Making a Map: On Therapy and Novel-Writing
By Erin Griffin Collum
“What is that?” I asked my therapist, waiting through the tiniest of delays in our video call in March 2021. It was my one-year mark of being in therapy.
“Adjustment disorder happens when someone lives outside of their window of tolerance for too long,” she explained, again presenting something amorphous and scary in terms I could understand. We had talked about the window of tolerance before, and I had shortcuts for this understanding at arm’s reach in my mind.
Hypoarousal (feeling depressed, low energy, or disassociating) and hyperarousal (feeling anxious, stuck in thought loops, or distressed) sandwich the window of tolerance, which is the sweet spot of being a human. I was finding my way out of adjustment disorder and into that sweet spot for the first time I could remember. It was and is grueling and joyful work. And I couldn’t have done it without writing my first novel at the same time.
I had my first therapy session at the beginning of March 2020. Even just seeing that date, I’m sure visceral memories of “lasts” reverberate through you too. As a podcast I listen to calls it, that was the “before times.” As America shut down and we were asked to stay at home, my Instagram blew up with posts of people “taking advantage” of isolation by learning to bake bread or tackle their to-do lists or finally settle in to write the Great American Novel. I scoffed. I was too tapped out to find posts like that charming or compelling or convincing anymore. I grew up under the rule of Fake It Til You Make It, and I could smell the cheerful falseness of this mindset from miles away. I had quit my full-time job a year back to work part-time and write, but I continued, as I always had, to full-time people-please. It was not going great.
I wasn’t going to Fake It Til I Made It anymore, but I didn’t know what the alternative was. I’d faked it, and I hadn’t made it anywhere I wanted to be, and now we were living in an apocalyptic pandemic. I’m wary of making this pandemic a footnote in my story. Every time I talk about 2020 and how transformative it was, I give these caveats. No tragedy is worth the personal growth it gives us. Hardship isn’t a crucial ingredient in God’s recipe for helping us be better. And yet.
And yet 2020 has been the most transformational year of my life. And yet hardship was my fast and chosen friend but I wanted a better one. And yet the pandemic was the best reason I had encountered in my life to stop people-pleasing, stop saying “yes” when I meant “no,” and stop believing what others told me when I could sense its falseness in my gut. Peoples’ lives and well-being were at stake. My life and well-being were at stake.
As my therapy sessions and the pandemic continued, like parallel counterbalances to one other, I started to identify what I really wanted. I started to redirect my people-pleasing energy to please myself. And in June 2020, I started writing a fantasy romance novel.
“It’s just for fun!” I told everyone when it came up. “Maybe I won’t even finish it, but I’m having a lot of fun!” Weirdly, this was true. I had had the idea for this book for months but easily talked myself out of writing it. After all, I am a poet. I earned my MFA in poetry. In the “before times,” I said I didn’t believe in hierarchies, but deep down, secret even from myself, I totally did. And poets were better than novelists who write genre fiction.
However, as I wrote, I understood the cheesy cliches people use to talk about the magic of writing. I used them all to describe my experience: It came to me fully formed! I can’t stop thinking about insert character’s name! I just keep having ideas! Again, weirdly, this was all true. I felt like I had stumbled into an alternate reality that was only mine. It was generous and generative and blissful. And I don’t use words like “blissful.” It was the first thing I had enjoyed this much since I was a child playing pretend alone in the backyard. I fell asleep thinking about scenes at night and woke up planning my day around working on my novel. When people asked to read it, I told the people I didn’t want to “no” and I told the people I did “yes.” This was as monumental as everything else.
Therapy sessions and the pandemic continued, but now I had this special thing that was just mine, that I did just for me. I kept expecting to hit writer’s block or for the writing to start to feel like work. But I kept nestling myself into my gold velvet chair with my Chromebook in the corner of my one-bedroom apartment while my husband worked from home through the wall. I kept writing, and the writing showed me how to keep writing.
It also often showed me what I really thought or wanted or needed.
Therapy has some magic of its own, under the right circumstances, but if the magic of writing my novel was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the magic of doing therapy was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Yes, it’s necessary plot-wise, but it’s dark and gritty and Dumbledore dies at the end. Each week in therapy, I could count on ending the session in tears and often more confused than when I started. I knew it was a better confused than without therapy — it was like being in the middle of untangling the knot in my gut instead of feeling the knot grow as I prioritized the desires, needs, and opinions of others over my own.
But therapy was confusing nonetheless. It was a deep, identity-crisis confusing, and, cheesily and truly, my novel was the map out of that confusion. It was a map I made myself. Through the summer and fall of 2020, I wrote to make some emotion I was trapped in concrete and understandable. If I wrote a scene about how it feels to be exiled, then I could understand how I’ve long carried the feeling of being different than everyone else. If I wrote a scene about blackmail, then I could see clearly how wrong it is to be emotionally manipulated. If I wrote a scene about my main character confronting someone who hurt her, but that she could avoid, then I could realize that I too wanted a confrontation of my own.
Writing my novel became its own parallel track to my therapy sessions and to living in a pandemic. It helped me uncover what I wanted and thought and felt throughout a year that shoved us all out of our windows of tolerance. It helped me understand what I find fun, and it helped me validate myself. I wrote for the right reasons: because I wanted to, because it felt good, and because it was a project I cared about. Now, when the “before times” confusion sets in, it’s still hard. There’s still hurt and grit and darkness. There’s still news in my inbox about death tolls and division that knocks the breath out of me.
Nothing about the last year and a half has been easy or simple. And yet.
Now I know how to find my way. I know how to make a map.
Erin Griffin Collum is a writer and editor. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University in 2017 and writes about mental health, embodiment, and identity in her poetry fiction, and creative nonfiction. She is passionate about romance and fantasy fiction. Read more about her editing work at griffincollum.com.
Read more essays and articles by Erin here.