Writing as Self-Control
How I Finally Discovered Why I Do What I Do
Last week, I sat for an interview with the host of a podcast about language learning and language education. To the extent that I had prepared at all, I prepared for a conversation related to my professional life, to the administrative, communications, and editorial work for which I am paid enough to keep the lights on and, even more challenging these days, to keep the tank half filled. Since this particular podcast usually examines issues of policy and pedagogy—subjects I have learned on-the-job rather than in-the-classroom—I worried that I would not have enough to say.
I often feel this way, in many aspects of my life, despite the evidence of expertise scattered around my office, and despite the affirmations of the people who sign my checks. I often feel unprepared, despite my habit of rigorous preparation. So I tried to predict possible questions and, in my head, I worked out a few acceptable responses. Then I tried to remember some useful, all-purposes phrases to drop into the discussion whenever appropriate, or whenever I was in trouble. Then I ran out of time and had no choice but to consider myself ready.
When the recorded conversation began, the host asked me what I believed to be a few warm-up questions about my creative life, rather than my work as executive director of language education association. In what seemed to be a courteous gesture, or else an interviewer’s gambit to charm and disarm her interviewee, she lobbed a few softballs at me. I thought she was trying acknowledge my versatility, or maybe stroke my vanity, before we addressed the specific issues that really mattered to her. But as the conversation progressed, and as the host probed my initial answers with what seemed like real interest, it dawned on me that we were not going to talk about my professional life at all. We were only going to talk about the issues that really mattered to…me. Specifically, unexpectedly, she wanted to know about my relationship to words and writing. “Why do you write?” she asked.
That question should have been a relief to me. My relationship to words and writing is, without question, a subject about which I am an expert. In fact, it is the only subject about which I am the world’s only expert. And yet I found myself on my heels, my panicky brain working three times harder and faster than I expected. I know why that happened now, in hindsight, why my brain and my tongue parted ways. While I am the world’s only expert on the subject of my own relationship to words and writing, and while I keep dozens of notebooks (actual notebooks) filled with thoughts about this topic, no one else had ever asked me about it.
Wait. That is not entirely true. I have discussed my writing before, on some great podcasts in fact. And on several occasions, I have even been asked why I write. In those instances, I have given an answer I borrow from the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. (At least I think it was Kandel. In my memory, it was Kandel.) Decades ago, I saw him interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show, and Rose asked him the same question: “Why do you write?” At that point in my life, it was a question I had only asked myself. No one had asked me yet, and I was still struggling to formulate my own answer. So I leaned in closer to the screen, expecting to watch Kandel squirm a bit, as I always did when I thought about the mystery of my odd behavior, my literary habit. But, to my surprise, he had an answer on the tip of his tongue. He did not even hesitate. “I don’t know what I think until I write it.”
He had probably heard someone else give that answer before, and borrowed it, just as I have borrowed it from him ever since. I have learned, subsequently, that he was giving an answer common among the people of my subspecies, our subspecies, we graphomaniacs, we misfit homo sapiens who continue to scratch words onto paper—many of us still writing in pencil—forty years or so into the Digital Age. The internet credits Joan Didion with the first utterance of the sentence but if you pay close attention, you will hear writers of all stripes offering some version of it again and again: “I don’t know what I think until I write it.”
In the moments that followed that exchange, as Kandel and Rose moved on to other matters, I stood frozen before my television. I am a bit of a crier, as my friends and family will attest, and in the seconds just after Kandel offered that simple answer, I cried tears of relief. A little self-knowledge at last.
So when the host of the podcast asked me that same question last week, I gave her the same clever response I have given for years, handed down through the generations of my clan. “I write so I know what I think.” Done. One question down, smooth sailing from here. But then she did the unexpected. She asked a follow-up question. “What about writing helps you understand what you think?” And that was the trouble. That was the new territory. A first in my experience. No one had ever asked me a second question on this topic. I think I knew the answer intuitively—again, I am the world’s only expert in all things related to me—but I had never said it out loud. In fact, I cannot remember writing it out, either. Until last week, it was still hiding in the recesses of my brain. I could feel it trying to break free, but it was still lurking where it had always lurked, where I had left it all these years, in the recesses. Now the microphone was on, and the host was staring at me, and I was going to have to drag that answer into the world, for the first time, while she watched.
