In extremis: Life writing as self-preservation practice in troubling times
Dr Deborah Shepard
Paper delivered at IABA International Life Writing Conference, 27 September 2023
Author photo: Auckland city in lockdown, 15 September 2021
As I was preparing to write this paper I became aware of a feeling of resistance and uncertainty. Should I be doing this? Because in the aftermath of the pandemic the subject that had swamped the media channels daily for over two years is now rarely mentioned. The reasons are understandable. It was a harrowing experience on so many levels — social, emotional, financial, existential — extracting a high death toll across the world and wide scale suffering in frightening circumstances. Then there was the psychological dimension. The lockdown measures and closing of international borders jolted us into a confrontation with life’s impermanence and our individual powerlessness in the face of catastrophe. These curtailments of personal freedoms unleashed a welter of negativity leading to a rise in anarchic disruption fuelled by misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. In the process simmering schisms in society were exposed, and we witnessed a hardening misogyny towards women leaders the world over. In my own country there was the vilification of our PM Jacinda Ardern, making her position no longer tenable or even safe. These developments were so shocking to witness that now in a post-Covid world many wish to forget and bury the uncomfortable past.
For that reason I am grateful for the space this conference offers to reflect on and re-examine my own role in documenting the crisis. In June 2020, Richard Horton, editor in chief of the general medicine journal The Lancet, wrote in an essay “Covid-19 and The Ethics of Memory,’ “We each have an obligation to remember [the pandemic]. The number of lives lost is too great to forget.’ For him “Securing the memory of COVID-19 is the minimum we owe to each other in the aftermath of this catastrophe.”
When I decided, on the eve of NZ’s first lockdown on 26 March 2020, to begin a journal of the pandemic and to post the entries on Facebook I wasn’t as clear in my purpose as Horton. I just sensed that documenting the crisis as it unfolded, using a form of life writing that brings history vividly and intimately to life, in a way that no other nonfiction genre can achieve, was a valid activity. It was also something constructive I could do in the midst of difficult personal circumstances for I was already stretched by a divorce which had resulted in me losing the family home a year earlier and being catapulted into a nomadic existence while awaiting a settlement. The experience was discombobulating and humbling and ongoing. I needed an absorbing project to distract me. The painter Edward Burne-Jones wrote in a letter to May Gaskell, ‘If I can only work – it has saved me always – saved me through the most miserable times.’
Initially I was nervous about writing my personal into the historic record, for I would be doing this on the wing, writing to a daily deadline, that allowed me little time to consider the implications of the writing before posting live. This would create ethical pressures. The expectation of the journal genre is that it provide access to the writer’s inner life. I couldn’t skim lightly for the success of the form hinges on the self-revelatory strand. Anai-is Nin has written, ‘… if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.’ While I agree wholeheartedly I was concerned about my personal vulnerability writing in the aftermath of divorce. Although it was never a major theme, still it surfaced because I was coping with its consequences. So I created some boundaries — to rarely refer to it and to never mention the ex by name, or hint at his profession, and to focus instead on my current lived experience documenting my days in lockdown. It helped to have my children in mind as I wrote, and if in doubt to ask them directly ‘Are you okay with this?
And so I juggled the two main strands of documentary reportage and my interior responses to the crisis and shared them with my audience. What I did not anticipate was the reception of my Facebook followers. Although I’d known my journal would function as ‘survival writing’ for myself, I wasn't sure about its relevance to the reader. I never imagined that readers would connect with the writing and engage warmly and even on occasions shape my writing, with people sending relevant articles for incorporation. When I wrote about the initial shock of lockdown my daughter sent an article from the Harvard Business Review ‘That discomfort you’re feeling is grief’. When I wondered whether other writers were journalling the lockdown a colleague alerted me to the diary of Wuhan journalist Fang Fang. These gifts made me feel supported. There was a community of readers out there, tuning in and commenting. I’ve since had people tell me, ‘Your journal was the first thing I read in the morning’, or it was ‘the last thing I read at night. It helped me feel less alone.’
It was then that I recognised the transformative power of journalling through a crisis. I can recognise this in my own writing and its evident in these two excerpts from the Covid-19 repository on my website. The first by a nature writer who'd attended one of my workshops. She begins in this way:
Even in my sleep I mine the minutiae of my days for any anomaly which indicates something hidden, something buried just beneath the surface. I have developed a crepuscular habit of wide-awake worry. My ears are pinned back, and my tail is tucked between my legs. This is not my way. But the virus is a threat I don’t know how to fight.
She then writes about phenomena that soothe her:
I find this in the eyes of my dog… in bird song from high in the trees; and in the tilt of a blackbird’s head as she listens intently to the industry of worms beneath her feet. The winter snowdrops, little silent white bells rung by the breeze, bring quiet moments of delight.
