"Personal writing is as old as human history, rooted, as it is, in the deeply human need to tell one's story. In our own time, the need is particularly urgent since we are surrounded by a culture in which individuality is ignored, and therefore denied." [G. Lynn Nelson, Learning From Within: Ira Progoff and the Power of Personal Writing, Media and Methods 48 (1978)]

In legal writing, it is possible to steer wide of anything that matters to you as a person, but the attraction for such analytical writing passes quickly. I need to face my feelings; that need becomes a craving. Until the craving is satisfied by writing--really writing--my dreams become wild, my attention to detail lags, and my restlesness insures my unhappiness. [From a Law Student's Journal]

The reading of stories reawaken memories and make the telling of our stories possible. There are no "rules" about writing the story of our own lives. The way to do it is simply to do it.

We have, I understand, learned not to view ourselves as writers. It is essential however that we give ourselves the chance to see how telling and writing our story might affect the life the story tells. One who has set out to say something of their own life may find that the telling is itself a kind of doing, that we make our story as we tell it and write it.

The telling and the writing is aided if we have a set of questions that we take to our reading and to the writing. The questions can be a guide, or a spur to thinking about who we are and how we live our lives. One way to begin is to try to ask "good questions," ones that lead to thinking about what you are already doing, questions that provoke you to move just far enough beyond your everyday life routines to see your own story. Good questions ask you not only to think but to use your imagination. For example, you might ask whether your life is a heroic journey?

When we reflect on our own lives, we run the gamut from having nothing to say, to the frustration of knowing that there is too much to say. Whether there is too little or too much to say (and do) reflections of how the way we tell our stories is a reflection of the way we live and see ourselves in the world. Some of us have impoverished imaginations, our stories are as poor as our lives. But rich or poor (literally and imaginatively), there are images that empower us and images that enslave us. These images, empowering and enslaving, appear in our stories and are integral to the way we live our lives.

There lies ahead a long arduous journey in understanding ourselves (a journey equally arduous to understanding law and how it works, and how you will come to practice it). Our talking and listening is a beginning. The conversations that are part of our stories are a beginning.

You and your own experiences, images, fears, dreams and visions are a story. The stories we read and tell, the writing that we do are an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences, feelings and fears, wonderment about what we have already experienced in reading and in life.

Much learning from your own textbook, from yourself, can be done alone--by a process of discourse or dialogue with yourself. Much of psychology developed that way, particularly the introspective depth psychology of Jung, much of Freud's theory on normalcy (he was his own principal subject in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams), and the philosophical psychology of Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche, and William James. These introspective thinkers did not merely think, or even think and write; they thought and wrote, in conversation with themselves, learning from what they wrote, experienced, and dreamed and then writing what they learned. Jung's analyses of his own dreams are remarkable instances of this--as are Freud's little detective stories on why he left his umbrella at home, or how he came to use the wrong word in a conversation. To wake up with a feeling of sadness from a dream; to find that you are depressed for no reason; to realize that you are sexually attracted to one client and always angry with another, and feel powerless and out of control with still another are the experiences of which psychology is made.

Much of literature is worked out this way, too. Trollope's making flesh-and-blood people out of the lonely daydreams of his wretched youth is an example. "There is a gallery of them," he said, "and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, the very clothes they wear." His characters were with him when he went to bed, he said, and as he woke from his dreams. They were alive because they were real; each of them told Trollope about people, as people told him about his characters and as both told him about Trollope. And thus C.P.Snow calls Trollope one of the greatest of natural psychologists.

There is a strong, and I believe, pervasive need, of clients and lawyers to tell their story as well as live it. We tell a story in our work, in the briefs we write, the cases we try in the courtroom, and in law office conversations with clients, in the counseling we do when we practice the art of good talking and listening. (There is a way of talking and listening to clients that is guided by seeing the client as a story, and seeing ourselves as having a story that we tell with our lawyering, and in our relationship with a client.) And there are for many of us, a need for still more, a telling that is more truthful, more revealing, than what we do in our day-to-day work. Many people seek a telling that is more truthful, more revealing, than the storytelling reflected in their day-to-day work. Compare, for example, the storytelling you do at a cocktail party with the stories you tell your lover.

