Rules for Writing About the Darkness

On turning suffering into art.

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Photo by JK Sloan on Unsplash

Every time I write an overly confessional piece about my private life or inner turmoil, particularly my ongoing difficulties with bipolar disorder, I worry that I have, finally, gone too far.

When I write about bipolar, hypomania, pornography, self-injury, masculine rage, and mass violence, I wonder if I have become the writer equivalent of a TikTok star performatively displaying her Dissociative Identity Disorder or Tourettes tics on camera. I wonder if I am merely performing and monetizing illness and if I am subconsciously setting myself up to keep being ill because it gets me clout. Licking the wound sometimes just keeps it open.

And I have larger concerns. I worry about online mental illness content and how it encourages reification of and identification with illness (real or imagined) rather than taking responsibility for it. I worry in particular about young people, and how being exposed to "mental illness" content might create contagion. If someone is struggling with their mental health, I fear that reading about it is sometimes the equivalent of drinking salt water: satisfying in the moment while worsening one's condition in the long run.

The internet is full of hand-wringing and disapproval over mental health content, and I agree with a great deal of it. In a searing critique of Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside,

Jason Pargin

writes,

But there is that other layer that Burnham never acknowledges and may not even be aware of, which is that publicly detailing the contours of his illness is, paradoxically, one of the symptoms of that illness. And that, in my opinion, is the real epidemic of the modern age.

“Stop opening up about your mental health online,” advises the headline of a viral article by

Freya India

. She goes on to admonish us for our blasé openness.

Then there’s this framing of it as activism. Actually, more than activism—now it’s almost a duty. You need to open up because it helps other people! Maybe, but does it help you? You, a 15 year-old girl, are not responsible for removing the stigma around autism or ADHD. The progressive narrative now also seems to be that if you aren’t opening up about your mental health problems it has to be because of stigma or discrimination. Have we forgotten the word privacy? You don’t have to be ashamed, but you don’t have to share either.

I say this because there are risks to sharing your personal struggles, especially online. Something our current mental health culture seems unable to admit is that being open about your problems comes with problems. Rarely do we talk about the regret of opening up to the wrong people, or too soon before you’ve tried to recover or really understand what’s wrong, or of misrepresenting yourself.

I nod along to all of this. Maybe being so open about my mental suffering is just indulging in a wider trend that’s making us sicker, uglier, and less resilient. Maybe, by "destigmatizing" mental illness, we've just removed some necessary social etiquette that keeps us all a little more well.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

I'm a professional writer, and the human condition is my subject. Important, perhaps even central, to the human experience is suffering. If I am to write at all, how am I supposed to not write about suffering, including my own, especially when such suffering is one of the golden threads that tie me to others?

Sometimes I don't know what to write about other than the storm in my brain. When I am fighting for my life to get through a dark patch, there's nothing else to write about. It's like being in a warzone and not writing about the war. It's as if the dead are rising from the grave and wandering through the streets and I’ve decided to not write about it. It feels absurd.

Writing about mental challenges is one of my primary strategies for getting better. When my mood gets dark or manic, writing has always been there to suck the poison from the wound and to turn the suffering into art. Sometimes, that art gets shared with others. This gives suffering a telos that it didn't previously have. Art makes suffering finally good for something.

I keep writing fucked up shit because I've gotten into the habit of doing so, it helps me feel better, and a lot of people write me privately saying they are moved, encouraged, and motivated by my work. And, despite this, all my worries remain.

So, I've done some thinking over the past few weeks about the ethics of writing about the darkness. If one must write about mental suffering, it's important to think through responsible conduct. Being a communicator demands a high standard. Communication shapes minds and bends the world of ideas, which is arguably the only world we know. None of us get to opt out of our responsibility to be ethical communicators.

Here's what I've come up with so far.