Tip of the iceberg...

I'm not a huge fan of Freud's Tip of the Iceberg theory, and I know it's been the fodder for many a literary thesis and marketing meeting PowerPoint, but I do feel that as a writer I've only shown you the tip of the iceberg what will end up being a memoir.

You see it takes awhile to let emotion be your ally. Logic, reason, narrative are all safe strands to show in a linear fashion and to have them exposed without damage or care. Emotions are the things that really drive us, our choices and ultimately even how we tell a story. I've heard so many authors say, "I couldn't write the book until I had time to process the experience." That is where thought and emotion meet and get woven into something useful, for both writer and reader.

I recently read a Harvard study on cognitive skills. We've been sold the idea that our mind ages, as a whole entity, and it looses valuable elements as we grow older. Well, it turns out, that isn't so. The mind remains plastic until we die and now they are proving something Mortimer Adler said to me in my early twenties; We don't really learn how to synthesize much of life's experiences, or how to think, until we're in our 50's!

This is the graphic that accompanied the article. When we're young our sponge like brain continues to  soak up names, dates, data, and other short term memory facts. As we grow older, middle-age, we come into our powers of making sense of all we've learned and experienced. And as we grow even older we ripen into vessels of knowledge primed to share our wisdom.

The trick is allowing myself to expose the piece of myself that would align with Freud's hunk of ice.

To access below the epidermis of one's life is a tricky feat. One must be fearless, in that deep blue water, where light plays tricks on your mind and emotions distort with being relived. It's hard to manufacture, even with journals and pictures, all of certain eras of ones life. They say if an experience makes you laugh you'll remember it forever. In my experience, when I've been hurt or scared, I've forgotten whole chunks of my childhood and marriage. My sister and I say we took turns remembering various parts of our childhood and together we have a reasonable facsimile of it. 

How much does our preverbal self inform our verbal self? How much does our processing speed affect our social understanding of others and ourselves? How much of each is really a composite of what we want to be, what we're comfortable being and what we know we are? Do we ever, really know? I think this is why old friends, siblings and written artifacts are the true treasure in ones life. There is a shared history over time that one can dive into, deep into, if you're lucky and take a solid, often scary and occasionally satisfying look at ourselves. 

Unfortunately, I've lost many touch stone friends from different eras of my life. They've primary died of AIDS, Cancer,  or Suicide. My generation, as I touched on two nights ago, was the first and last to freely and openly get into drugs and sex prior to all the consequences being known. We also were the last generation that needed to self-medicate for Depression, as anti-depressants became standardly available in our young adulthood. No longer were folks drinking like fish to numb the pain, only to wake up feeling like crap and repeating the process all over again. If we were lucky, we found help and medicine. If we weren't, we lost many people in their 20's & 30's  ('80's- 90's) to mental disease. 

Now I'm, again, rewiring and splicing my intellectual, emotional and spiritual self. It's not going to be   light and airy. There will be deep dark and well preserved sides to myself that may surprise many of you. For example, unless you've been reading this religiously, I never thought I'd live beyond 20. Given my penchant for adventure, my inability to feel content, forget about happy, for any sustained period of time and desperately wanting a love that would last forever (all divorce kids either want that or put up big walls to keep love away, so they won't get hurt), it didn't seem that I'd make it unscathed to my 20th birthday. Yet somehow, miraculously, after sailing through hurricanes, driving cars at 110mph, jumping off cliffs into unknown depths of water, taking hallucinogens of varying types, having too many one-night-stands, running in shanty towns at night,  and scuba diving before I'd ever had a lesson; I lived. Then I knew I had to start living like I was going to get OLD. And I have. 

Now to share some of how that organically (emotional self speaking to reasonable self) came to pass. 

Good Night, Unsinkable Storytellers, G'night!