A note on the prompts & monthly depth writing pod
At the end of this dispatch you’ll find depth writing prompts to channel your creativity & expand your sense of possibility. You can interpret the prompts any way you wish. You might want to do them now or when you have a quiet moment later on. You can do them on your own or with a friend. Or you can join the monthly depth writing pod on Monday December 16th 7pm - 8.15pm GMT to do the prompts with others in a friendly & supportive online space.
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Read on or listen to the audio to explore:
Our complicated relationship with suffering
The Jungian shadow archetype
Creative strategies for working through pain
Image: Tracey Emin, Take Me To Heaven (detail), 2024, photo Depth Writing With Dr Rachel.
Take me to heaven
Blood is gushing from the woman on the bed. It jets and spurts from between her legs with an unstoppable force, reducing her body to a fragile red outline of almost nothing. Through the miasma, the woman appears to levitate above a pink stain clouding the bed, while a halo glows like a full moon at the crown of her head, as if somewhere between these two flimsy facsimiles, she is a witness to her own death.
I stand in the clinical, white gallery, which feels not unlike a mortuary, looking at this self-portrait by British artist Tracey Emin wondering if her pale apparition is weighing up whether the pain was worth it or not?
Four years ago, Emin, who is in her sixties, did in fact nearly die when she was diagnosed with an aggressive strain of bladder cancer. Having miraculously survived, she now lives without a bladder, urethra, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, part of her colon and part of her vulva but with chronic pain.
However, Emin’s art was about pain long before that. Her early work involving unmade beds, patch-worked tents and unravelling threads, from back when young British artists (the YBA’s) were briefly immortalised as rock stars, chronicled Emin’s teenage experiences of poverty, rape and botched abortions growing up in the then forgotten seaside town of Margate.
Meanwhile the painting I’m standing before is from a series about the end of an affair. It’s called ‘Take Me To Heaven’ and the longer I look, the more I can almost hear the woman’s moan to be free of her pain-hobbled body. Maybe for a short while, maybe forever.
Good luck to you but really
Confronted by this red tide pouring from the woman’s near extinguished body, I wince and squirm. The painting has put me right on the threshold of what I can tolerate and I don’t know if I want to look or turn away.
Later, I notice Emin has posted a photograph of the stoma planted in her stomach for her colostomy bag on her Instagram. It looks like an angry red nipple transplanted to the wrong place dribbling down the curve of her belly. Beside the photograph Emin has written:
‘That’s how I feel when I have a show on.
That everything is outside .. My emotions are on show , my feelings are.. Everything feels raw . So I find it harder to post without feeling a bit sick of myself but today I’ve gone for it..
Body , mind and soul.’
Underneath, someone has commented; ‘Sorry but do not understand why someone would put this picture on Instagram. Good luck to you but really etc etc’
Good-luck-to-you-but-really is not alone. Here in the West, it would seem we are not very good at being with pain - either our own or others’. It’s no surprise that whole industries are dedicated to helping us numb, escape and avoid it. Why put ourselves through anything from the mildly discomforting to the unbearably excruciating when there are so many easy ways to keep our pain at bay? What’s the point of making a show?
I learned not to make a show years ago one sunny day at the zoo in the summer of 1981 when my mother wanted to take a photograph of me holding my new baby brother. For reasons that will remain forever opaque, she had me kneeling on a gravel path with him on my knee. We were facing directly into the sun so I had to squint to see. But when I told my mother my knees were hurting and my eyes were stinging she started to shout, berating me for being awkward, difficult, disobedient and surly. Her voice stung more than the sun and bore into my bones more painfully than the gravel. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I forced down my tears and did as I was told. I still have the photograph of nine-year-old me smiling for the camera a little too brightly.
Decades later, on this Saturday morning in the gallery-cum-mortuary-cum-burial-site on the bank of the River Thames, I realise that, in part, I feel uncomfortable looking at Emin’s open wounds because I can’t help but see… myself. Not the girl smiling for the camera but an infrared mirror of the pain I would rather keep hidden away.
