It Hurts To Write

I wish I could contract hypergraphia, a mental illness in which the victim suffers (or enjoys) an uncontrollable desire to write.

In her book The Midnight Disease, Alice W. Flaherty writes that she experienced hypergraphia during postpartum depression. Her twin boys, so small that one who wrapped his hand around her finger couldn't cover it, had died. After her ten days of pain (what?!) the scientist woke up to "tendrils of words coiling around her." (Flaherty, 2004, p. 6)

Writing is a lonely business, writes someone whose name I forgot. I believe it. In our sharpest heartache, our deepest, most refined and intellectual desire is to produce the art of writing. Julia Cameron says that artists suffer when they don't make art. Is that saying I suffer because I don't write? Because I don't write because I suffer.

Writing is a stretchy business, too. I sit for hours, which keeeeeeeeps stretching into time as I pour out little ink marks, remembering myself on the pages of a stranger's story. And by then I need to stretch. Flaherty said, "But it disturbed me that writing, which seems one of the most refined, even transcendent talants, should be so influenced by biology." (Flaherty, 2004, p. 13)

I, too, am addicted to writing.


Flaherty, Alice W. (2004). The Midnight Disease. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.