Chapter 5
Re-conceptualising the self in time
Susanna's story has certain key differences from those of other Group 2 students. Here it is not (ostensibly) childhood experience that gives rise to psychic inertia but the trauma of loss and illness in the more recent past. Susanna has lost a sense of ongoingness through time and her experience of the MA is characterised by gradual opening-up to greater psychic movement between past, present, and future, experienced particularly, as in the case of Maria, through reconnecting with bodily feeling. This opening-up also brings understanding of learning as felt and bodily.
Loss, illness, and the freezing of identity
Susanna comes to the MA following a decade of life changes and losses, including ‘the deaths of a daughter, a partner and a parent; geographical relocation from [Africa] to England; an unplanned career change and a [chronic illness] diagnosis’. She is undergoing psychotherapy but is ‘unable to talk about [these events], even within the therapy room’. Her creative writing has also stalled. Drawing, however, has begun to help her find ‘expression … outside the therapy room’, and participation in a support community is helping her counter the loneliness of her illness. She joins the MA primarily to update her qualifications, and to gain confidence with her creative writing, which she describes as ‘[lacking] breadth and depth … pieces often remain[ing] undeveloped and becoming “lost”’. She also hopes to get a little personal development along the way.
Susanna's main sense of herself at the outset is of stuckness, partly in her backward-looking focus on the losses she has suffered and even more so in her identity as a chronically ill person. She describes the diagnosis as having ‘fixed’ her in the past and a sense of regret: ‘one … gets thrown back on to the life that has been and what you could have done and should have done and what you'll never achieve anymore’. The medical labelling of ‘every blood sample that is taken from me as “Bio-hazard”’, compounds the sense of loss: of her health and of the possibility of future intimate relationships. Her self-narrative has ceased to move fluidly between past, present, and future: the present is barely tolerable, the future potentially non-existent, leaving the traumatic past as the overwhelming preoccupation.
It feels very important for Susanna to disclose her diagnosis, so that it can be validated within the context of her studies. She has already found helpful having a voice in her support community and she feels strongly – compulsively – that she similarly needs to have a voice on the MA in her new guise. But she is very uncomfortable about disclosure. There is another inhibiting self-concept at work too. The return to learning after such a long gap she finds very challenging. She is interested in everything, and during the first two terms feels compelled to read all the books on the reading list, putting a great deal of pressure on herself. The model of learning she has inherited from previous education is strongly cognitive and driven by a competitive struggle for achievement.
Reanimating the psyche
Opening-up begins for Susanna already in Course 1, with her reading group playing a central role here. The four members ‘bonded very well … and developed a strong trust’ that enables them to develop an intense personal relationship. Particularly important for Susanna is the discovery that one group member is a volunteer for the support organisation she belongs to. This brings reassurance that she can safely disclose her illness identity if she decides to.
The trust Susanna develops in her reading group is fundamental to her changes at the outset, but the creative life writing also plays a significant role, generating space and movement in her psyche. In her response to the ‘web of words’ exercise on the theme of beginnings, Susanna anticipates that, in starting a new writing life and experiencing the calm landscape of the ‘rolling Sussex Downs’, she will leave behind the chaos of her present life: ‘This banging noise of routine living and fitting things in’; this ‘stumbling and staggering [along] paths overgrown with thorns and heavy with bushes and leaves that whip my face’. Waking in the night to the ‘long darkness’ and the ‘hammering’ of the rain, she looks forward to the calmer, dreamlike state she hopes her writing will bring, ‘an elegant dance of prose’, words shaped ‘into a ballet’. But her mind refuses to cooperate, the words in her head fighting with each other. She strains to hear the symphony, even a lone flute that will charm the snake – which evokes her elusive creativity – but instead:
a cymbal crashes and swiftly following, the bass of a drum overthrows it, the high hat screams; the bass tormented, thrashes out its anger and a heavy beat develops. Is it thunder or the drum? The music brings me to my feet but my steps are clumsy and I fall on one knee, grazing it as I scrape across the rough dirt to get back on my feet. Then the beat takes hold – my feet scuffling, stamping, dust flying as a frenzied rhythm develops. I dance a wild dance of exorcism. I have no choice but to move with it, it moves through me and the letters and the thoughts fight for mind space and then get lost not caring, caught in the whirlwind. There are feathers flying, chickens scatter across the dirt, a child steps back for safety. Then the drum pace drops and the dust scatters over my feet as they slow to the fading rhythm. Eyelids heavy with dance, still no glimmer of dawn. A steady, heavy rainfall. I look for my pen to calm the chaos within.
