End of an Era? Or Inspiration For More?

Like I mentioned in the last blog post, nonfiction was a difficult concept for me to wrap my mind around for the longest time--it still sort of is.

The idea that I can write about other people, I can write about myself, or I can simply write about ideas is so overwhelming to me--and also freeing? Fiction has been my favorite thing to write since I learned to write because I, of course, had control over what I was writing. The beginning, the middle, the ending--I could control that.

Writing nonfiction? It's a little different.

Sometimes there's twists you don't see coming when you already have a pre-planned narrative. For example, trying to use Sylvia Plath about abuse and it showing up in her writing was incredibly difficult because she had less childhood trauma that went untreated--but she made a lot of interesting choices as an adult that sometimes didn't make sense and also showed up a lot in her writing to showcase how unwell she absolutely was--but not in the same way that Edgar Allen Poe was or Virginia Woolfe--Plath was very public about what she went through and very obvious in her writing. There was less room for interpretation, less room for a thesis or narrative.

I selected her as a topic for one post--which was meant to turn into another essay--because I was reminded of her in my genres class as we looked at confessional poetry. Plath had written about a miscarriage and what that meant for her emotionally--and also her suicide attempts until she was successful. She seemed like a perfect third subject for my claim on significant writers of the time and their encounters with abuse and trauma.

However, Plath would be a topic all on her own. How much was self-sabotage? Why was there self-sabotage? It didn't tie back as far as a childhood trauma that literary psych professors were concerned about, so what was it?

My aunt, who's a nurse in the psych department, expressed to my mother once that we all are some traumatic event away from going completely insane. It didn't matter what event or how impactful it was or wasn't--it was just the fact that there's one that can just cause a snap.

I think that's what happened with Plath--which is a completely different argument. It's not how abuse and trauma in younger years shows up in art--but how her own abuse of herself affected her throughout her life. She was cheated on and emotionally abused--potentially physically abused by her husband--but it happened long after Plath's seemed-to-be snap. Plath still portrayed what happened to her in her confessional poetry and through letters--but there's still a different idea here.

That's what was difficult about this topic--where does it end? What counts as going off-topic? How far can it go before you're not even writing about the same thing anymore? My two major ideas: abuse/trauma and sex did go together. Sex directly effected abuse/trauma and abuse/trauma directly effected sex. Although two very different advocacies--they're not that far off from one another.

My recent essay--and past blog post of a film review--even touches on the concept of sex--the female sex and societal pressures about such.

It all spoke to each other--but what happens when it goes too far away?