What Others Think
By Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
If my underwear ever had holes in it or the elastic was stretched out or the fabric stained, my mother would say, “What if you had some accident and wound up in the hospital? What would people think?”
Who in any emergency room would care?
But because of this conditioning or my natural proclivity (I remember dancing ballet on a low tiled coffee table within sight of our open front door as a kid, hoping someone would drive by, be awed, and whisk me off to join the New York City Ballet), or because projecting ourselves into others’ eyes is an ordinary human tendency, I landed in adulthood with my attention well-honed toward “what people think.” It’s haunted my writing, where worries about audience invade even my private journal. I’m as good as the next writer at leaping from rough draft to imagined New York Times review fame, or for that matter, obscure disdain.
Dealing with my thoughts about what others think is an ongoing, daily artistic struggle.
Over the years, though (thirty-five since I began writing in earnest), I’ve noticed that my capacity for originality, vulnerability, and connectivity in writing largely depends on my willingness to dismiss the audience—not forever, but briefly, deliberately, early on in the process. Literary gymnastics can move a reader, but I’m increasingly convinced that more basic and needful than skill is the writer’s capacity to enter private psychic space. Young adult novelist Swati Avasthi imagines it as an inner playground, safely fenced, a refuge she defends mightily. I think of it as a “cloud of unknowing,” taking a page from a 14th century Christian mystic who advocated a similar technique for silent prayer. At the beginning of a project I enter this cloud, granting myself complete privacy and ultimate freedom. There I can be messy, heretical, imaginative, offensive, stupid, and ever more honest. When thoughts of audience break into this space, I politely and forcefully escort them out.
There’s plenty of time down the road to consider the reader. Even then, revising and editing, I like to tote my cloud through a project much like Winnie the Pooh (“How sweet to be a cloud, floating in the blue!”), periodically reentering it to recover my authentic voice, to assess why and how the project moves my heart, and to play. Even with a book in proofs I’m wont to pull out a spiral notebook and free-write: What terrifies me about this release? What do I hope for?
Turns out this exercise of inner privacy isn’t just for my benefit. William Strunk and E.B. White, consummate masters of style, teach that “your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” Pleasing and satisfying ourselves is the prerequisite to pleasing and satisfying anyone else. But pleasure has never been my goal as a writer—there’s too much suffering and injustice going around—so I prefer Robert Frost’s advice: “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Literature’s capacity to move its audience depends on its author’s willingness to be moved.
And how do I make room for my own tears and surprises? By turning my back, temporarily, on the reader. I need profound interior solitude to be that vulnerable. I’m with Carol Bly, who said, “If the soul is thinking audience, audience, audience, it cannot at the same time be inquiring of itself, kindly but firmly, ‘What are we doing here?’”
Having written daily for over thirty years, I can now see that the denser my cloud becomes, the more effective my writing. My voice grows in authenticity. I’m freer to experiment, tell the truth, be bold. I’m more apt to immerse myself in the material—to forget even myself. Only when I have no thought for my audience do I enter the flow, that state of graced presence. I cherish such moments. Cultivating my cloud is how I invite them.
When I was a girl in a tutu, pirouetting on our coffee table, I was nimble and beautiful because dancing delighted me. The recruiter I imagined would simply confirm what was already true. As a teenager I learned what my ballet teacher and mother and probably every adult saw—I was in fact a klutz—and this self-consciousness increased my klutziness exponentially. I gave up dancing entirely, even alone. I lost the joy of movement.
Now I’m married to a dancer. While we’re cooking dinner she sweeps me into a waltz, or after submitting a grant proposal she pulls me into a polka. Each time I must set down my fear of appearing foolish. Internally I close the blinds and conjure up that seven-year-old’s delight in her body. The less I care about how awkward I am, the more fun we have. The more I exercise this internal choice, the more graceful I become. This is the trajectory of my journey as a woman and artist: Away from crippling self-consciousness toward deliberate choice and ultimate release into the dance.
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality & Spirit, now in its second edition; the novel, Hannah, Delivered, and three books on writing: Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice; and The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done, forthcoming this fall. She is a founding member of The Eye of the Heart Center, where she teaches writing as a transformational practice and hosts an online writing community. You can connect with Elizabeth www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com and www.spiritualmemoir.com.