Hypergraphia

I heard someone on a podcast say that someone who feels compelled to write has hypergraphia, essentially the opposite of writer's block.

A few years ago my friend recommended I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It was perfectly timed (synchronous as she/Jung would call it) and I began doing the exercises. I’d been making my way out of a scrupulous Mormon lifestyle and still craved just a teeny bit of structure but nothing overwhelming:

- a little bit of prayer-answering but nothing that would rekindle my raging confirmation bias
- a god that wanted me to thrive but not in a fully transactional way where I could go to extremes to get god to give me stuff
- a feeling of community, but a very broad one anyone could join with no membership dues or guilt

The Artist’s Way was a great program for me to learn to start trusting myself. It guides you through 12 weeks of self reflection which include coming up with your own ideas for activities, thought experiments and, sorry to sound hokey, but a bit of day dreaming too. The two most important and emphasized activities that are for all AW-Heads are: the Morning Pages and Artist’s Dates.

I will write a post about Morning Pages soon, but until then, the idea is that each day (preferably in the morning) you fill three pages with stream of consciousness garble. The point is not to create a masterpiece each morning, quite the opposite. It’s more to clean the lint trap of your brain before being the tumble cycle of the day. You are actually meant to complain, be boring and say anything and everything that pops into your mind.

As a mother of three curious and busy children I have no guaranteed privacy and felt afraid they’d read my Pages. Anything I write they could find. I suppose I’m also haunted by the idea that I could drop dead at any moment and have my loved ones go through all my stuff.

For these reasons, I’d write my pages and then rip them into pieces or throw them in a public garbage bin next to a dog park so that surely no one would dig through bags of steaming dog dung to read my Pages. It became too much of a chore to dispose of my Morning Pages like a Manhattan project government secret so I decided to write so tiny and with 0 pt spacing from line to line, that even I couldn’t read what I wrote, other than whilst I was writing it.

My Morning Pages look like a frenzied manifesto of a serial killer or maybe a DIY craft hipster’s idea of homemade, eco-friendly wrapping paper. My pages sometimes generate comments from passersby if I write them in public (which I don’t do often because I get interrupted, which really chaps my hide and defeats the purpose).

I tell you all this because when I googled “hypergraphia”, half the images looked just like my Morning Pages, something I believed was fairly unique to me.

Yay! Now I have self diagnosed myself with something! I have hypergraphia, the opposite of writer’s block, I have….writer’s diarrhea?
Writarrhea?