Charles Shaffer '21
PRINT AND PAINTING, BELEN SUROS '22
Writing to Ease the Soul
Sitting in the darkness of my room, my limbs weighed down as if pinned to the bed, I stared into the ceiling and pondered what was going on within my mind. It can often be hard to visualize something that we can’t see, so let’s imagine these thoughts as bustling supply-chain workers running from machine to machine, keeping the cogs turning. The electrical chatter of buzzing neurotransmitters passes through the brain’s synapses as they assemble anger; happiness; sadness; excitement; rational and irrational thought; anxiety, and passion to be distributed throughout the brain like packages. Axons like conveyor belts link the different fabs, each housing a unique purpose: some process emotion, some sensory inputs, and others the conscious and unconscious mind. Behind the scenes, a world of automated thought constructed by the cerebellum’s trillions of calculations runs the show from beyond our reach like a machine behind locked doors. This miracle of evolutionary production turns chemical signals into the visceral experiences that fill our memories. Dopamine creates the feeling of bliss as I drive down the highway with the windows down and music on, the sea air running through my hair; oxytocin manufactures the warm, bubbly feeling when embracing a loved one; and serotonin creates the chilling sinking feeling that fills my body as I sit here, staring.
Closing my eyes, the dark backdrop that I am staring into quickly turns to a stage as I play out the times when I was truly happy. Wandering the cobblestone streets of downtown Montreal, exploring this beautiful new city by the side of someone I loved, I felt like I was disconnected from my life back on the other side of the continent. Left to our own devices, we found our way into an empty mall in Victoria Square, old city roads lined with shops whose windows were packed with trinkets embossed with the city’s name, little book shops hidden in street corners where we found the more french novels than we could ever read, small back alleys with nothing but door steps and bikes locked to racks, and pathways along the waterfront. I remember walking back to the hotel at night in Quebec, surrounded by a large group yet oblivious to the world around us, and meeting up in the hallways at midnight to get away from our friends. Then comes the fighting with my parents just after they told me that I could never see her again, the explaining why I hadn’ been the ‘cheerful’ son they had always known. Academic life became a blur as I told stories of parents suffering the loss of their child to an overdose during drug debates, attempted to ‘summarize myself in a few words’ on a college application; and continued stepping up to the podium in front of an audience of debaters hungry to rip my arguments to shreds and judges ready to critique them despite my struggle to turn the contents of my mind into words. As eyelids reluctantly open themselves once more, I realise the root of the downward spiral that led me here: failed communication. So, eagerly deciding to give writing a go, I snatch up the notebook on my nightstand and press the tip of a ballpoint pen into its soft pages, simply allowing it to glide along the lines.
When I write, nothing stands between me and the blank canvas in front of me; no one judges me as I etch the thoughts raging through my mind into the page, the curves, dots, and lines telling the story far better than my vocal cords ever could. I’ve always found myself using writing as an escape that follows me everywhere I go, some bizarre and unexpected. Sitting in a hotel room in Borrego Springs, struggling with the loneliness and isolation that I felt, I pulled out my notebook and started to scribble a story about a soldier and his girlfriend separated during the second world war. The sound of the fan humming above me and the muffled voices from outside of the room were all drowned out as my vision faded to a point filled by the words in front of me. Resting on the lip of a tree well, skiers whizzing by me reduced to a blur as I sat buried in snow up to my waist, I pulled out my phone and filled the time I spent waiting for my friends to catch up writing a story about a strike team dropping into snow covered Swiss or Norwegian mountains. My ungloved hands froze solid. Sitting on an unusually large rock atop a cliff at the end of a hiking trail in Yosemite, my skin caked in a thin layer of dirt and my nostrils filled with the earthy smell of a pine forest, my pen scratched images of hikers lost in the woods into my torn up notebook. My legs dangling over the docks lining the river Rhône in Lyon as I stared into the lights glistening on the water’s surface, my mind conjured up stories reminiscent of the many french coming-of-age tales that I’ve read. Like a fledgling taking flight for the first time, my notebook frees my mind from its chains and lets me soar through the trees, mountain peaks, or city streets around me. It creates a world where I am in control.