Here, the desire to achieve a calm state for writing is thwarted by the more pressing need to express the rage at the present. And dance becomes the metaphor for self-expression; it is a wild thing, threatening disruption and the safety of onlookers. The locale evokes the Africa Susanna has loved and lost. Only when the rage has run its course is there any chance of the calm she seeks.
Given Susanna's sense of fixity, the movement and the strong presence of bodily feeling and emotion here, are striking. The fixity clearly has a role: to keep the pain and rage at bay. But the combination of metaphor and present tense in this piece allow her to delve beneath the defended surface, to bring the past symbolically into the present, and to give expression to the pain and rage. Reflecting on this exercise, Susanna writes that ‘beginnings’ mean ‘leaving things behind and that in that departure I might become more diffuse and less focused’. These bodily metaphors anticipate the opening-up to a less fixed sense of self that is already a possibility as a result of this first exercise. They are very different from her earlier ones: fixity, disclosure. Whilst ‘disclose’ implies bringing into the light something already formed, and control on the part of the discloser, becoming ‘more diffuse’ and ‘less focused’ implies loosening control and entering into a process of gentle dismantling. What makes it possible to let go in this way, so soon within this new context, is the nature of the ‘web of words’ exercise, the way it ‘pulled us together through our words’, with the tutor as an essential part of the holding environment.
The word ‘snake’, that emerges in ‘Beginnings’, becomes the focus of Susanna's next poem. In ‘Beginnings’ its arrival is unexpected. It is connected with the struggle to write, a creative urge that needs awakening, but it could also represent the excess of emotion that surges out into the dance, something frightening and potentially dangerous, or disturbingly sensual. In the new poem both these elements are visible. At the start the snake is sleeping ‘Through scorching summer … saving stamina/and sinewed muscle/for the fight’, evoking power contained. Then the snake charmer with his flute calls her, little knowing ‘the danger he awakens’.1 In the last stanza the ‘harlequin paper skin abandoned’ is evidence that the snake has sloughed off her former contained state and is dangerously on the loose. The witches' refrain from Macbeth – ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog/wool of bat and tongue of dog’ – repeated between stanzas, emphasises the sinister, potentially life-threatening consequences of rousing the snake. The simultaneous power and menace of the creative urge is effectively captured in this poem: in order to write, it suggests, Susanna has to risk accessing the darker side of herself.
Being in the present – turning towards the future
Very quickly then, with ‘holding’ provided by the tutors and the reading group, Susanna begins her journey out of her stalled vision of the past by creating living, breathing metaphors for her present sense of self. The next exercise pushes this further. For the ‘future self’ exercise Susanna chooses a safe five years hence, imagining herself now as a working writer. As ‘Five Years On’ opens, she is sitting with her back ‘against a huge floor cushion propped up against a chair’, reading and listening to music. She knows that it is ‘safe enough to lean back’, because there is someone behind her: her lover who is crucial to the atmosphere of trust this piece of writing conjures up. He is the one who helps her to let go of the ‘smouldering darkness’ and to trust ‘the ground beneath [her]’. He helps her to contain her pain, creating a space she can go to, ‘tiptoeing gently when I need to visit my dreamland of the dead’. It is also a sensual place, ‘where we touch and feel our way through each other's lives’; where desire finds its natural home again.