I am in my fifties now, and one of the benefits of that absurd number is that I have a passing knowledge of my own patterns. I know, for example, that in moments like this, when I feel myself cornered, I tend to fight my way out of the corner by wielding the one weapon I have at my disposal that no one else in the world has, the one asset that is uniquely mine: self-revelation. Brutal, self-deprecating, self-lacerating honesty. The safety of personal exposure. It is a quirk of my character, and it has served me pretty well. And so it kicked in again, during this podcast interview, which I paraphrase now because I spoke too quickly to remember the actual words.
“I have a very busy brain,” I said, “and an enormous amount of nervous energy, and writing slows me down enough to think clearly.” That was the first response. Good, and true. I still approve it. Then came another, something like, “I see writing as a search for precision. One word at a time. If I get one word right, I move on to the next. At the end, if I do it well, the words add up to a coherent thought.” Also good. Also true. Writing helps me know what I think by slowing me down and forcing me to be precise. Yes, just so.
But my next thought was the real discovery. And while I managed to keep it bottled up in the moment, it nagged me for the rest of the interview (and, obviously, for some time thereafter, since I am still writing about it). As I was confessing all sorts of other personal quirks and foibles, I suddenly realized that the reason I was on my heels for this entire conversation, the reason I felt panicky when I should have felt most confident, when I was only talking about me, was that I could not rely on the pace and precision of writing to guide my answers, to edit me, to save me from myself. The host had coaxed me into speaking first, without a plan, unedited. And in so doing, I was forced to confront all kinds of anxieties, including social anxieties: imposter syndrome, self-doubt, even worries that my Long Island accent would break through again if I was not vigilant.
Writing is how I control all of that misfiring. Writing is how I control…everything, including myself and my own manic energy. But here I was now, speaking off-the-cuff, in an interview that was different in tone from what I had anticipated. Out of my control. And the pattern I just mentioned, the tendency to fall back on self-revelation, that “safety of personal exposure”…I suddenly saw all of that as related phenomena, the character traits of a man who only operates at two speeds: tight, literary control or complete divulgence.
How odd, then, this second revelation: If I cannot control what and how I communicate, by writing and editing what I think and say first, I exercise no control at all. That is, if I cannot write it down first, I will say any damn thing. What a strange admission that would have been on a podcast, and what a late date in my life for this epiphany.
To be clear: I do not consider this binary mode to be a character flaw. Not entirely. None of the traits I describe here are character flaws, necessarily. Not my oscillation between self-control and self-revelation. Not my tendency to spill my guts in self-defense. Not my manic energy. Not even my anxieties. These traits are as definitional as my name, as specific to me as the fact that I will never be tall enough to play for the Knicks. And when I feel myself becoming too self-critical, I try to remember that I am a functioning member of society, a man who meets his many responsibilities, and that some people actually seem to like me…and even like my writing sometimes.
Nevertheless, I now recognize the dangers of my ways a little more clearly than I did before that interview. Writing is a crutch that gets me through my days, one of several I suppose. And like all crutches, it is also a dependency, one that I am unlikely to overcome completely. My entire character has grown around it like a vine around a tree, and I have continued to grow that way for many, many years. Writing supports me. It is my solidity. Without it, I would be—and sometimes I am—flimsy.
Or, to put it even more precisely (here he is again, the editor come to save me), if I did not write constantly, I believe that my life would be little more than a series of free associations or, worse, a steady stream of strong emotions. One burst after another. An endless eruption of laughter and anger and tears…and literary references. Unprocessed. Inarticulate. In that sense, writing contains me.
We shall see if the interview in question ever appears online. I would not blame the host for filing it away forever. The uncontained Tessitore can be a lot for anyone to suffer through, let alone an unsuspecting podcast editor. But the effect of that conversation is memorialized here, now, in this little essay, and so is the lesson I learned from it. I have written it down, fixed it in place, where it makes the most sense to me.
Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 120 episodes of Be True.
To celebrate spring, I read "Pomegranate," a poem by D.H. Lawrence. I also discuss the beauty of...the birds and the bees, the hypocrisy of our species, stupid euphemisms, and The Beach Boys.
This was a beautiful read that resonated deeply. If I may.. I think many of us write to better know ourselves through the proverbial journey of life.
Well this was a fascinating read