You Are Gothic But You Don’t Know It

You can’t escape it. It comes out in your articles, when you talk to your friends and the entertainment you consume.

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When I try to tell people about the Gothic aspects of their lives they look at me as if I was a madwoman.

That’s why I thought that the best way to show you how you also use Gothic elements, vocabulary, concepts and ideas in your articles and in your everyday life was to use some of my writing friends, coaches and contacts as examples.

In her article Writing Does Feel Like Staring Down A Monster On Some Days, Kristina God talks about the “deepest writing demons” to talk about writers’ mental blocks. In that same article, she also refers to Sean Kernan, who used this same statement in a recent Tweet.

Another writer here on Medium who uses vocabulary that you would normally find in Gothic texts is Alex Yuan. In his article with the title How to deal properly with energy vampires, he tells us about those people around us who can take away our energies and bring us down with their attitudes, feedback, and even the way they address us.

Tim Denning, who actually introduced me to Medium, (a little wink for my friend Tim here), when talking about grief in his article Yesterday, a Painful Tragedy Changed My Life for the Next 10 Years, he compared himself to “A zombie”. This image is very powerful in the sense that it’s really effective as it reinforces how he felt at a very painful moment in his life. In other words: he was shocked and numbed.

You will find more often than not that the Gothic is very psychological, and with this I mean, that you will find it every time there’s a description or writing addressing issues about mental issues. In this sense, writer Zachary Phillips has a poem called Why? where he asks himself “I’m creating demons from fluff?”.

As you can see, a text is not only Gothic when it uses certain labels that make us imagine certain scary creatures from the other side. It is true that certain characters found in Gothic literature serve as very effective imagery, but this is because they have the power of triggering images and ideas in our brains that we are all familiarised with, due to their universality, although sometimes we’ll find they may vary from one culture to another. And since images can be more powerful than words, and words trigger certain images we can’t really describe with words, we fall into this rabbit hole, where images and words retro-feed each other leading us to that grey area that is the Gothic.

There is one writer who takes the Gothic to a completely different level, though, partly or maybe mainly, due to his “unusual” job. I’m talking about Noah Watry, an undertaker with a strong passion for poker.

He’s used to people’s reactions, mine included, when he tells them what he does for a living. Think about it for a moment, how many undertakers or people working closely to the dead do you know? Probably none.

It was only when I started talking to him on a one-to-one online meeting, that I stopped to think about the big role people like him, play in our society.

He has to make sure we say our last goodbyes to our loved ones in a way that it’s not traumatic to us. He has to make sure that the last memory we have of our parents, friends or children is as pleasant as it can be. And that final moment has to be perfect or, if not, as close as possible to that perfection.

Just the mention of his job can produce rejection to some people. I sometimes wonder, how many times a girl might have turned him down precisely because of his duties with a society that needs him, but at the same time rejects him because his job title creates discomfort. This point is precisely what creates alienation and otherness which the Gothic handles to perfection.

In Noa’s article Despite Our Differences, Funeral Directors Are Everyday, Normal People Too, that I read as a memento mori, the Gothic is everywhere, just as the concept of ceasing to exist is the elephant in the room. Like Tim Denning in his article, previously mentioned a few paragraphs above, Noah also uses the word “zombie” to say that contrary to public belief, a funeral director is anything but.

Mental stability, empathy and love are also some of the elements that define the Gothic by being part of a binomial relationship with their negative counterpart, which takes me to the dangerous statement“Gothic is everywhere and in everything”.

As Professor in Contemporary English Literature Lucy Armitt says in a collaborative book “Teaching The Gothic”:

If Gothic can be “Anything,” it is actually “Nothing”

And this blows my mind, as much as the idea that comes further down on the same page and that reads:

Without a social context….the Gothic is impotent

Like in many of Noah’s articles, I guess for obvious reasons, for me too, the Gothic is the same as for many students and academics, omnipresent in every single moment we experience. For as long as we are alive we won’t be able to escape it.

Elements that describe the Gothic are also made by it, and they appear in our everyday speech, it sneaks into our writings and it sucks us in a mental spiral when we experience loss and, soon after that, grief.

For some of us, life and death cohabit in one single space where they end up meeting, creating a well-known transitional space in time we all hate.

It is precisely that transitional uncomfortable space the one that belongs to the realms of the Gothic, not only because of its ambiguous nature but also because of its impossibility to be described and therefore pinned down.

Final Thoughts

I’m curious about your Gothic elements, concepts and ideas that leak into your writings or into your life. Have you noticed them? Why don’t you reach out to me and tell me all about it?

Still don’t know what Gothic Literature is and how can it actually help you? Watch my free introduction below:

Final thoughts: If you have found this article useful, consider becoming a Medium member so I can keep helping you on your journey. You only have to use my referral link so I can receive support to keep creating transformation for those who, like you, want to know more about their Gothic self.

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I write and talk about the Gothic all the time. I help create awareness about the Gothic to trigger transformation in anybody who has a connection with the Gothic. If you want to go deep into your Gothic self visit me at Alice in Gothic Land, watch my videos on my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. You can also book your First Free Assessment Call with me and I will help you figure out your very own Gothic journey.