#001 Evidence of the Essay: “The Beast in Your Head” by Cynthia Marie Hoffman, published in SUN Magazine in August of 2024
#001 Evidence of the Essay: “The Beast in Your Head” by Cynthia Marie Hoffman, published in SUN Magazine in August of 2024
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/584-the-beast-in-your-head
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/publications/3/editions/2325
What kind of essay is this: Argumentative; Descriptive; Expository; Critical; Narrative; and/or Historical; etc.? “The Beast in Your Head” has some narrative elements (there’s a terrifying car accident on a windy road at midnight, there’s a pop concert), but the essay is primarily driven by enlightenment.
The essay’s structure is built on three pivotal moments I heard Metallica’s 1991 song “Enter
Sandman,” (ABOVE) but the throughline is the speaker’s (it’s me!) reckoning with identity as a teenager (and finally an adult) with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that she’s keeping hidden. Ultimately, she discovers something profoundly healing about joy, and about herself, through music.
Can you describe the step-by-step process of researching and writing this essay from beginning to end; including dates when you began writing the essay and when you finished the essay? I probably started thinking about this essay in late 2022 but didn’t start putting words on the page until late February 2023. I had been afraid of getting started. I am primarily a poet and hadn’t written personal essays in a couple decades. I’m also a perfectionist, and I had the idea that I had to be “good” at essays on the first try. That’s a great way to shut off the creative
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“The Beast in Your Head” was the first essay I undertook. Though I had a list of ideas (a spreadsheet of them, in fact, with color coding!), this was the one idea that was already shaping itself in my mind, the one that could not be ignored. I spent more than six months writing and rewriting and revising it. It’s the essay that taught me how to write essays (but let’s face it, I’m still trying to figure out how to write essays! In the same way that, after publishing four collections of poetry, I’m still trying to figure out the poem).
I knew The Sun Magazine was looking for personal essays about music, so I had this fantasy that my essay would find a home there. I DM’d a pitch via Twitter (which is what they recommended at the time) but didn’t hear back. At the time, I still didn’t know what the essay was about. And I certainly didn’t know how to pitch. Pitching is not something we do in the poetry world. But the actual writing itself—sentences, imagery, emotional impact—that was something I felt I could do. So I just focused on the writing; publication, if it was to come at all, would come later.
https://thesunmagazine.submittable.com/submit
Not much research was required. Mostly, I had to jog my memory of the guitar and music theory I’d taken as a teenager. And I had to watch the music video for “Enter Sandman” to get the visuals right.
I knew I had finished the essay when I finally figured out how to wrap the car accident into the first line: “The last thing I saw before the accident was the windshield full of trees,” even though the action of the car accident occurs as the centerpiece of the essay. Figuring out how to control multiple time periods, as well as multiple realities (the external factual events versus the internal perceived experience of OCD) was so important, while also thinking about pacing for the reader. I often printed the essay out, cut the paragraphs out with scissors, and pushed the pieces around on the carpeted floor of my writing room. Once the pieces locked together, like a puzzle, I felt that I was done.
Where did you do most of your writing for this essay? At home, sitting at my desk, wearing one of my giant hoodies that makes me feel protected and safe (the hoodie turned out to be a secret ingredient to enable me to tap into a vulnerable storytelling headspace). I often wrote at night, late into the night, when the house was quiet because everyone else was asleep. I would collapse into bed at 1:30 am and still have to get up for work the next day.
Once, I figured out an important piece of the essay as I was driving with my family to a special saddlery store an hour away. When we arrived, my husband and teen went into the store, and I stayed behind in the car, using voice recognition and the Notes app on my phone.
Normally, I can’t think a single coherent sentence if music is playing—I need silence and often write with earplugs in, listening to the centering waves of my own breath—but in this case, I was writing about Metallica’s 1991 hit “Enter Sandman.” I had to really get inside that song and not only describe its sound but remember how I’d felt in 1991 when it came out—a time when I was secretly dealing with symptoms of OCD that included scary, violent intrusive thoughts. I must have played “Enter Sandman” a hundred times into my earbuds late into the night as I wrote.
What is the thesis statement or the main idea of the essay? With the heavy metal song “Enter Sandman” as its central catalyst, a woman reckons with violence and ultimately comes to understand her true identity, and find self-acceptance, despite a lifelong journey with OCD.
Can you give us a short excerpt that you feel is the best evidence to prove your thesis statement or main idea? “Something changed after the accident. For the first time, something truly violent and terrifying had actually happened to me. It wasn’t an intrusive thought anymore. It was a memory. And I didn’t feel like I’d expected to feel—neither powerful nor brutish like the guys in the music videos. What had I thought when I’d looked up to those metalheads growling and smashing guitars? Had I believed that by performing violence, they had acquired some mastery over it? And that if I looked tough like them, it would mean I, too, had control over the things that scared me?”
What is your experience of writing this excerpt? This excerpt challenged me to dig deeper into the argument of the essay, the interrogation of my own motivations. It was useful to look back on this confusing time as a teenager secretly managing OCD symptoms all on my own, and to understand, from my present-day adult perspective, why I had been drawn to the type of music I had at the time—how it had offered me companionship, comfort, and ultimately, at the very end of the essay: joy.
This passage does something we are called to do so often in nonfiction writing but which we are encouraged not to do in poetry—say the thing clearly and out loud. It felt good, after years of writing poetry, to finally feel like I was not only granted permission to state the thesis outright but encouraged to do so. Through writing essays, I’ve been able to tap into a deeper level of self-awareness than I ever have through writing poetry. For that, I am so grateful to have finally (re)discovered the genre.