Briohny Doyle is right.
When Briohny Doyle said ‘there is no way to narrativise your way out of trouble’, she was right.
The Australian author was speaking to podcast host Michael Williams. The whole of her comment was this:
“There is no way to narrativise your way out of trouble; if anything, the more you narrate the deeper the hole.
I don’t believe any of the wellness gurus’ ideas about your story being your empowering thing.”
Briohny is right (and forgiven the word ‘narrativise’) .
Story-making, what Briohny calls ‘narrativising’, is not the reason writing is good for our wellbeing.
It might make us feel we’ve had our say. It might serve our agenda. It might give us a sense of strategising our way through challenges or into new ways of being in the world.
The reality is story-making is mythmaking. It is marketing for your personal brand. The story we tell is always the story we can live with.
Wellbeing-through-writing is not story-making.
Wellbeing-through-writing is a languaging process that leads us deep into the feeling spaces of the human body. Languaging the feeling body through writing is a way of finding words that align with our living and these words are never a story.
Stories have pronouns: she and he; she said …, he did ….
The feeling body’s words are clear-eyed. They are strong and certain and calm. They are advocates for blood and bone and flesh. They are unlikely to come in sentences.
Stories have their place, to be sure. As a method of embodied empowerment that’s not it.
I’ll give the last word to Briohny:
“We can delude ourselves with narrative just as much as might be able to comfort ourselves. Narratives which prescribe empowerment … solidify things that aren’t solid and reify things that aren’t tangible.”
Languaging the feeling body through writing. That’s what we do. Finding words that match your living. That’s what it’s for.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author, researcher and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 initiated Walk&Write holiday writing adventures.