Many people wrote about the solace of the natural world during Covid. Perhaps this was unsurprising given many of us walked our way through the lockdowns and in the process gained a greater appreciation of the natural world.
The second excerpt is from a Dutch writer (a member of the first writing group I belonged to) who lives on her own in Tāmaki Makaurau. She writes that with the closing of international borders, she felt her world shrinking. Fearing she may never return to her homeland she writes:
…Never again to go for a walk in the woods around my hometown, wander about the weekly market buying cheese and salted herring, spend days with my sister, get on a train to Amsterdam, see the broad rivers in a wide landscape.
Again like the first writer, she turns her attention to her garden:
… I laugh out loud when I see a blackbird insisting on having the birdbath to itself, no sparrows allowed in. So much splashing that a top-up will be needed. The sparrows are happy to share their bath. Six or eight hop from the rim into the water and out again... The silver eyes are so quick it seems they barely get their feet wet, but they too come back for a second dip…
How lucky I am to have this small garden.
Something interesting was occurring here, a tendency in the narrative structure of these lockdown entries to began on a negative emotion and then gradually as the writer articulates the anxiety, there is a consequent easing and release from the feelings that clears the way for an upswell at the end. This is the therapeutic power of journalling. Daily it offers potential for catharsis, leading to greater peace by the end of the writing session.
In my own entry from the first day of lockdown I opened on a sense of unease, ‘Everything feels off-centre. My head spins.’ And ended like this:
Despite everything I find I am grateful for this mellow autumn day and for the afternoon walk which took me to the top of the volcanic cone of Takarunga. Up there, head grazing the sky, I scanned the 360 degree view below, taking in the sparkling city floating on its isthmus, the harbour pale blue and milky entirely empty of boat traffic, how extraordinary. Further out I spied the islands in the gulf and even further out a long faint line sketched in lilac on the far horizon, the Coromandel Peninsula. Across the channel I studied Rangitoto, the great maunga sitting, in a fully embodied Buddha-like state, with the sea wrapping around…
The day ended on a Zoom meeting with my Buddhist community. Our scholar teacher, presently stranded in Birmingham, led us into a thirty minute meditation. Her emphasis was on compassion, for the self, and for people everywhere currently challenged by the pandemic. She left us to continue on in silence with the words:
Here. Now. This.
Dr Deborah Shepard
Paper delivered at IABA International Life Writing Conference, 27 September 2023
Author photo: Auckland city in lockdown, 15 September 2021
As I was preparing to write this paper I became aware of a feeling of resistance and uncertainty. Should I be doing this? Because in the aftermath of the pandemic the subject that had swamped the media channels daily for over two years is now rarely mentioned. The reasons are understandable. It was a harrowing experience on so many levels — social, emotional, financial, existential — extracting a high death toll across the world and wide scale suffering in frightening circumstances. Then there was the psychological dimension. The lockdown measures and closing of international borders jolted us into a confrontation with life’s impermanence and our individual powerlessness in the face of catastrophe. These curtailments of personal freedoms unleashed a welter of negativity leading to a rise in anarchic disruption fuelled by misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. In the process simmering schisms in society were exposed, and we witnessed a hardening misogyny towards women leaders the world over. In my own country there was the vilification of our PM Jacinda Ardern, making her position no longer tenable or even safe. These developments were so shocking to witness that now in a post-Covid world many wish to forget and bury the uncomfortable past.
For that reason I am grateful for the space this conference offers to reflect on and re-examine my own role in documenting the crisis. In June 2020, Richard Horton, editor in chief of the general medicine journal The Lancet, wrote in an essay “Covid-19 and The Ethics of Memory,’ “We each have an obligation to remember [the pandemic]. The number of lives lost is too great to forget.’ For him “Securing the memory of COVID-19 is the minimum we owe to each other in the aftermath of this catastrophe.”
When I decided, on the eve of NZ’s first lockdown on 26 March 2020, to begin a journal of the pandemic and to post the entries on Facebook I wasn’t as clear in my purpose as Horton. I just sensed that documenting the crisis as it unfolded, using a form of life writing that brings history vividly and intimately to life, in a way that no other nonfiction genre can achieve, was a valid activity. It was also something constructive I could do in the midst of difficult personal circumstances for I was already stretched by a divorce which had resulted in me losing the family home a year earlier and being catapulted into a nomadic existence while awaiting a settlement. The experience was discombobulating and humbling and ongoing. I needed an absorbing project to distract me. The painter Edward Burne-Jones wrote in a letter to May Gaskell, ‘If I can only work – it has saved me always – saved me through the most miserable times.’
