Imagining yourself into life again: Writing, childlessness, and the power of creativity
“Alchemy.” This is the first word that pops up into my mind—as strange as it might sound—when I ask myself “what have I learned from the experience of involuntarily childlessness?” Surviving the most catastrophic change of plan I ever faced in my life taught me, essentially, to turn the lead of grief into gold—seeing more beauty than I ever imagined existed, feeling a sense of connection and love for all that surrounds me, being able to “create” in the sense of transforming, refining, changing for the better both myself and the reality I live in through imagination and new ideas. My whole body and mind simply do it, like a human tree breathing in negative CO2 and releasing luminous oxygen instead.
I can’t even remember what I was like just a few years ago, but anything inside and around me was tiresome, hurtful, difficult, slow. I needed strenuous effort to motivate myself to just about getting through the day.
Then I started writing. Not with any special sense of purpose. Just because I could not bear any more the sense of defeat coming from having spent two years talking, nearly daily, about “the book”—this fantastic place where I would have explained what it felt like being childless; I would have revealed what not being able to conceive does to relationships, your sense of identity, the way you relate to your own body; I would have investigated why there was so much silence and shame around infertility; and unraveled the social and political implications of not having children. I kept on talking but, even if, as a researcher and academic, I had written other books before, I did not really believe I could do it. Because that is another consequence of infertility that few realize exists and that I discovered precisely through writing: being branded “defective” and “malfunctioning” by medicine leads you to believe—without you realizing it—that you are “faulty,” “damaged.” And that, just like your body is not able to carry out as basic a function as reproduction, then you are not capable of doing anything else.
Sentence by sentence, however, as if assembling the tiles of a million pieces puzzle, I started regaining my confidence. “Confidence,” actually, is too bold a term. Initially, it was more “a vague and pale sense of not complete and utter unworthiness.” And the tiles, ever so slowly, but then progressively more and more vividly, started to reflect back to me a different image of myself. A stronger, whole, perfect-as-it-is me.
“The book” became Childlessness in the Age of Communication: Deconstructing Silence (2020, forthcoming), a work that brings together both academic research and personal experience through an experimental mixture of analysis and creative writing. This is the blurb I wrote to accompany the text—once I looked at what had come out of my deliberate effort to disregard any convention and follow my intuition instead—and sent its finished version to the publisher:
Cristina Archetti started researching childlessness after being diagnosed with “unexplained infertility.” She soon discovered that, although involuntary childlessness affects an increasing number of women and men across the world, this topic is shrouded in silence, taboo, and shame. Archetti exposes the devastating effects that infertility, in societies that increasingly fetishize parenthood, has on relationships, identity, health and well-being.
Her reflections reveal the invisible mechanisms that, from the microscopic details of everyday life to policy, make up the structure of silence around childlessness. They also tell the story of a personal existential struggle and a journey to find oneself in a world designed for families and revolving around children. Through a prose that mixes analysis, excerpts of interviews, media fragments, and evocative writing, she aims to develop a new language of feeling-in-the-body fit for the 21st century. In a world of political polarization, conflict, and fragmentation, this language might be all we have left to achieve a genuine understanding of “the other.”
Writing the book took me through the whole spectrum of emotions, from pain to an empowering sense of achievement, passing through having to stop writing countless times because I could not see the screen through the tears, and laughing out loud at what people might think reading it.
The very writing process helped me in so many ways, but three contributions are worth sharing here to underline the way creativity can support us through and beyond grief. And by the way, I started with the written word, but creativity, as I discovered, is generative and contagious, so writing quickly led to experimenting with theatre (Archetti 2018), incorporating singing in presentations I gave to academic conferences (Archetti 2019b, 2019c) and, in my spare time, learning to dance.
First, by writing evocatively about my experience, myself and my emotions became an object of analysis: I started observing myself. Writing, as if it was a form of self-archeology, led me to unearth aspects of “me” I did not know about. This made me increasingly curious about this strange woman on the page: Why did she think what she thought? Why did she behave the way she did? I became more aware of the very words I used (Why was I saying “unfortunately I don’t have children” instead of just stating that I was childless as a matter of fact?), of what shaped my decisions (Did I really want to have a baby or was I being pressured by somebody or something else?), even of the way I walked (horrendous, I’ll tell you, as if I was bearing a weight on my shoulders). I understood that the pain in my body—a hip pain I had had for years, which started around the time I began attending the fertility clinic and is now inexplicably disappearing—was an alarm signal. It wanted to alert me that I was completely out of balance, that I hated, literally, to the bone, becoming part of a story of failure and unhappiness that others expected me to live—“you can’t have a meaningful life without children” is the message that incessantly bombards us from every corner (even in films, see Archetti 2019a). Sometimes the person emerging from the text was ahead in dealing with her grief than my conscious self. On the one hand I was shocked, when listening to the interviews I conducted with childless women and men as part of the research for the book, at how inarticulate I was in even asking the questions. On the other hand, I was surprised at the extent to which, beyond being the interviewer, I was also, just like my interviewees, trying to tell my story, attempting to break that silence that, bottled up inside, ends up brewing into illness. This is my past self talking in an interview (14 April 2016):
‘I realize that even the sorrow [about being childless] is really related to social expectations…because somehow I’ve been told since I was a child that…somehow…there is this idea that to be a complete woman you need to have a child. So, in a way, I know that I’m worthy…but then there is this…kind of voice… in the back of the mind that tells you: “No, you’re not. No, you’re not.” It’s a kind of constant struggle between the two voices, at least that’s for me…and I’m really…I’m working on it…to try and say [to myself]…“This is all rubbish that other people have made up…This is not who I am. It does not say anything about me.”’
