Jan. 16, 2007 - 21:31 MST

GOOD MEDICINE

After I finally got started writing a diary it became evident to me that, "I can't not write."

Much of it is probably the opinionated blather of a blithering idiot. However it is mine, all mine and expresses how I feel at the moment of writing.

Funny, how I read along for so long various journals and blogs without having the urge to hit the keyboard for real, but that is how it began for me. Gradually I began to swap e-mails with various people who journaled, and Al Schroeder's Nova Notes with a question at the bottom of each of his entries and the ability to answer the question and read how others answered them led into two things, one was I found out I could express myself to the point that others who read would comment and gained me a cyber sister way back then. Our ages are quite different, but we seem to see life through the same lens.

The fact that I am pretty deaf has given me the incentive to communicate via the written word also.

An article in The Rocky Mountain News by Anna Quindlen of Newsweek helps me understand a bit. Many of the people who have blogs and so forth are working through grief, past abuse and the sadness of cheating mates. As well recovery from the death of a loved one sometimes is helped by back and forth communication with folks who have been there and survived.

So here is her article quoted in full"

WRITING CAN BE A WAY TO SURVIVE, GROW STRONG

"The new movie Freedom Writers isn't entirely about the themes the trailers suggest. It isn't only about gang warfare and racial tensions and tolerance. It isn't only about the difference one good teacher can make in the life of one messed up kid.

"Freedom Writers is about the power of writing in the lives of ordinary people. That's a lesson everyone needs."

The movie and the book from which it was taken, track the education of a young teacher named Erin Gruwell, who shows up shiny-new to face a class of what are called, in pedagogical jargon, "at risk" students. It's a mixed bag of Latino, Asian and black teenagers with one feckless white kid thrown in. They ignore, belittle her and dismiss her as she proffers lesson plans and reading materials seriously out of step with the homelessness, drug use and violence that are the stuff of their precarious existences."

"And then one day she gives them all marbled composition books and the assignment to wirte their lives, ungraded, unjudged, and the world breaks open."

"Ms. G, as the kids called her, embraced a conmcept that has been lost in modern life<: Writing can make pain tolerable, confusion clearer and the self stronger."

"The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. E-mails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls. And the physical isoplation they and other arms-length cyber-advances create makes talking to yourself more important than ever. That's also what writing is: not just a legacy, but therapy."

"As the novelist Don DeLillo once said: "Writing . . . . frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves . . . . ." That's exactly what Gruwell was afer when she got the kids in her class writing."

"Growing up, I always assumed I would either drop out of school or get pregnant," one student wrote.. "So when Ms. G started talking about college, it was like a foreign language to me." Maybe that's the moment when that Latina girl began to speak that foreign language, when she wrote those words down. Today she has a college degree."

"One of the texts Gruwell assigned was The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. A student who balked at reading a book by someone so different, so remote, went on to write: "At the end of the book, I was so mad that Anne died, because as she was dying, a part of me was dying with her." Of course Anne never dreamed her diary would be published, much less read by millions of people. She wrote it for the same reason the kids who called themselves Freedom Writers wrote in in those composition books: to make sense of themselves."

"That's not just for writers. That's for people.."

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And that's the way that reading books has always been for me, as I read my life was the life of the protagonist and the suffering they experienced was mine in a way.

Many things I have written about have enabled me to look back and make some sense out of things that confused me totally at the time of happening. And it has also helped me make the proverbial "attitude adjustment" often talked about and seldom done by many.

Of course, having been an alcoholic and spent some time in AA helped me look at things in a different way. And by the way, I am still an "alcoholic in recovery," knowing that just one drink would slide me down that slippery slope again. AA was an organization that helped me begin to think like an adult, for which I am eternally grateful.

My life has been dull, humdrum -- put one foot in front of the other for so many years, but changed radically when I began to write a diary and later a diary and a blog.

A very remarkable thing was in reading Al Schroeder's Nova Notes he had a question at the end of every entry. It was real neat for me as I could answer the question and then look and see what answers others gave. Much like the present day comment sections, but a bit more organized. From that I became acquainted with a lady who became my cyber sister. We look at things about the same way. Along the way I have picked up cyber sisters, a cyber brother and even a cyber auntie. These folks are in essence my mentors and I love them dearly.

So, I shall buy the book and read it, possibly learning nothing new, but enjoying reading about others who profited by writing.

Writing to me has been the very best of all GOOD MEDICINE . . . . . . . . . . .

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