This is how one student expressed that need: "In legal writing it is possible to steer wide of anything that matters to you as a person, but the attraction for such analytical writing passes quickly. I need to face my feelings; that need becomes a craving. Until the craving is satisfied by writing--really writing--my dreams become wild, my attention to detail lags, and my restlessness insures my unhappiness." And so we have, over the years, turned to writing, and asked our students to write: journals, long letters to friends, and even fictional accounts that will capture the meaning of the world as we have experienced it. We need this kind of writing, the kind of writing we find in journals, letters, and novels, to give expression to our lives. And when our lives are too full, crowded and busy to do this kind writing for ourselves we turn to the writing of others, to those who have found the time, who have responded to the need to say something imaginative (and truthful) about life, about the world in which they live (and the world in which we live).

There are many reasons to keep a journal, and many ways in which to do it. We (the authors) have worked with journals over the years, writing our own, and asking our students in law school to keep journals as a way to learn about themselves, about how becoming a professional matters in their own lives.

Doing a journal is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Knowing that introspective and personal writing is good for you, that you can learn about yourself, and begin to better understand the conflicts and joys experienced as a law student and lawyer, is apparently not enough to prompt a person to keep a journal. The fact that so few lawyers and others in public life and leadership positions keep journals and do the kind of introspection that we suggest here is an indication not only of the difficulty of doing a journal but of an attitude toward introspection. Abraham Zalezkik and Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, in their book on corporate leaders, Power and the Corporate Mind, argue that, "Leaders, who orient themselves to power and action, are usually indifferent to the notions of psychic truth; instead, they care about practicality and feasibility." They suggest that truth, what we might call psychological truth, "can be sought only on the edges of depression, the potential for helplessness that must be acknowledged in the process of arriving at the understanding of goals and the manner of their pursuit. Depression is too painful for most people to endure, so they involve themselves in activity and, occasionally, in a preparanoid search for antagonists, danger, and obstacles that reality seems to be erecting for them to overcome. The consequence is insensitivity and lack of awareness, which diminish the capacity to perceive and communicate."

The habits of journal writing and introspection are discouraged in the reality of a world dominated by the routines of everyday life. And it is the routines of everyday life, the meetings with clients and other lawyers, the court appearances, the papers to be drawn up and filed, the brief to be written, that keep us busy, our lives crowded with practical matters. Who has time to think, much less write, or keep a journal that seems to serve no purpose other than his own peace of mind? Busy people who long ago quit reading textbooks have no time for making a textbook about themselves. The busy lawyer tends to justify his life by telling himself, "I don't have time to do anything else." And it is exactly this kind of experience, of being rushed, of not having time, that becomes an integral part of our relationship with clients, that impoverishes our counseling, that gives our lives the feel and the "texture" that they have. This experience, of lawyering and everyday life, and the conflict it creates and the frustration and burn-out it ultimately produces, can itself be made the subject of our journals, an entry-way or opening into a deeper understanding of who we are and what we have become as lawyers, how we have found a place for ourselves in the world, or continue to search for that place.

Journals work in many ways, reflecting for the most part less of a philosophical statement that the one we have presented here. Journals are paradoxical, on the one hand unique to the writer, and, on the other, an expression of hopes and dreams, failures and fears that each of us experience in our daily life.

When I asked my students to write journals, to use them to learn about themselves, I did so because the felt experience in one's life as a student, is a significant feature, and not merely an adjunct to the substantive knowledge that is being taught and learned in law school.

When students write about doing journals they speak, often, of journals as a kind of therapy. This is the way one student explained it:

I write to survive. Whenever I feel a lot of pain, I write to some unknown individual, just spewing out my rage and pain. It has a cathartic effect. Sometimes when my feelings and thinking are at odds with each other, I attempt to make decisions through stream-of-consciousness writing. I make a deliberate attempt to write everything about a feeling or thought. After a week or so, I reread my writing to see how the situation has changed.

