It’s all about the word: On being a human, a counsellor, and a writer

BY ISABELLA MORI

So starts a poem I wrote many years ago after I delivered my children and myself from my abusive ex-husband and made room for all the hard stuff in my life to come to the surface. Later, many of my therapy sessions started with one of my poems.

Theologian Michael Dowd calls poetry “night language”—language that lives in a world where much is felt and not seen. Night language can express ideas and experiences that are otherwise hard to articulate. “i’m not starving / but i thirst” was a way to convey that while there was enough sustenance in my life in many ways, some vital element was in scarce supply—and that I felt that the reason for that scarcity lay within myself. What exactly that scarcity was about was unclear to me, as was why I experienced it—but that’s the stuff of night language: touching on the unspoken, the unknown.

My ability to write poetry came from growing up in a family that screwed me up yet at the same time gave me the tools to deal with it. My parents showed me a model of marriage that validated living with an abusive spouse—“stand by your man!”—but also gave me a sense of justice and self-determination. This early experience of agency would later help me escape my abusive relationship. Meanwhile, through their passion for literature and art, my parents gave me the tools to deal with the aftermath.

Welcome to growing up with a genius father who was a fantastic painter, a deep thinker, an addict through and through, haunted by bipolar disorder and chronic pain, manipulative, wise, licentious, caring, and so funny that I peed my pants more than once laughing. Welcome to a mother who created magic with a violin, believed it when people said she wasn’t creative, dealt with her anxiety by bursting into rage, was passionate about avant-garde music, never made us feel poor even though we lived in great poverty, and together with my father, turned codependence into a baroque art form. Welcome to my native country of Germany in the ’50s and ’60s, dominated by stories of war, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima. To a sister with a disability, the twists (mostly twists) and turns of the sexual revolution, and enough family members and friends dying of suicide that I thought for the longest time that was a normal way of dying.

There were a few things on my mental health plate.

However, since I can remember—perhaps even before I bought myself a fountain pen after being paid for my first “job” at age six—writing has been the raft I could clamber onto in the midst of the emotional white water churning around me. One memory in particular stands out: I was in my twenties, living in Paraguay with my son, working at a job that involved quite a bit of writing and translating. This kept my literary fingers limber, and I wrote a lot of my own poetry at home as well. The poetic images that kept coming to me were of a toad—me—living in a deep well, only occasionally making it to the rim to sit in the light for a short while before quickly returning to the depths. Those were the words I was able to use because the term depression was inaccessible to me. Depression was something my father had, something that kept him in bed with the curtains drawn for months on end, and I. Was. Not. That.

Years later, when the emotional waters around me had stopped churning and had calmed down to manageable waves, I began to let the idea of depression in. First, I used poetic language, metaphors, to warm up to it: the dark fog I felt at times was “clouds,” my mood “weather.” Around that time, I also started working as a counsellor. I had played a part in my mother overcoming a life-threatening depression following her retirement; as a result, helping others felt like a natural role, and when I needed something to focus on after that separation from my ex-husband, studying to become a counsellor seemed the right thing to do.

There came a point when it dawned on me that the word, this basic unit of language, is central in my life. As a writer, I write stories, but the word is fundamental. I want the right word, the beautiful word, the word that precisely fits what wants to be said. (For more thoughts on that, see my piece “Circling Around Writing” in the online literary arts magazine, Literary Heist.)

As a counsellor, I pay close attention to what the person across from me says, and their word choices give us both clues. There is a reason why a client may say “my older brother” and not “Joe,” even though I know very well that Joe is their older brother. Why is it that they use the more distanced term of “older brother,” rather than the intimate “Joe”? Maybe we can explore that.

“i’m dying of thirst”—so begins the poem. The last three lines are:

In the end, therapy, a loving new marriage, fulfilling work—and yes, lots of writing—invited me to abandon the fear of drowning, and I threw myself into the flow of life. Today, I don’t thirst anymore. Today, I have enough waters to soothe me and pour out to others.

Isabella Mori lives in Vancouver and has authored two books of and about poetry, including A Bagful of Haiku – 87 Imperfections. Isabella’s work has appeared in publications such as the anthology The Group Of Seven Reimagined and is the founder of Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize. Currently, Isabella is working on a multigenre book on mental health and addiction.