Academic or Woman?
How to create like a woman with a heart and a head
These past few months, I’ve been going back and forth in my head about
unscripted musings or tightly-outlined essays,
grammarly-ed edits or unedited raws,
lots of philosophical facts or just a few simplied definitions,
personal feelings on topics or strictly sticking to the facts on one side of spectrum or the other,
researching, researching, researching, or intuitively choosing verbiage and conclusions,
1st, 2nd, and 3rd drafts or allowing my work to be vulnerably human,
sharing as a woman with history or an academian with rhetoric on every topic,
empathy or cold hard facts,
flowery adjectives or plain speak,
statistical or conversational?
And it doesn’t seem to end. Where do you share from the head, from the reality of how things really are, but share your history, your inner longings, connect intuitively with the person on the other side of a screen? How do I write as someone who has read more classics than any other genre, is consistently signing up for free online classes (@ Hillsdale College), annotates obsessively, writes compulsively, but isn’t just the studious disciple of Wisdom? How can I share that I’m a woman who has been in love and has fallen out of it, been the one left behind, experienced loss after loss, has laughed in the rain and played water balloon baseball as a girl?
What about those moments, the woman in me?
How can I express myself? How? How? How? What are the rules to the game? And if there aren’t any, why does it feel like there is?
At this point, someone may roll their eyes and think I’m going ‘liberal’ or ‘feminist’, claiming the arts world is ruled by men, that its a patriarchal place to be, isn’t it? Sorry to disappoint, but no—that’s not what I’m saying. We can still appreciate feminity, value it, denote it as actually more worthy of our attention than some other things, but I don’t want to worship my womanhood.
Simply, how can one individual, namely, Woman, play both the truth-teller and empathetic friend? The studier and emotional entity, in a creative sense? Does this compute? Maybe not. I’m laughing as I’m writing this. Welcome to the chaos of my mind.
If you’ve been around recently, you know I have a huge fondness for John Eldredge, as well his wife Stasi, and his son Blaine’s, work. They are remarkably talented individuals but it is apparent that they prioritize the people over the content’s contents that they put out into the world. The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtist and John Eldredge are a testament to the truth of that; that work rendered me speechless, raw, emotional, brought me back to some sort of unnamable primal human state in which I really saw people and myself, God, even, as they were meant to be seen and experienced.
I read said work twice. In a row. But the words immediately began losing their potency as my analytical persona suffocated me.
It’s not as if I believe the left side of the brain is ‘evil’ or ‘less than’—I just think that maybe I’ve cultivated the left because it feels safer than acknowledging and going down the right’s rabbit holes.
I used to be comfortable with all the mystery in creativity for me, but I’m just a tad afraid of what might lie in that maze if I left myself to it. Instead I haul myself up with philosophical definitions and thelogical tomes that seem to have no end—it’s not that I think poorly of such works of art (because they are art, in a way).
It’s just that maybe I’m a little exhausted by it all.
Do you understand? Do you see what I mean? I don’t blame you if you don’t.
How can I channel (this is starting to feel like some new age dogma) this romantic artist in me, this woman of deep feeling, become her, embrace her, love her, without casting aside the sturdy ‘maleness’ (maybe that’s an incorrect qualifier) of reasonable sense, ontological depth, and studious disciple?
Besides all this and probably not to the point: Where does privacy meet openly spilling personal feelings? How can somebody do that without effectively exposing others to ridicule, to exposing oneself to ridicule and misunderstanding? Where does vulnerability become naivety? This whole technology thing sure does seem to be adding more problems than it’s solving. If not problems, questionable quandaries.
I just don’t know.
In espousing ideas I believe are real, true, foundational, restorative, sign-posts for life, maybe I’m nervous I’ve lost my heart along the way. Maybe those sign-posts are necessary to keep from straying down the wrong path, but should there be fine print underneath to warn about losing my heart message?
Questions, questions, questions.
, , and are fine examples of women who write truthfully, honestly, heartfully, intentionally, intellectually. Perhaps these creators and artists can share a tip or two;)
I mean this with all love and respect, friend, but I think you may be overthinking it a tad bit. ;) First of all, "reasonable sense, ontological depth, and studious discipline" are as much feminine traits as they are masculine traits: we're all rational image bearers, called to live with sobermindedness, and pursue the gifts of the intellectual life. Edith Stein, Teresa of Avila, Simone Weil, Tullia D'Aragona, Dorothy Sayers, Annie Dillard, and any number of brilliant women throughout history testify to that. It's not "masculine" to be a mind, seeking after clarity of ideas--it's virtuous! And all great writers throughout history, men and women, from Thomas Aquinas to Flannery O'Connor, have held passion, mystery, intuition, reason, logic, wonder, and skill together in the tapestry of traits that an artist or thinker needs to develop. You clearly hold those tensions together in your own self in a strong way! You're wrestling with it here, but also, I've seen that even in the writing you've done before.
That being said, one of my favorite ways of talking about what it means to be a woman is what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls "the Marian fiat of receptivity." The feminine virtue, at least according to Edith Stein and JP2, isn't a kind of illogical "emotionalism", but this receptivity, the ability to hold the world within oneself that's imaged most clearly (though not exclusively) in fertility. One of my favorite quotes is by J D McClatchy: "Love is the quality of attention we pay to things." Also Mary Oliver's "Attention is the beginning of devotion." The quality of good thought and good writing and good living is paying attention, taking things into yourself through this willingness, this "let it be unto me" act of receptivity.
Paying attention helps you build a good argument, because you catch logical errors. Paying attention helps you make true art, because you can write about what Ray Bradbury called "the texture of real life." Paying attention makes you more empathetic, which is the best quality a writer can have. (Cynthia Ozick calls the writer's empathy an act of attentiveness, of "envisioning the stranger's heart.") And so on and so forth. Attentiveness is a trait that all artists should pursue, men and women--women just have a bit of a head start. ;) And both analysis and emotional vulnerability stem from the same human desire: to know, to be known, to understand, to wonder at things. They're streams from the same ocean, not enemy armies.
Megha also made a good point, I think, in a much more succinct way.
You start with a question that you think matters and you try to answer it as succinctly and clearly as you can. Or you start with something you know from the depths of your bones and you try to put it into words.