Guest Blog: Defiant Creativity & The Quest For Meaning

Defiant Creativity: Writing the Body into Meaning

By Somayeh McKian

Certified Psychotherapist, In-Training Logotherapist, Gender Studies Scholar, & Published Author

In my first two reflections for my Logotherapy training and supervision, I explored how writing serves as an archaeological tool to excavate meaning, and how the human spirit, the Noetic dimension, retains its ultimate purpose regardless of the language or accent it speaks. But existential excavation does not happen in a vacuum. It happens within a specific, tangible vessel: the human body.

In my qualitative research into narrative inquiry, specifically focusing on the lived experiences of Iranian women and the idea of  the "Fat Female Body," I continuously witnessed a profound form of suffering. It is a suffering born from a rigid, heavily policed biological and social  destiny.  From a young age, many women experience a relentless spectrum of bodily surveillance: fathers pushing for invasive gastric surgeries under the guise of medical directives, mothers navigating endless clinical maze-like treatments, and grandmothers enforcing strict discipline at the dinner table.

Faced with this constant judgment, the individual often retreats to a psychological  corner to hide from the gaze of relatives and the unattainable standards of culture. They begin to live out what I previously called an  inkless life, a manuscript where their physical existence has been completely authored by external critics, leaving them feeling stripped of agency.

But with the help of  logotherapy, we understand that the human condition is never purely biological or psychological. Dr. Viktor Frankl beautifully reminded us that the Noetic dimension remains entirely free and untouched by somatic or social limitations. When the weight of physical destiny attempts to crush a person, the spirit can rise through what I call Defiant Creativity.

The Corporeal Pen: Reclaiming the Flesh

When we treat life as a manuscript, creative writing transforms from a passive hobby into a deeply corporeal, existential act. the medical chart and family gaze represent the Discourse of the Other, reducing the subject’s flesh to a passive, specular object . By seizing the pen, a person ceases to be an object spoken about by medical charts or family members, the status of a looked-at body; they become and emerge  the active subject and author of their own skin,  a desiring and creative subject. The pen functions as a symbolic tool that rewrites the real of the skin, allowing the subject to author their own lack and actively navigate their physical existence on their own terms.

In my collaborative creative writing sessions with research participants, we searched for the "ink to meaning" amid some corners of their manuscripts. Through this process of existential archaeology, two powerful keywords emerged from their text, completely subverting the dominant narratives of shame: "Sweating" and "Stop it." 

• Nazanin’s Reclaiming of "Sweating": In medicalized and societal discourses, sweat on a larger body is frequently pathologized, viewed as a disgusting bodily secretion or a marker of failure. But in Nazanin’s creative text, sweating was completely transformed into a layer of profound aesthetic meaning. It became an expression of vitality, energy, and motion, undeniable proof that her body was powerfully alive, radiating heat, and refusing to be stopped.

  
  

• Nina’s Reclaiming of "Stop eating, stop it": For Nina, the phrase "stop it" had always been an external weapon used to police her, a grandmother tapping her shoulder, a relative restricting her food. Through the freedom of the pen, Nina took the phrase back. "Stop it" became her internal boundary. It became a conscious, defiant pause: stopping the cycle of internalized fatphobia, and stopping the forced submission to surgical erasure.

  
  

Toward a Feminist Aesthetic of Meaning

Somayeh McKian

Just as I realized that learning German grammar forces a meticulous, intentional precision of thought, rewriting the body requires us to look at the specific, concrete details of our physical existence with radical responsibility.

By merging Logotherapy with feminist narrative inquiry, we can generate a feminist aesthetic of fat. This aesthetic allows the human spirit to look at the soft flab, the stretch marks, and the lived history of the flesh, and detect a unique, conceptual beauty rather than a medical deficit.

We cannot always choose the physical or cultural circumstances we are born into, but we retain the absolute freedom to choose our attitude toward them. When a person finds the ink to write their own bodily narrative, they prove that the fluent soul transcends not only vocabulary, but the very limitations of its physical destiny. The living body has its own purpose, its own momentum, and its own magnificent story to tell.