Initially I was nervous about writing my personal into the historic record, for I would be doing this on the wing, writing to a daily deadline, that allowed me little time to consider the implications of the writing before posting live. This would create ethical pressures. The expectation of the journal genre is that it provide access to the writer’s inner life. I couldn’t skim lightly for the success of the form hinges on the self-revelatory strand. Anai-is Nin has written, ‘… if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.’ While I agree wholeheartedly I was concerned about my personal vulnerability writing in the aftermath of divorce. Although it was never a major theme, still it surfaced because I was coping with its consequences. So I created some boundaries — to rarely refer to it and to never mention the ex by name, or hint at his profession, and to focus instead on my current lived experience documenting my days in lockdown. It helped to have my children in mind as I wrote, and if in doubt to ask them directly ‘Are you okay with this?
And so I juggled the two main strands of documentary reportage and my interior responses to the crisis and shared them with my audience. What I did not anticipate was the reception of my Facebook followers. Although I’d known my journal would function as ‘survival writing’ for myself, I wasn't sure about its relevance to the reader. I never imagined that readers would connect with the writing and engage warmly and even on occasions shape my writing, with people sending relevant articles for incorporation. When I wrote about the initial shock of lockdown my daughter sent an article from the Harvard Business Review ‘That discomfort you’re feeling is grief’. When I wondered whether other writers were journalling the lockdown a colleague alerted me to the diary of Wuhan journalist Fang Fang. These gifts made me feel supported. There was a community of readers out there, tuning in and commenting. I’ve since had people tell me, ‘Your journal was the first thing I read in the morning’, or it was ‘the last thing I read at night. It helped me feel less alone.’
It was then that I recognised the transformative power of journalling through a crisis. I can recognise this in my own writing and its evident in these two excerpts from the Covid-19 repository on my website. The first by a nature writer who'd attended one of my workshops. She begins in this way:
Even in my sleep I mine the minutiae of my days for any anomaly which indicates something hidden, something buried just beneath the surface. I have developed a crepuscular habit of wide-awake worry. My ears are pinned back, and my tail is tucked between my legs. This is not my way. But the virus is a threat I don’t know how to fight.
She then writes about phenomena that soothe her:
I find this in the eyes of my dog… in bird song from high in the trees; and in the tilt of a blackbird’s head as she listens intently to the industry of worms beneath her feet. The winter snowdrops, little silent white bells rung by the breeze, bring quiet moments of delight.
Many people wrote about the solace of the natural world during Covid. Perhaps this was unsurprising given many of us walked our way through the lockdowns and in the process gained a greater appreciation of the natural world.
The second excerpt is from a Dutch writer (a member of the first writing group I belonged to) who lives on her own in Tāmaki Makaurau. She writes that with the closing of international borders, she felt her world shrinking. Fearing she may never return to her homeland she writes:
…Never again to go for a walk in the woods around my hometown, wander about the weekly market buying cheese and salted herring, spend days with my sister, get on a train to Amsterdam, see the broad rivers in a wide landscape.
Again like the first writer, she turns her attention to her garden:
… I laugh out loud when I see a blackbird insisting on having the birdbath to itself, no sparrows allowed in. So much splashing that a top-up will be needed. The sparrows are happy to share their bath. Six or eight hop from the rim into the water and out again... The silver eyes are so quick it seems they barely get their feet wet, but they too come back for a second dip…
How lucky I am to have this small garden.
Something interesting was occurring here, a tendency in the narrative structure of these lockdown entries to began on a negative emotion and then gradually as the writer articulates the anxiety, there is a consequent easing and release from the feelings that clears the way for an upswell at the end. This is the therapeutic power of journalling. Daily it offers potential for catharsis, leading to greater peace by the end of the writing session.
In my own entry from the first day of lockdown I opened on a sense of unease, ‘Everything feels off-centre. My head spins.’ And ended like this:
Despite everything I find I am grateful for this mellow autumn day and for the afternoon walk which took me to the top of the volcanic cone of Takarunga. Up there, head grazing the sky, I scanned the 360 degree view below, taking in the sparkling city floating on its isthmus, the harbour pale blue and milky entirely empty of boat traffic, how extraordinary. Further out I spied the islands in the gulf and even further out a long faint line sketched in lilac on the far horizon, the Coromandel Peninsula. Across the channel I studied Rangitoto, the great maunga sitting, in a fully embodied Buddha-like state, with the sea wrapping around…
The day ended on a Zoom meeting with my Buddhist community. Our scholar teacher, presently stranded in Birmingham, led us into a thirty minute meditation. Her emphasis was on compassion, for the self, and for people everywhere currently challenged by the pandemic. She left us to continue on in silence with the words:
Here. Now. This.