On getting to know your mind

Writing to better know your own mind and introducing Human Rights 101.

A cool thing happened to me this week: in an attempt to deal with lingering mental health issues, I’ve been doing a postmortem of sorts of the first real decade of my career. One of the questions I’ve struggled with was: why did I choose to get my Master’s degree in human rights?

Human rights is a really interesting field of study, but it’s absolutely brutal on the student. You are, after all, studying the worst things that humans have ever done, and you’re doing so at a clip. You read books on the Holocaust and then the Cambodian genocide and then Operation Condor in depth, and there’s no real acknowledgment during your study that learning about these events can have a disfiguring effect on your emotional health.

After your coursework is done, you then go to work in the field of human rights — I’ve done so as an advocate, as a writer, and as a librarian — and inevitably, the emotional weight of the job causes serious mental health issues that can lead to burnout. My last three jobs have burned me out, so I needed to ask myself: what the fuck am I doing? What drew me to this work? Was it just guilt about being a white, straight, American man? Did I really want to do this work, or did I have a sense that it was something I should do? For most of my teenage years, I wasn’t interested in activism as much as I was interested in zombie movies, and I worried that the only reason I got into activism was because I desperately wanted the approval of certain friends and family members that I perceived as being “moral.”

And then writing this week’s article, without meaning to, I stumbled onto the answer. This week’s article is some of my loosely connected thoughts on the way we think about and discuss the apocalypse, and I struggled for several weeks to come up with an introduction, before I slipped into a discussion of the Cambodian Genocide, and my visit to one of the Killing Fields when I was 20.

While writing, the following thought spilled out of my brain:

But in retrospect, I think that I was drawn to it because the study of human rights abuses is the study of apocalypses, moments where old worlds collapsed and our old stories about what constituted “civilization” and “society” no longer worked. My fascination with the process of collapse has outlived my ability to stomach temples made of skulls.

The intense relief I felt after writing this otherwise bleak sentence is hard to explain. It was a thought that seemed to just pop out during the act of writing, but when I wrote it, I realized just how much sense it made, how it integrated two previously separate parts of my personality into a coherent and satisfying whole.

I’m currently reading Roberto Bolaño’s masterpiece The Savage Detectives, and a day after writing this sentence, I came across this bit:

At night we used to write. He was writing a novel and I was writing my journal and poetry and a movie script. We would write facing each other and drink lots of cups of tea. We weren’t writing for publication but to understand ourselves better or just to see how far we could go.

I love that concept, writing to understand yourself better. Therapists regularly suggest journaling as a way of getting your thoughts and feelings out onto a page in order to process stuff, and I think this is why: when we write, we let a different part of our brain take over, and in the creative act, we make space for something true to inadvertently slip out.

I’ve discussed this extensively over the past several months through the works of Alan Moore (paid subscribers can read the whole series here). Moore calls himself a “magician,” which can be confusing to American audiences who hear the word and think of card tricks.

What Moore actually does is closer to old-school shamanism, where he views writing and art as being a way of exploring the mysteries of human consciousness more deeply, and in which the writer is not only exploring his own mind, but is hopefully helping the reader learn something new about theirs.

It’s been a really fulfilling series to write, (I’ve been doing it through some of the most difficult months of my life) but I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave it for now. The door that my writing kicked open in my brain earlier this week is one that I feel like I should walk through, so for the next few months, I’m going to be revisiting what I learned in my Master’s degree. Starting Tuesday, I will be beginning my Human Rights 101 course. If you loved Wondrous Creatures, the Alan Moore course, don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll be able to shoehorn him in somewhere — he’s come out with two new books in the last three weeks — but if you came here for the Mutual Aid 101 course and then were like, “why the fuck is this dude writing about magic?” then what’s coming is going to be more up your alley. It also (depending on what happens a few Tuesdays from now) might be a really vital thing for you to know about!