I was inspired by this odd character in my notes and interview transcripts. She was struggling. Clearly, she was suffering. Yet, she wanted to survive—she was fighting back.
Second, writing creatively helped me experiment with building a language, a genre, a collection of materials—in the book I mix analysis with poems, diary entries, floating images from social media, scraps of news reports and movie dialogues, memories of dreams, fragments of conversations, imagined scenarios—to express, as far as words allow, the pain caused by grief. Suffering is notoriously unshareable (Scarry 1985: 60-61; Frank 2013: 101-102), but even more so (if that’s possible), in the case of involuntary childlessness. It is because it relates to a loss—of a long-imagined future that is never going to materialize, of a child who never died nor lived, of myself as a mother-to-be-who-will-never-be—that has no name and is not expected to exist at all. Pinning “it” down with vowels and consonants, examining it like an insect under the microscope, helped me confront it, make sense of it. In addition to this, while I’ll never be able to fully convey to the reader who has never experienced infertility what this really feels like, I can at least make apparent the contours of its wound. In presenting my developing work as I went along, in the often whispered conversations that followed my public talks, the most rewarding sentence I could ever hope to hear was “you gave me the words.” Both the sense of purpose I gained from realizing that what I was doing could help others and the opportunity I had to get those who never experienced infertility to listen, perhaps even understand, were in themselves healing: through the very fact of enabling suffering to be acknowledged and validated, by breaking the silence and stigma that surrounds involuntary childlessness.
The third way the writing process helped me was, counterintuitively, through its repetitiveness. As I have read many times among those suggestions great authors give to aspiring writers: writing is re-writing. Indeed the editing of the manuscript, over the course of its many revisions, brought into sharp relief the change I was undergoing while forging my new self. My “progress,” the proof of my creativity—in fact the very ability, which was most amazing to me, to generate a new self in the face of infertility—was there, in the Word document in front of my eyes. The book itself travelled a long way from its initial title: “The Irreparable Woman.” I realized, as I went along, that I was indeed irreparable, not because I was damaged beyond mending, but because there was nothing to repair in the first place—I had never been broken.
Writing kickstarted a series of creative practices that have supported me in rebuilding myself, mentally, but also physically. In this last respect, I have witnessed the pain I initially felt in my body being extracted, as if drained drop by drop, through every word I wrote. I have metabolized, I think, the worst of my grief. Yet, the process has not ended. I do not expect it ever will. While writing helped me imagine a new “me” and a brighter future, it also made me understand that suffering is fine—it’s human. Grief is part of life and, as such, it should be honoured and embraced. But it is also temporary because, ultimately, whatever turn my life might take, nobody can take away from me the power I have to re-invent my story.
Cristina Archetti (cristina.archetti@media.uio.no) is Professor of Political Communication and Journalism at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her book Childlessness in the Age of Communication: Deconstructing Silence will be out early in 2020, published by Routledge.
References
Archetti, Cristina (2018). Embodied. Performance lecture delivered at “Fortellerfestivalen [Norwegian Storytelling Festival],” Sentralen, Oslo, 14-15 April. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XcAzx0jlhI [Youtube video].
Archetti, Cristina (2019a). No life without family: Film representations of involuntary childlessness, silence and exclusion. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 15(2): 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1386/macp.15.2.175_1. Read a draft of the article here.
Archetti, Cristina (2019b). Getting under the skin: Creativity in Political Communication research. Paper presented at the IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research) annual conference, Madrid, 9 July 2019.
Archetti, Cristina (2019c). Researching silence: Creative approaches in Political Communication. Paper presented at the Nordmedia 2019 “Communication, Creativity & Imagination” conference, Malmö, 21-23 August 2019. Read the paper here.
Frank, Arthur ([1995] 2013). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. 2nd edition. London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226067360.001.0001
Scarry, Elaine (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.