Beginning in the middle

Deleuze (1995) remarks, “One’s always writing to bring things to life, to free life from where it’s trapped…to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed” (p.141). To write in this way invites a recognition of writing-as-thinking, and writing as a way of knowing (see also Richardson, 1994). A ‘conventional’ blog (if indeed there is such a thing) is often presented as if the author only wrote when s/he knew what it was that they wanted to write, as if the writing was merely recording the thoughts that they had. Alternatively, writing writes us, the act of writing, generates ways of seeing, sensing, and the shadows of which we may be unaware.

And so I write, not simply to foreground the main prose on a page, in a similar way to which we may present a curated self to the world, but also to make visible the ‘scribbles, content that is “sous rature” (or under erasure), the practices of becoming anew, that lurk in the interstitial spaces, in between oft-cited theories of psychotherapy.

As I may begin to write differently, unconstrained by familiar desires for precision, clarity, and coherence; if I gave myself permission to write creatively, experimentally, potentially provocatively, I experience a sense of adventure, rather than a prescribed (familiar) path to follow. And I wonder how in our own (as client and practitioner) processes of change, a desire for order, coherence, and certainty, may be both comforting and restrictive.