‘Everybody Syndrome’: two writers and the generalisation that stopped them writing

Generalisations are the sticking plaster we place over something that is really asking for deeper treatment. From racism to achieving progress in something we wanted, generalisations are a roadblock to nuance and specificity. And nuance and specificity are where truth and understanding wait.

‘I don’t like journaling.’ It wasn’t so much a statement as a declaration of war. Her face didn’t say a simple I don’t like. It was much more complex than that. I wasn’t sure dislike was even in there. The tone and expression seemed closer to I feel threatened, of I feel fear. This client used writing in her job, and like so many people interested in writing coming to me partly because they want to make time for the writing they truly wanted to do, had already taken great pains to tell me she ‘wasn’t really a writer’. But this felt like something more.

 So I waited to see what more it was.

‘I don’t see the point of journaling,’ she continued. ‘I resent the pressure everybody puts on me to journal.’

‘Everybody?’ I asked.

‘Everybody. You think everybody should be able to.’

‘”You” as in me?’

‘You as in everyone.’

Generalisations are the sticking plaster we place over something that hurts, or seems to big to deal with. But the sticking plaster doesn’t stick – because what’s underneath is really asking for deeper treatment. It’ll be a simplification we’ve internalised in response to fear or shame; it won’t be an objective conclusion based on evidence but a withdrawal from seeing individual humanity.

And whether the result of that is racism – one of humanity’s most destructive generalisations – or achieving progress in something we wanted, generalisations are a roadblock to nuance and specificity. And nuance and specificity are where truth and understanding wait.

Over the next few sessions I did get to hear examples of ‘everyone’ – enough to identify that it wasn’t literal or how the client wanted to think or feel. But the reason I’m thinking about it now, several years later, is another writer I worked with recently. In her, I saw a similar raising of the emotional drawbridge when the idea of journaling came up.

She’d told me she didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t press. But then she kept coming back to it not working for her and not being ‘for’ her. Again, my acceptance didn’t get whatever was on her shoulders off them, so I mentioned I’d noticed this and asked if there was a question beneath it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just not for me.’

At my next group writing coaching session in central London, this client was one of the group. We began with a warm-up. There is a prompt, but it’s just a diving board: what happens next is up to the writer.

The Writers’ Gym, like the physical gym, has one aim for a warm-up: to get brain and body into the zone where they work together comfortably. There’s no reading of the results: the first draft stays with the writer. But we do talk about how it felt to do the warm-up. This same client said:

‘That was amazing. I started writing about all the things that were on my mind, getting in my way. It’s cleared the mental detritus out of the way, so I start the writing I want to be doing with a clear deck.’

Henry Ford wasn’t talking about journaling when he said ‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.’ Or, rather, he was – because he was talking about our whole experience as humans.

Whatever we believe we’re doing ‘wrong’, we aren’t going to enjoy – because we aren’t going to do it freely.

This writing warm-up wasn’t a journaling exercise: some people wrote stories, some brainstormed, some vented, there’s importantly no limit and no restriction to Thinking On The Page (as our Writers’ Gym notebooks say!).

But journaling is emotional throat clearing, and when this is done authentically it’s the best way into authentic writing. We stop hiding behind memories of exams and ‘good vocabulary’ and instead focus on narrowing the gap between what’s in our head and what’s on the page.