On the Brink of Everything by Parker J. Palmer

Author:Parker J. Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2018-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

Speaking of fakery, one of the great temptations of being a writer is to absorb the projections of readers who think you’re an expert on some subject just because you’ve written a book about it. When I was young, my ego often became bloated with those projections. I forgot the counsel my father gave me when I was a kid: “Remember, Park, today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.”

When my ego becomes bloated with the illusion of expertise, I risk losing the gift of bafflement that has always animated my best writing. I stop asking questions and start believing I have answers. In an effort to preserve my gift, I’ve tried to write candidly about my limitations, flaws, failures, and shadows. When I’m able to do that honestly and well, it helps the reader see me not as an expert but as who I am: a fellow traveler, a companion on the life journey.

I’ve never felt obliged to share the whole of my brokenness in public. As a Jungian therapist once told me, “The soul needs its secrets.” Only when I’ve thoroughly integrated a hard experience into my sense of self can I tell my story in a way that makes safe space for the reader to reflect on his or her hard times. It took me ten years following my first descent into deep darkness before I could write about it without causing the reader to worry about my well-being.

Nothing has been more satisfying for me as a writer than the gratitude I’ve received from fellow sufferers for what I’ve written about clinical depression. Yet I’ve never been able to write as if I knew what people who suffer as I have ought to do to find their way through. Books about “tips, tricks, and techniques” tend to leave me cold; telling your story truly and well is more than enough for me. When you share your story of struggle, you offer me companionship in mine, and that’s the most powerful soul medicine I know.

Here, it seems to me, is yet another parallel between faith and writing. The God I’m familiar with does not work like a GPS, but accompanies me as I try to grope my way through the darkest of dark places. I think a good writer can do at least a little bit of that for the reader; writing from a deeply human place of vulnerability is an act of compassion, as well as self-therapy.

And yet, for all the importance I attach to telling parts of my shadow story, there’s a personal downside to it. As soon as I put the story on paper, it begins to become stylized, fixed, and frozen. The original experience loses vitality as I put it into words and those words get published. Tell the story often enough, and it stops being a soul story and starts becoming a shtick, especially if it draws an affirmative reaction from readers.

When I write or speak such stories, it’s tempting to say to myself, “As

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