“Sane-washing.”
I encountered this arresting compound word in the Washington Post and then Atlantic Monthly. Not surprisingly, the context for its usage was political. That won’t stop me from appropriating it for other purposes.
First, a definition. Sane-washing refers to the act of transforming irrational and nonsensical words and ideas into rational ones. Sane-washing morphs the literally incomprehensible into the comprehensible. You might say, it turns fiction into fact. Muddle into meaning. And it achieves this simply through insistence, repetition, and ignoring inconveniently contradictory evidence.
The concept is akin to brain-washing, of course, but also relates to an idea like money-laundering, which turns ill-gotten gains into legal profits. Bad becomes good. False becomes true. And we’re supposed to swallow the re-contextualization hook, line, and sinker.
Sane-washing insists on labeling what’s fake as real. As if there were no difference between carob and chocolate, or chicory and coffee.
Sane-washing gives us lots to chew on in creative maker spaces.
For instance, it’s a fabulous device for novelists. I just finished reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise, in which deeply desperate characters sane-wash their own life experiences in a heartbreaking bid to convey—if not to achieve—normalcy. Spoiler alert: They fail. The characters’ early-life traumas cannot be washed away or their consequences ignored, no matter how hard they try. They’re all running on sane-washed fumes.
In terms of character development, sane-washing is a promising device for creating complex and unreliable narrators as part of an emotionally high-stakes story.
Far more broadly, sane-washing applies to the existential aspects of building and sustaining any sort of artistic practice.
You have to be a bit crazy and often ridiculously brave to make art and share it with the world. Taking the creative act at face value, it’s a wonder any of us do it.
Enter sane-washing: The mental gymnastics we use to create zones of safety around our practices; to handle certain rejection over and over; to hold self-doubt at bay just enough to keep going with our work: we must normalize these difficulties in order to live with them.
Put simply, we turn the arguably insane and often incoherent act of making art into a sane act of self-preservation and constructive engagement. (Which it is—but not always, and often not at all.)
We insist that going off alone for hours, days, weeks, months at a stretch to write a book that comes with no roadmap and no certain outcomes is the normal thing to do. Most people never attempt to do that. But those of us who do have sufficiently sane-washed our mindset so that we’re able to traipse off and attempt the seemingly impossible.
I suppose that when sane-washing is not being manipulated for nefarious purposes, it serves as a useful kind of buffer. We treat the arguably impossible as if it’s possible. We turn a likely “no” into a more likely “yes.” In our minds, that is.
Sane-washing is indeed an outright act of manipulation. And it’s easily weaponized—as when incoherent word-salad transmogrifies into (false) wisdom.
But let’s find the hidden lining, shall we? For artists, sane-washing can serve as a beneficial tool—a lens through which we accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
Whatever works, I say, go for it.
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WRANGLING THE DOUBT MONSTER: FIGHTING FEARS, FINDING INSPIRATION
“…the perfect antidote to the procrastination and angst that stem from doubt and get in the way of creating our work and getting it out into the world.”
--Lisa Tener, award-winning author of Breathe. Write. Breathe.: 18 Energizing Practices to Spark Your Writing and Free Your Voice
I think it was Steve Jobs who said, "You did the impossible, because you didn’t know it was impossible.” Perhaps that’s a cousin to sane-washing? Thanks for the post and a new vocabulary word :)