In this containing space Susanna can be fluidly creative: ‘I am always either reading or writing these days, researching and writing, searching and noting, re-writing and shaping, moving and re-arranging’. This activity ‘nourishes me in the deepest way’. It gives her a voice: ‘I read and I am heard’. But her writing is not always easy; it takes readers ‘from one slippery path to a crevice then steeply uphill to the clear light of day’. For some, ‘the voice is too loud, too stringent and sometimes the frightened ones call “tone it down”’, but she does not. Like Simon's story ‘Pencil’, ‘Five Years On’ simultaneously evokes space and movement, in the iterative processes of writing and re-writing, moving and shaping, but there is also a sense of trust that when she ‘leans back’ she will be held, not just by the other, but by her own internalised sense of safety.
In this piece, then, Susanna dares not only to imagine a future, but one in which she is managing the pain of the past sufficiently to be able to write again, and also, importantly, enjoying a new sexual relationship. This derives, I suggest, partly from her deeper exploration of what the present feels like, and partly from her sense of being ‘held’ within the reading group. Just doing this piece of writing, Susanna says, is a ‘turning point’; ‘having it heard in the writing group’ is another turning point. Also crucial is the tutor's feedback that helps her not to dismiss the writing as a ‘romantic fantasy’, but to see it as a legitimate expression of desire. The term ‘turning point’, although a cliché, captures Susanna's psychic movement away from a fixed focus on the past to a more forward-looking gaze, thus setting her self-narrative in motion again. As she says later, ‘I found the act of writing this piece powerful and quite transformational. It moved me from a past and present marked by loss into an area of possibility and future’.
Re-conceptualising the self as multiple and in process
Exposure to the conceptual material of Course 1 also contributes significantly to Susanna's development at this stage. It speaks to her about her own condition: the idea of illness as a narrative in Hilary Mantel's memoir (2004); the potential for psychic splitting under the impact of physical illness (McDougall, 1985); the way medical discourses can construct social identity (Foucault, 1971); and the possibility of having multiple voices and dimensions of self (Neisser and Fivush, 1994). It helps Susanna to articulate and bring conceptual shape to her experience prior to the MA and to understand better the impact of the work of the first term. What begins visibly to emerge from Susanna's experience of the MA is a growing understanding of herself as potentially in process rather than fixed by a label; as having multiple voices and dimensions of self, potentially in conflict with each other; and of writing and rewriting her experience as a means of keeping the process in motion and open to change. This ‘new identity’ – which she also refers to as a ‘new personal typography’, revealing her experience of it as spatial – ‘includes being part of a writing and learning community that stretches the boundaries between the personal, the creative and the academic’.
Susanna's shift into a more open and fluid sense of self continues in Writing and Groups. The issue of disclosure of her medical condition looms large again at the start of this course, with the exercise ‘This is Who I Am’. Susanna chooses poetic free verse and a mixture of past and present tense to contain a mini-autobiography spanning birth to the present. A difficult parental relationship comes into view (‘They weren't speaking when I was born’), divorce perhaps (‘the explosion shattered the fragile family Ming into fragments’), and the need for escape (‘a square peg in a round hole in a cold country/I escaped to the sun’). The devastating consequences of that escape (‘It was too hot; I got burnt!’) become clear in the last few lines of the final stanza: ‘Blister packs keep me alive/I ignore the red and yellow labels/marking me a danger to humanity./Defiant, I use public transport at all times’.
Writing this poem and reading it to the group is, Susanna says, ‘enormously cathartic’ and is made possible by the holding environment of the group. The ‘space in the room’ feels safe-enough to begin, at last, the disclosure Susanna is seeking, although when it comes to discussing the poem, she notices that she does not offer explanations of that last stanza. Mutual listening and sharing is enough at this point (although later she regrets not taking the opportunity for a fuller disclosure), but she is glad that the next writing exercise is on: ‘This is How I Shelter, When I Shelter’.
