ABOUT ME- Candace Barrett
I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers- Anne of Green Gables
I'm a psychotherapist, writer, and mother, living in a 200+ year old (haunted) house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
I started writing at a very young age, and at age 10, completed my first novel, named, heaven help me(!), "Blue Jeans, Bullets, and Boys." My literary tastes drastically changed as I grew; now my recurrent themes are likely to revolve around death, haunting, murder, and liminal places.
I was always an avid reader, and by the time I entered junior high the Victorian novels became my favorites. I drew inspiration from them, which did not please my English teachers. They assigned Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, a roster of almost completely male, well-to-do, white men who wrote about bullfighting, fishing, safaris, war, and (for Fitzgerald anyway), the irrresistable glamor of the rich, a lure that completely missed me. Their female characters were usually unrecognizable to me as actual girls or women. I wanted to read women writers, people whose obsessions I could relate to, not a bunch of bullfighting macho rugged individuals, most of whom treated women like garbage, but that was somehow supposed to be okay, their birthright for some reason. As for my writing, it was popular anong my classmates (to be clear, my prose was popular, I wasn't), but my teachers, while admitting I possessed some innate gifts, criticized my work strongly, uniformly telling me it was too long, too strange, too descriptive, too utopian or too dystopian. I argued back, but my own prose style began to falter after several years of unconstrictive criticism and efforts to squash down my natural style (which owed much to my beloved Victorians). It wasnt until I went to boarding school in my senior year that I had teachers who appreciated, and criticized, my writing for what it was, not what they wanted it to be.
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My favorite authors are an eclectic lot: Murakami, Ishiguro, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Waters, Jenny Ofill, Marge Piercy, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys, Diane Schoemperlen, D.M. Thomas, Michael Faber, and of course the first loves I never abandoned, Hawthorne, Zola, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Hardy, Eliot, and above all, the Brontë sisters (all three of them; I think Anne is seriously underrated). I consider it a literary crime that everyone knows Jane Eyre and so few have read Villette, Charlotte’s true masterpiece.
Books were my refuge as a kid. Early on, I developed a host of mental health problems: Bipolar II, OCD, PTSD, body dysmorphic disorder, and (in my late teens), alcohol addiction. I finally got sober for good at age 34, and two years later sought psychiatric treatment and began to manage my illnesses. The most stubborn of them all was the PTSD, and last year I finally found the courage to enter an intense form of trauma therapy (EMDR). After 7 months of EMDR, I’ve made more progress than I did in seven years of talk therapy (which did help with the other issues, however). From 20 or more flashbacks daily, I’m down to 2 or 3 on most days now, and there are even days when I dont have any. Those days are like a miracle.
Through the years I've published stories, essays and articles in literary, consumer, and unclassifiable oddball publications. I wrote an autobiographical feature article for Cosmopolitan, and a short story about life in a cult in the literary journal Confrontation. In recent years, I've had an essay and two short stories published in anthologies. One of these stories (The Girls of Blackthorn), is maybe my favorite, based on the urban legend of a woman in white, flagging people down on the road at night and asking to be taken to a destination, then disappearing.
It is since I've engaged in the EMDR that I've noticed a renaissance in my work. My therapist advised me that for years my system has been greatly engaged in trying to manage the voluminous daily flashbacks; now this energy is more available for creative work. I think this burst of extra energy and inspiration has been a huge factor in my decision to write for Medium.
The other thing inspiring me to write is my horror at the Palestinian genocide, and my initial sense of helplessness to do anything about it. I donate more than I can afford to UNRWA and the International Rescue Committee, I write congresspeople, I call the White House, I talk to friends and acquiantances and try to educate them about the fact that Israel is not "defending itself" (the exact opposite in fact), I joined Jewish Voice for Peace (I’m not Jewish; the requirements are only being anti-genocide and anti-zionist). Then it occurred to me that one thing I can do is write, and this impelled me to publish my first two Medium articles. I’ve opened it up since, to include other essay topics and fiction.
In terms of my profession, I’ve been a mental health therapist since 1999, working with a lot of populations, including sex offenders, people with various addictions, nursing home residents, and especially SPMI (serious and persistent mental illness.) I’m passionate about my work, but ultimately it can take a toll and burn you out, so I’ve cut it back to part time.
My sojourn on Medium has been delightful so far, and I am really looking forward to engaging with other readers and writers!
