnant being. One writes to a self that is constantly changing, yet retaining much of its basic components. Therefore our skewed sense of the self, a term used by the Dalai Lama, is what is at fault for the negative stigma surrounding the mental state of the writer, and this lies in our cultural and educational exposure and experience.