Speaking Out: Therapy or Performance?
Speaking Out: Therapy or Performance?
This weekend, at my cousin’s wedding, I had the kind of conversations weddings rarely allow. The recent publication of my book helped. The themes I explore are not light ones. Grief, trauma, healing, our relationship with religion and our upbringing. As I investigated the world of energy healers and mediums, what I discovered resonated with my own experience. The investigation shifted direction, without my quite deciding that it should.
After reading it, one of my cousins asked me a simple question. “Was this therapy, or did you really want to write?”
The question stayed with me.
Putting things into words helps us make sense of them. Saying them aloud makes them more tangible. Writing gives structure to what speaking releases. Therapy draws on both, each in its own way.
But publishing, being read, speaking out is no longer just about letting things out. It means exposing yourself.
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Nietzsche wrote that every word is a mask. To tell a story is inevitably to construct a version of it. Journalists, like writers, choose an angle, dwell on one detail and leave out another. Speaking about ourselves always means speaking from our own perspective, shaped by our history, our biases and our blind spots.
And the mask does not come solely from the speaker. It also takes shape in the listener’s mind. We each understand things through our own frame of reference. What is heard is never quite what was said.
In my book, I try to uncover these masks, including my own. A form of introspection that observes itself.
I think of Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking inspired me. She writes about grief by weaving together what she experiences and what she observes, without trying to be objective. That is precisely what makes the writing ring true.
Like her, I wanted not only to describe but also to become part of the story, in the tradition of literary journalism she did so much to shape.
Speaking out, then, is neither therapy nor performance. It is a movement towards something. A kind of necessity, an assertion of self. Giving ourselves permission to express our own version of events.
Perhaps the therapeutic part lies in publishing a book and accepting the reactions, the differences in perspective and the misunderstandings that follow. Seeing a project through. Finally owning who we are.
— Concepts in motion.
