PERSONAL ESSAY
Against Introspection by Willa Glickman
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ecember 20 (Saturday!) 2014. What’s happening right now: I started by writing down my age, then drawing my face. I have just finished my first semester at Swarthmore College (in case you forgot what college I go to). It is winter break now. I drew a small map of campus. Looking back, I’m struck by the formality of it, by the strangeness of self-consciously addressing a journal to a self so far in the future that I would have forgotten what I looked like when I was young, where I went to school, how to get to the places I went everyday. Maybe I envisioned that it was for some future anthropologist, picking over the artifacts of our ruined civilization, eager to know where my dorm was. It didn’t seem to be for self-expression but for posterity. I think things all felt a little uncertain then. I think I was also stalling, sticking to the factual and easy-to-jot-down before having to communicate to myself why I had really begun. My dad is undergoing radiation for pancreatic cancer. He is supposed to have surgery in a month or so. It’s a little hard to know how to feel about this. I find all the early entries grating. The cheeriness bothers me, the empty phrases, the exclamation points. A pleasant if somewhat uneventful day! I try to be kind to my freshman-yearwinter-break self. I was young and unused to crises and we were all trying to be positive. My concern shows though here and there—drawing a picture of my mom rubbing my dad’s feet, numb from chemo, I noted with an arrow: Dad isn’t bedridden or anything, he was just in bed at the time. Wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, I guess. Part of me wonders who I was censoring myself for—a certain conception of myself as stalwart? My parents, who would never read it? Fate, who suddenly seemed to have a strong hand in arbitrating the balance between life and death that we were presented with? A deeper part of me worries that I wasn’t
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APRIL 2018 SWARTHMORE REVIEW
censoring myself all that much. Maybe, like all the people who lived before Shakespeare invented interiority, I just didn’t have particularly complex feelings, or if I did, I didn’t think much about them. Depth of expression equates to depth of experience, as the argument goes. Today was Mom’s birthday. She was a little sick and Dad was feeling a little chemo-y so it was a bit low-key, but nice! It is clearly not productive to evaluate old journals for literary merit, much less to take something scrawled twenty minutes before bed in an old high school notebook as representative of my entire psyche. But I think my evasive entries particularly bother me because of how graphically they display the limits of writing, or at least the limits of my ability to express myself in writing. A shy kid growing up, I have often experienced “quietness” as a breakdown in communication. In my mind I have a clear sense of what I mean, but I can’t pin down the edges of it enough to translate it into words, or it gets jumbled in the physical act of speaking. Writing has always appealed as an alternative, a slower mode of expression that provides enough time to get everything in order, proof that there was something there after all. But this can also make it feel high stakes, as if each time I sit down with a blank page I have to make up for the things I’ve left unsaid, and imperfect work isn’t just a temporary miscommunication but a mark of an internal lack. Who was I then? I feel unable to make contact with the version of myself that my dad would have last known. But I am grateful to that succinct stranger for what she did record, which was essentially a log of everyday life in an abnormal time. The mundane feels meaningful, something we were actively maintaining. In a journal that becomes largely defined by my dad’s absence, glimpses of him in the early entries are precious, if not necessarily satisfying. Me & Dad went to the gym and stayed there for 2 ½ hours because he chatted with every person there. Woke up, read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for class, Dad brought me back a muffin after getting his blood drawn. While Mom & Dad went to do some 3rd Eye Transcendental Meditation (Dad saw
‘The Vortex’ → a circle of lime green light) I went to visit Numen at his job. What I want to read most are his words, but I didn’t record those. Why would I have? Even when I knew he was going to die I couldn’t really believe that his voice was something that could be lost. I could barely hear it as anything out of the ordinary. Reading his writing later I come across the phrase: Faster than you could say the Birdman of Alcatraz wasn’t allowed to have birds on Alcatraz… I’ll leave him to speak for himself. After he died the entries immediately become less closed off. There is less to be in denial about, less to lose. I am less afraid of my own sadness. I become more aware of the limitations of my writing: I feel like when I write I am afraid of being honest and writing down my thoughts for several reasons:—It’s difficult.—I’m afraid to/embarrassed to.—The written down-ness of it. Sometimes I don’t want to be solidified in that way.—It seems impossible to capture everything rather than just a particular angle.—It feels self-indulgent/ self-centered/ungrateful.
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ut looking back now, I find that I value the new introspection less than I thought I would. Maybe I still remember the outlines of how things felt at the time too well for the description to feel meaningful, or maybe I described too generally. What I really value are the details of how I spent each day, especially the bizarre ones immediately after my dad’s death. When I had thought about him dying I had been unable to imagine what we would do—not in a grand sense, but literally. How would we possibly act? In the absence of any religious rituals, mourning seemed very unstructured. While I remember the time he spent in the hospital fairly clearly, I have almost no recollection of the time after his death other than what I recorded, which was mostly of being introduced to the white-plush-carpeted world of the death industry (selecting a cremation box, an urn, planning a memorial service). It was in many ways a time of doing and organizing rather than of feeling, or rather, a time of feeling through organizing.