I live by the illusion of control over my sense of self. Though it seems like I am the one dictating where I stand politically, how I react to being insulted and what people I am friends with, all I really do is sift through the ideas formed by my unconscious mind. This is made abundantly clear in the times when I face the world head on and reflect on myself, an activity that I usually indulge in when walking the coast or sitting in my room, staring off into space. As my vision drifts out of focus and my body leans back into the cushion of my bed, a dense, chilling dread pours into my body from my scalp to the tips of my fingers and toes. But even when my arms and legs feel like lumps of lead as I struggle to move, my brain continues to light up with activity, performing thousands of calculations that make my reality seem smooth. Tossing my notebook to the side, I ask myself why my subconscious creates that hopeless feeling of standing alone in a crowd, even when surrounded by friends, or my warped sense of self that breaks down my being, leading to little more than physical and psychological hatred. Why does the brain have a strong knack for hating itself?
Self hatred fueled one of my most vivid memories of a time spent wandering the beach during a particularly lonely part of my life. My mind pushed back against the thought ‘nobody knows you exist’ as I wandered Del Mar’s endless shoreline, each step I took bringing me one step closer to letting down my defenses and accepting this as truth. The sea to my right and bluff to my left, I walked past hundreds of people as the sky slowly faded from blue to orange, and finally a dim red, the sun dipping below the horizon. My footsteps continued carrying me forward until I finally ran out of beach near Torrey Pines. The violent crash of waves hitting the shoreline harmonized in my ears, accompanying me along the way but doing nothing to soothe the deep, dark pit that I felt growing inside of me. I stared into the point on the horizon where the union of land and sea faded to a dot, losing my peripheral vision as I walked until the pain in my feet overcame the numbness. I took the isolation, the detachment, the discomfort, and the depression and thought ‘well, I guess this is me now.’ I was numb to the soft embrace of the sand enveloping my bare feet and the kiss of the crisp ocean air. I needed a way to reconnect with the world, so I pulled out the first blank page that I could find — the notes app on my phone — and forced myself into a realm devoid of external stimuli.
In that moment, the only things that existed were me and the page. I told stories about how backwards human society is; about our illusion of safety sitting within our tiny homes, nothing but meaningless ants riding a giant rock through the eternal depth of space. I wrote of the creeping darkness that saps the life out of the city as day fades to night.
“And, like a clam laying open on a beach, it’s insides writhed by the might of the ocean, I felt the loneliness and desperation of one whose soul had been torn out by the grips of society. Of humanity. I wandered the earth without a sense of direction, nothing but a hollow shell of my former self. As the sun went down over the water, the dark blotches of clouds in the sky denounced the darkness that descended over the world, obscuring the path into the light. Only from the small cracks through which the slim rays of light managed to escape could one catch a brief glimpse of hope. Yet mere moments later, it was all but extinguished as a cool darkness enveloped the night, extending the endless trod towards the promise of happiness lying just beyond my reach.”
As that writing relieved the darkness within me, the image of my lungs filling with water as I let myself succumb to the ocean’s grip and disappear into a swirl of waves evaporated. I had found a way out. Putting my phone down, I took in the serenity around me: the crash of the water pummeling the shoreline; the ocean breeze brushing across my face; the spray of the sea and cool mist of the night collecting in my damp hair; and the bright, full moon suspended above me like a giant ball hanging from a jet black ceiling. In that moment, writing allowed me to open a door into my mind and guide myself, lost in its midst, back to the light. The world is a beautiful place. Sometimes, we need a little help seeing that.
In the times where I find myself staring into darkness, I turn to writing as a tool for escape. With little more than a pen and paper, I can take myself out of the world that overwhelms me, face my thoughts in an isolated environment, and grow from the pain and loneliness that I hid from in years past. When I write, time flows through the pen’s ink as it scratches the images of my mind into the sweet earthy pages of my notebook, whisking me away from the world. It is a tool when facing myself during a period of numbness, each written word easing the feeling that paralyzes my muscles. Joan Didion wrote, “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.” As I struggled getting to know myself throughout highschool, understanding the nonsensical mess that swirls within my mind has been my most difficult undertaking, and writing has proven itself as the greatest item in my toolbox for self healing and discovery. Telling a story about a boy wandering the streets of Montreal or enveloped in a beach’s cool darkness has allowed me to create an anthology of pieces that, when put together, paints a picture of me. Whenever I am struggling to express my mind or crippling under the pressure of the world, I know that I can pick up a pen or keyboard and simply take flight.
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