Her short fiction on this theme is a series of images of shelter: ‘… in my bed under cool covers’, ‘… in cafés drinking frothy white cappuccinos’, ‘… the desert of the blank page where the soil is dry and thirsty for words’. Africa is here, drifting into view from the safety of these shelters, and those she has lost – husband and child. Evoking Simon's short story, ‘Murder’, Susanna uses the image of the ocean here, remembering a time when it was a shelter, when she loosened her grip on the raft she was clinging to and allowed herself to drift to the bottom, where she ‘sat curled around myself watching antennae open and close, insects disappear down the gaping mouths of gold-finned fish, tiny pink petals float past and occasionally far above, the heel of a human or a black rubber flipper’. Since that time she has become ‘stranded on the land’, unable to go underwater again, but a wise voice from the past reminds her that: ‘You liked it there … you've been to the bottom of the ocean before and you know now that you won't drown’.
In a short space of time then, Susanna is able to start working through her sense of loss in the safe-enough holding environment provided by the writing exercises and the group. There are other elements of ‘holding’ too in this course, including the learning journal, through which she reflects on the experience of the group and the writing. Theoretical readings also bring clarity and structure to experiential learning: Anzieu's (1984) concept of the group as an envelope; Carl Rogers's (1989) idea that it is the ability to change that constitutes learning rather than acquiring knowledge; and particularly Nina Coltart's (1996) notion of silence as an opportunity to reflect deeply and to grow. Whilst the experience of the course, particularly the way it is facilitated, is a hugely important part of Susanna's learning, it is really important for her ‘to see some of those ideas formulated in words’.
Re-conceptualising the learning process
The process, begun in Course 1, of relinquishing a dominant identity now begins, in Course 3, to impact on Susanna's sense of what it means to be a learner. Her former conceptualisation of learning as a drive for achievement, a ‘terrible compulsion … to cram everything in’, is replaced by a more open and accepting stance. Rather than concentrating ‘on delivery and outcome’, she now understands the value of concentrating ‘on what you're actually learning and being … in the here and now’. This emphasis on being in the present connects with Susanna's increased ability to inhabit the present in the creative writing exercises. It evokes, in her earlier words, a ‘diffuse and less focused’ conceptualisation of the self in the learning process than her previous fixed container metaphor of learning as a process of cramming everything in. She also uses the term ‘absorbing’ to describe her new understanding of learning, with its connotations of porousness and receptivity. This new sense of being open to the process of learning is also helping her to relax her need to be in control as the facilitator of the writing group she is running and to develop a more relaxed, listeningholding stance.
The theme of the final session of Writing and Groups is endings, not an easy one for Susanna in the context of her losses. The writing assignment, ‘This is What I Remember’, gives rise to a free verse poem. Susanna describes this as her ‘strongest piece of work so far’, allowing her to face ‘an aspect of my shadow self – a frightened person, terrified of further abandonment’. Through the gloom of ‘the bright seaside sky greyed quickly’ at the mention of endings, the catastrophic events of her past life appear as a traffic accident on an African road, ‘a thick mud of pigeon guts and liver smeared across the windscreen of our future’. She feels distanced now from the ‘long hot summers … meant for/children with brown limbs lost in artless play,/ surfers,/ lovers/ and the lioness stalking grasslands, tearing gazelle flesh apart/ with her bare teeth’. There is only the silence of the bush and grandmother's ‘sad wisdom’. But it is not all darkness, for there is ‘a hairline crack where light seeps through’. The visceral sense of loss this poem conveys is relieved by this final line: it raises the reader's and the writer's imaginative gaze upwards towards the light – and the future.
Finding time again
At the end of the first year, then, Susanna has experienced change in a number of ways. Centrally important is her changing perception of time. From a sense of being ‘fixed in the past’ and ‘dragging myself into the present with great difficulty’, she can now inhabit the present and has rediscovered a sense of future. This opening-up to greater psychic movement has enabled her to relinquish her dominant self-concept of a chronically ill person. Her growing understanding of the self as made up of multiple dimensions has enabled her to begin to reconceptualise her illness identity as ‘part of my life and not the only thing’; rather than a portent of ending, it has become ‘a companion’. This has relieved the overwhelming pressure to disclose this identity and, whilst she has referred to it in her writing and told ‘a few students who have become friends’, she hasn’t actually ‘disclosed’ to the student group as a whole.