Doing a journal is thus a way to deal with pain, disappointment, confusion, conflict, and failure. These experiences, the ones we hate so much to admit, the ones we dread having, the ones we hope will just go away, are the kinds of experiences that journal writing helps us experience more fully. (The same is true of happy feelings, of course.) The journal claims the experience as one that can be admitted, owned up to, explored, even appreciated.

A journal is a way of keeping a record, and a place for seeing that one is moving in the desired direction. For some students, writing is a way to stay on an even keel; it keeps them on track, moving in the right direction, helps them be more effective and realistic. One student says: "I am depending on the journal to keep my thought processes keen, even in the tide of overwhelming amounts of case material and demand for one lane thought." But the ego which gets into journal writing, and it is the ego that worries about being effective and realistic, of setting goals, and achieving them, also has a penchant for ignoring aspects of our lives that don't get expressed by being on track, by the linear movement from goal A to goal B to goal C. There are needs and purposes in professional life that are sacrificed in the making of goals and in achieving them, in doing what our teachers and our clients ask us to do. Goal-oriented achievement poses no small danger, even as it gets us to where we have chosen to go (when we actually choose a path). One student writing on this point recognizes that law school is a great adventure and one that calls for sacrifice: "This journey is probably the greatest adventure I have ever embarked upon. This [journal] is a record of my development, a living account of the adjustments and sacrifices that I have made to accomplish a goal that was set so long ago." The journal is a way of seeing what our purpose is and where we have been--if not where we are going. One student writes:

I want to see myself in my journal. I have saved my writings for over ten years. By re-reading these writings, I can see many facets of my personality. I can read about how I express anger, love, worry, hopes, dreams, and pain. I can compare how I feel now with how I felt ten years ago. I can evaluate the changes. My collection of writings keeps me aware of what I have been through, and helps me focus on my goals.

Another student writes:

My journal is still full of questions for me to resolve. Hopefully, every time I am in doubt my journal will be a barometer to show me how far I have veered from my course, or how well I have obtained my objectives.

A journal works as therapy, when it works (sometimes nothing seems to work), because it gives whatever is troubling us, pulling us down, or moving things too fast or too slowly, a chance to speak for itself. The ego crowds out the many voices of our lives that don't fit easily behind the persona, into the demands that our clients (and the world) make upon us. The therapeutic value of journal writing that students (and we the authors) experience comes from getting back into awareness these voices trampled on in the rush of everyday life. One student writes:

Without regard to the purpose of this journal, the process of drafting it over the semester has been a valuable experience in itself. I have thought about things in depth, whereas without the journal, I would merely have let them pass. I have questioned and criticized, whereas without writing the journal, I would have been apathetic. But, most importantly, I have forced myself to take a step back from "all of this" [law school] and try to gain a perspective of it, whereas without writing the journal, I would not even have attempted this. In essence, the journal has been very beneficial to me, even if I have not created a "purposeful" or "good" journal.

Journals and introspective writing help us see what is truly important in our lives and how the apprehension, anxiety, anger, and fear as much as our happiness, contentment, and achievement are are inevitable and valuable in our lives.

Journal writing is an "outlet," or as one student dramatically puts it: "This journal has give me an outlet to plug all my frustrations and problems and ideas into. It has been my psychiatrist." Another student speaks of the journal as a way of seeing and understanding her own life.

This has been an excellent outlet for me and my frustrations and tensions. I write down my problems, insecurities, feelings and then come back and read what I have written and it gives me a different and clearer perspective of the situation. Sometimes just by the actual "writing" physical tensions are released and frustrations calmed. It has been an excellent way for me to look deeper and find out new things about myself.

