Denial Isn’t Gaslighting
Denial: “An unconscious thought process whereby one allays anxiety by refusing to acknowledge certain unpleasant facts, feelings, etc.” Uh huh. I got that. I was finishing the triathlon, the Olympic length, which I had not trained for, an activity my ex-husband had suggested as a means to bring us closer, never mind he was scarfing a free pirogi as I crossed the finish line. I denied what my body was telling me which was, “This is impossible.” Same message I received after 72 hours of back labor, after submitting a novel, after getting sober, after surviving the death of my sister. What did I do? I denied. I kept going. Denial isn’t gaslighting. You aren’t pretending one thing is true in place of another. You are simply postponing, rejecting, refusing so you can survive. My mother did it around my father’s drinking.
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Origin Story: How to Be a Writing Coach
Why did I become a writing coach? Because I had my first teaching job at Brooklyn College and faced with a classroom of Haitian immigrants, needed to learn how to teach writing. Not literature analysis, reading, or grammar. Writing using those aforementioned subjects, a sense of humor, a willingness to learn on my feet, and a deep empathy for my students struggling to remain in the United States, take care of their families and find jobs. They wrote about these things, and I found work by James Baldwin, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and articles in the newspaper, stories about assimilation, loss of home, and identity. We wrote and we read and I corrected their essays and found forms like letters home, poetry, and storytelling that helped them become better writers.
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Writing with Empathy
When you write with empathy, you're putting yourself in the place of the person you're communicating with. Empathy is the ability to ‘imagine’ what it would be like to experience what another person is experiencing. Empathic people are intuitive and often sense the unspoken needs, emotions or tensions of people. But what does this mean when writing a personal statement? If you can communicate your own feelings, ideas and beliefs with the focus on the reader, you will have an essay that not only defines who you are but will give the reader a chance to grow and develop with you. How does this happen? Storytelling. Concrete, engaging content that persuades the reader to continue reading. All good writing is persuasive.
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