At a recent bilingual, half-day poetry workshop, our leader reminded us that some ideas are poetic, and others are best suited to prose. I’d been thinking about that for a while—how ideas can take shape depending on the writing form. A fellow writer once said that he didn’t know what he thought until he started writing. After years of writing for outcomes (newspapers, radio, books, magazines, etc.), I think I lost sight of the limits that writing forms can impose on thinking.

In writing Secret Harvests, David Mas Masumoto said that he unearthed little of the information that a nonfiction writer typically gathers for a book. He is also a poet and farmer, growing peaches and raisins in the Central Valley. He filled the book with impressions and unreliable memories, creating a pastiche with skeletal facts and other people’s voices. Secret Harvests is beautiful and evocative; the story unexpectedly hopeful. In her memoir, Year of the Tiger, disability activist Alice Wong created a scrapbook of photos, poems, graphics, artwork, transcribed conversations, and essays. Their work shows that flexing form, the way poems do, can make space for ideas.

During the poetry workshop, our leader also encouraged us to find the heat when editing our work. Linger over the place where the writing feels the most alive, strange, emotional, or uncomfortable, he said. I’d been thinking about that idea for a while, too. Are those the spots closest to the truth?

For a long time, I didn’t think of Sam and other individuals with autism as particularly resilient. Then I realized that idea was old tapes talking. He has many creative and ingenious connections, and they are incredibly resilient. Wong described how she and other individuals with disabilities were the real hackers of our society. She argued that we often fail to appreciate their resilience, their ability to adapt, and that individual autonomy comes from decision-making. Research shows that decision-making is part of building identity. What you choose is who you are and who you become.

Because Sam can be slow to decide things, that spot radiates some real heat for us, too. The world often holds indecisive people in contempt. Back when I was in elementary school cutting black silhouettes from construction paper, the art teacher explained positive and negative space to our class. She encouraged some of us to paste the black outline—the negative space—to the background paper instead of the silhouette itself. Can a time of indecision be like the negative space you cut away, creating space for a decision?

Enter the research work of Daniel Newark. About ten years ago, he wrote a paper, “Indecision and the construction of self.” He said that our work of decision-making is more than the mechanics of it. The work we do to make a decision inspired some of what we know about human development. But Newark argues that can also be true even when we are indecisive. When we are trying to figure out what to do, we are also forming who we are. He pointed out that scholars have paid little attention to the “hesitation, ruminations, and palpitations that often characterize choice.” Furthermore, when scholars have discussed indecision, they often label it as unproductive, even pathological. How sad.

Newark lays out a strong argument for indecision as another way to build identity. When we are indecisive, we may not have enough information, or we doubt the quality of information we have. We talk to and connect with friends, family, and other people who might help. That’s identity work. We can either solve the problem we are facing or reduce the need to solve it. So, when rational efforts don’t work, we tend to be more open to other tactics, including the classic identity work of self-examination. When a problem feels subjective, all our efforts to learn from it, understand what we are feeling about it, and sharing that knowledge with others before deciding—that’s identity work.

Sam has lived here in California for two years. It took him months to decide to move and he’s still talking about the decision. I see now that understanding what it means to be Texas ex-pat and a California resident is some serious identity work.