Whilst the opening-up has been challenging, anxiety is now ‘hugely reduced’; she has a ‘stronger sense of myself as an individual’; she is able to write more consistently, to be bolder and take risks with it, to allow ‘ideas [to] come on trains and buses’ and to be in process before they become fixed in words. She is also ‘beginning to get more sense of trusting my self as a learner’, learning ‘to work between aspects of myself’, which gives her ‘a stronger sense of “whole”’. These are major changes, yet Susanna describes the process of change as subtle and personal, ‘like homoeopathy where nothing necessarily happens but everything changes’. All the things she has been working with, she says – her writing voice, her ideas and material, readings of all kinds – have always been there, but ‘the exercises and discussion and listening and reading of our own and each other's work [have] synchronised into a self-respect and validation that has allowed me to write about it in some way’. This conjures up for me a stalled process being set in motion again, or perhaps better the re-setting of a mechanism that has never quite worked properly, so that the process it motors begins now to function more smoothly. That process, as in Simon's story, involves cognitive fluidity, a more ready access to feeling and emotion, and an ability to ‘hold’ the challenging space for the imagination. Thus the sense of fixity and fragmentation into discrete identities, with their inhibiting consequences for feeling and thinking, has given way to a more fluid but manageable sense of multiplicity. As a result, learning and writing processes have speeded up: ‘I learn something [every session] and in shorter and shorter time spans …On [one journey home] I wrote 14 short passages of prose – one for every station at which the train stopped’. Even in therapy, ‘I’ve kind of moved along at a much quicker pace’.
Consolidating a more reflexive self-experience
The start of Year 2 is complicated for Susanna by a period of hospitalisation. But her newfound facility for poetry provides a tool for reflecting on that experience through metaphor and imagery. During the enforced passivity of her hospital stay, rather than pressing herself to read all the theory books on her list, she begins to write a sequence of poems. These form a connected narrative from the end of the summer term, with its ‘golden glow’ of the intense relationships developed in Course 3 and expectations of journeys to be made over the vacation, to finding herself at the mercy of the ‘howling dog’ of physical pain. Waiting for hospital admission evokes difficult memories of an absent father at a time of childhood hospitalisation, but there is also a lighter, more ironic tone, that gently subverts the serious business of the psycho-geriatric ward in which she finds herself and her preparations for her operation. What she learns from this period of reflection and writing is, again, ‘to be much more in the here and now’.
In spite of the new challenges, Course 4 (Contexts for Practice) is a period of consolidation, enabling Susanna to bring together some of her learning from previous courses: how to facilitate effectively for others the kind of ‘bonding and … opening of the valves of creativity and self-examination’ she experienced in Course 1; how some of the theory from Course 2 becomes more intelligible in a practice context. This term's student-led writing workshop provides an opportunity to develop her sequence of hospital poems, and she learns the value of re-working her initial ‘energetic expression’ of ideas. She ends the term with a deeper sense of trust in herself as a writer; it is invaluable, she says, to listen to others and take their comments on one's work, but ‘in the end one relies on one's own feelings and judgements’. This involves being able to ‘learn through mistakes’. She realises that this applies also to her work as a facilitator of therapeutic writing groups, and equally well to the way she evaluates herself: ‘owning oneself rather than taking on an identity through the blame or praise of others’. All of this echoes the theme of opening-up to a more fluid and multiple sense of self that is also grounded in a growing sense of personal agency.
Creating a space for relationship
For her Independent Study project Susanna embarks on a ‘travel memoir’, exploring her time in Africa and her relationship with her former partner, continuing the process of purging and clearing a space for new thoughts. She has a sense of ‘leaving home’, of relinquishing the holding environment of the MA and going out into the world alone to show what she has learnt. In a conscious attempt to free herself of the need for ‘chronology and accuracy’ of an autobiographical account of her past and to continue the process of opening-up, Susanna chooses creative life writing and a non-linear, episodic structure for the memoir. Using flashbacks, she can move back and forth in time and place, dramatising key events: her arrival in Africa by native bus to be reunited with her lover after their initial coming together; their first meeting in a neighbouring African country; her subsequent sojourn in England before returning to Africa; then the traditional wedding in her partner's home village.
