Sometimes I spend hours at a time sitting at the computer writing. Lately, I've noticed that something similar to what happens when I have to sit for a long time on an airplane is taking place; my ankles swell. The time goes by quickly, but it can also drag when I'm labouring to get through a chapter in a certain project. Writing, and being a writer is a weird experience. When I was 10-years-old I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, and I knew then that I wanted to become a writer. So, I talked a friend of mine into both of us becoming writers, and when we were in school, while everyone else was working on the social studies or English assignment, he and I would be writing war stories. What does a 10 year old know about war?! But there we were, passing our relative pieces back and forth to see what the other had written. Some people want to be a writer, because they want to be known as a writer. It's a matter of prestige and a way to support themselves interpersonally.

"Hello. And what do you do for a living?"

"I'm a writer."

"How fascinating!"

Other people would accept the title of writer, but they don't think of it as something they are; they think of it as something they do. These people write, because writing is what they must do. Writing is the clearest way to process life. They jot things down in a journal. These days they blog. They often find excuses to enter into public venues with their writing.

When I realised I wanted to be a writer, I accepted the job in my local youth group, an organisation called 4-H, to be reporter. That meant that I was supposed to write and put news releases in the local newspapers. So I did. Thus, I first became published at the age of 11 or 12.

At this stage of life writing is the shortest distance for me between action potential, the firing of a single neuron, and a complete thought. When I was in seminary, I often had one night to complete a paper, and I did not have time to write it out long hand and then have someone else type it up for me. So, I trained myself to write the rough draft and final draft all at once, on the fly, while using a Smith Corona electronic typewriter with a correcto-tape cartridge, and I became quite proficient at snapping out the black tape to insert the white tape so as to make corrections.

Those papers often took me until two or three in the morning to write, but after seminary I could compose what I wanted to say on the keyboard, and when computers came along, the whole process went even faster. When the Internet arrived, I started writing to colleagues and other professionals in discussion groups and did not even realise I was writing probably 20 pages of thoughts in the form of discussion every day.

Now, I cannot write longhand in any approximation of legibility, and I am useless in a teleconference call. When I was in the ministry, I used to speak in front of people and think quickly and orally on my feet, but now, as a psychotherapist, I sit and listen most of the time to others talk, and if I have to express myself, I am best writing out what I need to say. I think through my fingers on the keyboard, and while that is a disability for most people, for a writer, that is exactly where you want to be.

So it was that while working on a project sketching some of the history of gestalt therapy, I happened across a DVD someone had given me of the life of Laura Perls. I slid the DVD into the computer and sat back to watch. I needed information to pass along about Laura, and all I wanted was a quick note, just a little piece of data that I could insert in my writing project – simply an anecdote here or there.

That's all I wanted, but I became engrossed by the life of that unassuming and gentle person with a European education who had a more complete understanding of gestalt psychology and existentialism than did her husband, but who willingly stood in his shadow.

She was a full partner in the writing of his first book, but she let him take all the credit. She put together and sustained the first gestalt training institute in New York, but she was content to let her husband steal all the acclaim and the standing as the founder of gestalt therapy.

While Fritz Perls was living on the Big Sur coast in California, Laura was in New York. They lived a separated marriage in which he ignored her and his two children, while she remained a mother and acted as a single parent.

He lived freestyle like a showman and was in residence as a guru of sorts during the late 60s, often sleeping with women who came to train with him. She lived the professional and ethically sound life of a psychotherapist and became the centre of gravity for the activities of the New York institute.

After Fritz Perls died, Laura kept his ashes in an urn in her closet in New York. About 20 years later, she returned to Germany, to her hometown, and there she died. She is buried with the ashes of her husband in a cemetery there. Hers is a love story – the story of two Jewish professionals who fled Nazi Germany, went to Holland, South Africa, and then immigrated to the United States. They lived lives fully and worked with amazing people, but they were themselves quite flawed. Even in the dysfunction, though, she loved him.

I pulled the DVD out and sighed. They were an oxymoron – a self-absorbed sacrifice.

So, a writer writes. My project was not about the love that made Laura loyally support her husband. But a writer writes, and when I sat down, and when I contemplated Laura Perls, this is what snapped from my brain, through my fingers, and onto the screen. That's when I realised how the life of Laura Perls had affected me.