How much can biography really tell us?

After recently reblogging a poem on Virginia Woolf and seeing associated posts come up as recommendations at the bottom I just had the thought or question.  How much can biography really tell us of the inner world of the writer Ior any public figure in fact?)  I just listened recently to the book on CD of Virginia and her Sister.    It is told in the form of novel via letters and diary entries of members of the Bloomsbury set, that group of people who assembled around Virginia and her sister, Vanessa and cover the period before Virginia met and married Leonard Woolf, but created in the mind of the author who at this point doesn’t come to mind.

The most powerful thing that made sense to me of Virginia’s suicide was that the book dealt with the death of their brother and of the two earlier losses of their parents which befell them before.  There was a part in it that spoke of how Vanessa could handle the grief well, but Virginia struggled with it[s impact.  I am a firm believer that grief of some kind of loss accompanies most addictions and so called ‘mental illnesses.’  Even if we are still babies when an important loved one dies I do believe it has an impact.  (And the grief is often more for the lost self that never may have got to live or express deeper feelings and reactions.)

My step grandfather died when I was only one year old and I don’t consciously remember him but he was much loved and to my mother and grandmother his coming ended the lonely time of 7 years they had alone together after my Grandfather died from war injuries some time in the early 1930.  Mum and Nana had to struggle along far from home with no war pension or other assistance.  As I have shared before in posts my Grandmother had to go out to work early in the morning and after school until 8 pm leaving my mother alone.  She was an only child.

As some of you know I have a great interest in Astrology.  The archetypal themes of life and personality and loss have made sense to me of great cleavings and tsunamis in my own life.  I went to a lecture by astrologer Liz Greene in London a few years back and she did my chart in one of the seminars.  The minute she saw it she asked me who died when I was very young.  She told me that I had absorbed a lot of the grief that was around when my step grandfather died.

Back to Virginia though, how much of her own struggles were due to unexpressed grief?   I also believe that I read or heard somewhere a while back that the question of sexual abuse was also pertinent to her life.  I really need to go and read a biography when I have time, however the point I am trying to make in this blog is how much of a life is really so deep felt and hidden and not always so easy to uncover for a biographer.  We may know the facts of a person’s life but not the inner meaning for them and how they dealt with them.

The poem I posted associated to Virginia Woolf talks of bi polar disorder, of emotional pain and defences to keep the person safe from harm.  It speaks of Nazi terrorists and many of us who suffer know these inner forces and voices so well.  They are part of the deeper layers of our own unconscious and often will arrange our suicide or death.  I spoke of this in recent posts on the work of Robert Firestone which concerns destructive voices in our psyche that try to keep us safe from harm but can end up severing us from life and embodied relationship.

Anyway these were just some not very deep reflections on some issues which are close to my heart.  Two sisters of mine have been diagnosed with Bi Polar disorder.  I watched powerless from the sidelines as they we medicated and received next to no therapy.  One of my sisters was made at one point almost comatose by shock therapy.  At that stage I was over 15 years sober and knowing she was going through that tore me apart inside.  I know the losses both my sister’s went through.

I also recognise my addiction and alcoholism had an aspect of that kind of fear, flight, fight reaction to pain hidden deep inside it.  In the end labels are not the reality.  They are descriptions that can hide deeper pain that then becomes harder to deal with when I brushed from view by a diagnosis.  We can never truly know the pain another soul suffers and so we should remember always to be mindful and kind for we never truly know what thorns that person may have had to walk over and not everyone handles things in the same way.  Labels don’t really talk of the reality and people are not diagnoses but individuals, often with complex histories and pain we may never fully know.