freewriting

I've never much enjoyed the discipline of "freewriting."

In elementary school and middle school, my teachers would scold me for my frequent anguished pauses during our sixty-second freewrite sessions. "Abby, the point is not to get it perfect. Don't worry about spell checks or revision. That comes later. Just get what you're feeling onto the paper, okay?"

So I'd sit there in a paralysis of possibilities, and resort at last to writing lines. "I will not revise. I will not spell check. I will write what I feel. I will not revise. I will not spell check..." The buzzer would go off and I'd turn the paper in with a sense of mingled relief and failure, imagining the scorn with which my teacher would read it later: "Poor girl's a parrot. No originality at all."

Those paralyzed sessions at my desk were prophecies. Little did I know then how symptomatic my revulsion to freewriting was. The affliction to which it pointed was far more sinister than mere "lack of originality." It was lack of artlessness. It was crippling inhibition.

My super-ego constantly played Charlotte Bartlett (hypersensitive, controlling, and pathetic) to my ego's baffled and hesitatingly compliant Lucy Honeychurch. As I'd put the pencil to the page and initiate a clumsy and unpolished sentence ("indelicate" perhaps, but "at the same time, beautiful"), the pinched inner voice would gasp in horror and squeak, "Oh, but that won't do. I'd never forgive myself if I permitted you to commit this act of indiscretion. Best to phrase it this way..."

I could not express freely "what I felt" (as my Mr. Beebe or Mr. Emerson of a teacher urged) because of my mind's spinsterly chaperone. Nor could I proceed with the caution she required because of the time restraint. There was nothing to do, then, but to take refuge in parrotry.

That tension has only intensified as I've grown. In my relationships, in my writing, in my reactions to events, I constantly feel my heart rise to express how I feel--the restraining hand of social mores siezing it--and my lips spilling out some dull but safe Cecil Vyse of a cliche in response.

This cycle is wrong. It is false. I hate it.

I want my expressions of self to be beautiful, even if they are indelicate. I want to know what it's like to freewrite my feelings.

I want George Emerson. I want a room with a view.