To counsel another person, to attend to her problems, the concerns and fears that are related to her problems, it is necessary for the counselor to "see" and reflect on what is happening in her own life. The work that a lawyer does, the listening and talking we do with clients; the way our encounters and interactions with clients are imagined, conceived, and executed cannot be divorced from the feelings, fears, failures, hopes, and dreams of the person who is the lawyer. Only if the lawyer were able to view herself purely as a technician, only if her professional work were purely routine, would it be possible to study and understand, to learn and perform the lawyer role without it having an effect on who she is as a person. A student writes: "This journal has made me confront myself as a person. If this writing serves no other purpose, that is enough." One effect of learning law, knowing law, and practicing it out in the world is that it makes us one kind of person rather than another, bringing satisfactions, pleasures, and also fatigue, alienation and disenchantment. This subjective dimension of professional life, unexamined in legal education, makes lawyering worthwhile and fulfilling or simply work to be tolerated.

Journal writing is a way to explore, to discover, to see how the goals we make for ourselves in turn bring with them restrictions and limitations.

My law school writing is, for the most part, different than my personal or imaginative writing. I am expected to accurately record and analyze divergent facts. While analysis can be creative, it is nonetheless no real part of myself. As a law student I am only reacting to factual situations or to theories already formulated by others. At most I am creating theories from separate, smaller groups of ideas already formulated. Legal writing strives for succinctness. While necessary for clarity, brevity removes one's spirit from the work. When clarity is the only emphasis, writing has no soul.

Legal writing can, however, be seductive at times. When I am tired or would rather not face up to the world or my feelings, I find it easier to analyze than create.

Another student comments:

Writing for an assignment has always been difficult for me. I've been afraid to sound like myself--for fear that what I'm saying isn't worth listening to. I must sound authoritative and often I find myself using words that I would never use in conversation. I'm still not sure if writing is supposed to sound like me or not. I've concluded that if the assignment involves research on a particular subject, I should never sound like me.

I remember handing in a writing exercise in high school that was returned to me with every "I" and "me" circled in red ink, along with a comment that these words were used far too often in the essay. It had a profound effect on me. I'm still somewhat paranoid about personal pronouns in my writing.

In Law School all I've written are memos and a brief for the Legal Writing course. It's something you do by writing, but it isn't writing. The memos were the easiest--research and write--"it could be this, it could be that"--no feeling, no emotion permitted. The brief permitted the expression of some emotion through the need to be persuasive. This was "me" talking and it involved somewhat of an investment. I wrote alone in the apartment all weekend. I found it a painful process--almost like labor. It felt as if I had delivered this baby, and now a baby expert was going to look at it and he might tell me it was ugly--or, worse, that it was dead!

And another:

School causes us to write for our teachers, others, instead of for ourselves. We learn that we cannot write, that we are not worthy of writing for ourselves. This process continues in law school.

When I have a writing assignment, I panic. Will it be as good as the professor wants it to be? It's so hard to write for oneself when grades and jobs depend on pleasing the professor. Why are we all so caught up in pleasing others with our writing?

I associate methodical, sterile, "correct" writing with becoming a lawyer. When I write for law school, my writing is not original, it is a conglomeration of other people's thoughts and writings on yet other people's thoughts. Everything I write down has to be footnoted! Law school has made me more confident in terms of writing correctly, but not creatively.

As a woman, I write more about love, pain, coping, and relationships. It is hard to imagine a woman writing a book about fishing.

When I recently began to keep a journal, I sat down with nothing particular in mind and simply began to write. No typographical errors to correct, no misspellings, no delay in putting ideas into words. It felt good.

[This commentary is drawn from Thomas L. Shaffer & James R. Elkins, Legal Interviewing and Counseling (St. Paul: West Group, 4rd ed., 2005) and James R. Elkins, Writing Our Lives: Making Introspective Writing a Part of Legal Education, 29 Willamette L. Rev. 45 (1993)]

"Amid the incessant chattering of radio and television, the near instantaneous connections of Ma Bell . . . thousands of Americans have quietly resumed the age-old practice of creating diaries and journals. Perhaps the greatest attraction of this return to writing is the opportunity it provides for being one's self away from besetting busyness and the demands and standards set forth by others."  --George F. Simmons

 

"The uses of writing for psychological health and fulfillment may be traced to ancient Greece where poetry was first recognized for its healing powers."    --Alice Glarden Brand

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