Writing Experience
Writing Experience
I was full of fury. I had so much I wanted to sort through, so much I wanted to unpack and so much to say. Normally, this is a recipe for a white hot blog post that comes streaming out of my pen. But I was entirely jammed up. I didn’t know where to start or how to dive in and I was frustrated, not just by the medical situation that was driving the post but also the struggle to write about it.
In talking about it with my friend, he pointed out that for things like the arts and feminist issues, I’ve been thinking about them for most of my life. When I pick up a pen to talk about things related to feminism or sexism or arts issues, I have already digested a lot of the content and ideas. Those things come relatively easy to me because I’ve done a lot of thinking and processing of those issues already. In trying to write about things related to ableism and Medicaid and medical justice, I’m just so new to these things, comparatively, so I can get gummed up and confused. I have years of writing about feminism behind me and almost none in dealing with the medical system. It makes a big difference.
Until my friend pointed it out to me, I was entirely unconscious of that discrepancy of experience. It explains a lot. Experience and practice can become invisible until we run into something without them. I have a LOT of experience in talking about feminism and the arts. I’ve taken courses in those subjects. I’ve read about them for years. I’ve had a lot of conversations about art in my life and a lot of conversations about feminism and sexism, too. I’ve been writing about them since before I started this blog back in 2008. In contrast, I have almost no experience talking about medical advocacy. When I first began dealing with, what I came to learn were, migraines in 2016, I had never had to look for a referral before. I had never had to figure out how to choose a doctor. I had never had to choose a pharmacy. When they asked me what my pharmacy was at the first doctor’s office that prescribed me something, I didn’t have one and it didn’t even occur to me that I should choose something close to where I live so they just sent it to the one next door to them. I’m like a child when it comes to thinking about health advocacy. There are probably a lot of people who have the opposite experience. Folks who have been disabled all their lives are often incredibly masterful at talking about it. (I would like to point you to the extraordinary Imani Barbarin talking about how she learned to do that.) The experience of writing, in general, is certainly an enormous boost when attempting to engage with something new but having practice and experience in particular areas really does make a difference.
I think about David Foster Wallace writing about tennis — because that man could write about tennis. He knew a lot about it. He’d been thinking about it a long time. When it came time to put it in his novel or to write an essay about it, it was right there. And he was such a skilled writer, he could make it readable even for me, someone who has only played tennis (very badly!) in gym class. He was also able to write artfully about things that were entirely new to him, things like a cruise, but maybe these sorts of thing were not as easy for him to jump into. We don’t know. We can’t ask him.
But for me, it did unlock something to recognize the difference between writing something with which I have some experience and something new. Acknowledging that helped me begin, in a moment that I was struggling, by recognizing that my difficulty was partly in dealing with something in which I am a novice. I was able to find my way with a little more grace for myself, a little more understanding for my own struggles. These blog posts don’t all come easy. But some of them do. And usually, I realize now, the things that come easy are usually those that have years of thought behind them. It’s easier to know where to start when you’ve been going a while already. Sometimes, writing can become easier the more you do it and sometimes you end up back at the beginning, wrestling with how to begin, like in the early days.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on February 1, 2023.