The things you dumped down the toilet
In the Jungian system of archetypes the term for what we prefer to hide and keep in the dark is the shadow. The shadow, according to Jungian psychoanalysis, is universal. In folk tales, it is only vampires who don’t have one. The question is not whether or not we have a shadow but how aware we are or not of our inner darkness and the unprocessed pain behind it.
South Korean writer Bora Chung captures this dark and shape-shifting archetype as well as anyone might in a short story from her 2017 collection Cursed Bunny in which a woman goes to the toilet only to find her faeces won’t flush away. Not only that but the woman is horrified to discover they also speak, addressing her as ‘mother’. Understandably repulsed, she asks this grotesque talking creature what it’s doing in her toilet.
‘‘My body was created with the things you dumped down the toilet,’ the talking faeces replies, ‘like your fallen-out hair and faeces and toilet paper you used to wipe your behind.’
‘But I can’t bear to think of a creature like you living in it,’ the woman counters, ‘finishing your body is none of my concern. I don’t care what you do, and I’d appreciate it if you stopped appearing.’’
Yet, instead of going away, the creature continues to take on a life of its own much to the woman’s great disgust. Needless to say, Chung’s story doesn’t end well.
Like the woman in the story, I tried my hardest to flush away my shame and the warped belief stuffed inside it that I wasn’t and couldn’t ever be good enough – not for my mother, nor myself, nor anyone else. Such was my great ability to smile while deploying a colourful variety of Faustian pacts I mistakenly thought would set me free, that the merry-go-round of my life unceremoniously ground to halt through the sheer effort of putting on a different kind of show when in my late thirties I developed chronic fatigue. I felt like I had died and was ashamed of that, too. And, in a way, I had.
The ‘orphaned dead of our psyche’
Jungian analyst and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests it’s helpful to see these small and sometimes big deaths along the path of our lives as descansos - the hand-made crosses and bouquets of flowers to be found on roadsides and cliff tops marking the place where someone has died. Rather than hide what is buried, descansos draw attention to our losses so we might process our pain instead of driving it underground into the unconscious.
‘Descansos,’ Estes explains in Women Who Run With The Wild Wolves (1992) ‘mark the death sites, the dark times, but they are also love notes to your suffering. They are transformative. There is a lot to be said for pinning things to the earth so they don’t follow us around. There is a lot to be said for lying them to rest.’
Once I was able to overcome my resistance to Emin’s paintings, what I saw was more descansos beautifully rendered in dripping paint. Meanwhile, if I were to make a descanso for nine-year-old-me, I would sow a gravel path with forget-me-not seeds. And if I were to make a descanso for the water-logged woman I became in my late thirties, I would exhume all the dresses she’d worn to go dancing and stitch them together to make a patchwork shroud. Writing down the stories of what Estes calls ‘the orphaned dead of your psyche’ is another way of making descansos so that their/our suffering might be alchemized through the transformative fire of imagination and creativity. Finding ways to do so made up the greater part of my doctoral research while there are still many more flowers I have yet to plant.
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Let’s discuss in the comments below
To what extent are Western societies pain avoidant and why? How is this evident in the culture and what is the impact?
What cultures, societies and communities, now or historically, model helpful strategies for processing pain?
How can creativity and art help us work through our pain?
Depth writing prompts
Reflect - what strategies do you or have you deployed to avoid pain – your own and that of others - to what effect? Are there any circumstances in your life now where you are conscious of avoiding pain?
Imagine something you find disgusting, repulsive and grotesque has taken on a personality, voice and life of its own. Write about what it does and says – maybe to you.
Write a list of the small and large deaths on the path of your life. Plant a flower at the graves of your ‘dead’ by writing a ‘love note’.
Join the monthly Depth-Writing Pod on Monday December 16th, 7pm-8.15pm GMT
Press pause on the busyness of life, connect with others and, most importantly, have time just for yourself to write in response to this month’s prompts.
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N.B. Although depth-writing is therapeutic, it’s not therapy, so let the words lead but only as far as want to go.
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