She wants to locate her story in the political and historical context of the time and in a first draft she intersperses newspaper extracts, maps, and photos of African leaders in between episodes. But the members of her reading group find that these distract from the memoir, so she begins afresh, this time keeping these ‘actual’ readers’ needs – for living characters, and dialogue and commentary – more clearly in mind. This is ‘a pivotal moment’ in her understanding of how to start shaping the memoir and another example of how crucial the group is as audience to the developing work and the developing self. The revised version is a multi-voiced narrative, within a first person, past tense frame, with the historical and political context brought alive through imagined dialogues between the narrator and local people, such as students she is teaching, who relate their experiences of the struggle for liberation in their country. These dialogues – imagined re-renderings of conversations Susanna had at the time – enable her to place her story, and her suffering, into a larger context. Thus in creating this relational piece of writing, she confronts her difficult past in the company of others with difficult pasts. Relationality is strongly present in this piece in other ways too. In the preparations for the narrator's wedding festivities and the ceremony itself there is much collaborative music-making and dancing and, by contrast with ‘Beginnings’ where Susanna's dancing is an expression of rage and pain in isolation, here it is sensual and joyful and in the presence of family and friends. In this final piece of writing Susanna has created a moving, bodily-felt space for herself in the company of others.
Having successfully sustained a long piece of creative writing in the relative isolation of Independent Study, Susanna feels increased confidence in herself as a writer and a sense of ‘self-reliance’; readers’ comments and tutorial feedback have helped her to sharpen her ‘critical eye’ on her writing. She is also, she says, ‘more self-accepting’. This latter is the result of the ‘very powerful effect’ of writing ‘creatively’ about a period of her life ‘that was full of contradictions’. Being given permission to fictionalise it has allowed her ‘to acknowledge it and make something of it without it disturbing me or feeling like a confession’. It has brought her a sense of ‘freedom with myself’. What she means by this, she says, is that she is
much less frightened of exposure and writing about myself … I was almost frightened to write in case of what came out. Now I feel that what comes out is fine, it can stay on the page as private writing or be shared or be changed into a fictional or other format.
The phrase ‘frightened of exposure’ is seemingly at odds with Susanna's previous pressing need to ‘disclose’ her illness identity, and the two verbs carry very different connotations: ‘expose’ implies opening-up to something raw and vulnerable, whilst ‘disclose’, as I said above, implies revealing something complete or closed. It also links with Susanna's intense experience of needing to be heard: if what needs to be heard is closed off, it cannot be expressed. I would suggest that the idea of disclosing her illness was a safer option than exposing her grief and anger. Whilst imposed from outside and freezing time, the illness identity created a sense of coherence at a time of huge emotional upheaval. Susanna hints at this when she says at the outset that she was unable ‘to be with myself’ and that this had ‘frozen my ability to express myself in creative writing’ and inhibited the work she could do in therapy.
After the MA Susanna talks about getting back into teaching and says: ‘I am easing into myself a lot more’. And then trying to define this more closely, she says she is ‘pushing back … into a kind of area of not so much familiarity or comfort but [pause] being more myself’. Elsewhere in the interview she describes this sense of being more herself to being ‘much more timely with myself and other people’. Being ‘more timely’ evokes fluidity and movement and contrasts with Susanna's previous stuckness in the past, no longer having a tolerable present or future. This increased sense of psychic movement allows the different aspects of herself – her writer-self, her ill self, her teaching self – to feel more integrated. She has moved from a fixed self that needs to be revealed towards a looser, more fluid and bodily-felt sense of self in time. The work she has done through the MA, alongside her therapy, has set the process of self-making in motion again.
Note
1. Later, Susanna identifies the snake charmer as her therapist