I have wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old, and I am on the other side of life now, and have been a writer all my adult life. I am blessed to have done work I love all of my life. Writing is identity to me, as well as healing.
When Red got sick, I just started writing about it, and I always remember that most human suffering is related to love and loss,and the purpose of healing is to help people acknowledge, experience and bear the reality of life, good and bad.
One wise professor told his students that the greatest sources of human suffering are the lies we tell ourselves, and writing has helped me to be authentic and clear and strong. Writing helps me understand myself, and I often do not know how I feel until I write about it.
I try to share my own vulnerability and humanity, my own anger, envy, pride and greed. In so doing, I have come to begin to understand who I am. Writing authentically is difficult for many people to do. We are taught to hide our feelings, not to share them, we are told it is not wise or safe to be honest, only wary and guarded.
The open world of the Internet and social media, where trolls abound like guppies, reinforces the instinct to be careful and hide ourselves. One of the most effective ways to access your inner world of feelings, writes trauma specialist Dr. Bessell Van Der Kolk of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Mass., is to write to yourself if you aren’t ready to write for the outside world.
“Most of us have poured our hearts out in angry, accusatory, plaintive, or sad letters after people have betrayed or abandoned us,” he writes. “Doing so almost always makes us feel better, even if we never send the letters. When you write to yourself, you don’t have to worry about other people’s judgment – you just listen your own thoughts and let their flow take over. Later, when you reread what you wrote, you often discover surprising truths.”
I believe in the healing power of writing. I urge my students to write honestly, and to not use to writing to protect themselves or others. I believe writing is most effective when it is honest, even fearless, and free of the lies we tell ourselves all the time.
Van Der Kolk writes about the practie he calls free writing, where the writer can use any object as their own Rorschach test for entering a stream of associations. You simply write the first thing that comes to your mind as you look at the object in front of you and then keep going without stopping, rereading, or crossing out.
Free writing has become widespread in trauma treatment, where it is found to be healing. It is also used more and more in writing classes as a simple way to encourage writing.
A wooden spoon on the counter, says Van Der Kolk, may trigger memories of making tomato sauce with your grandmother – or of being beaten as a child. A teapot that’s been passed on for generations may take you back to the furthest reaches of your mind to the loved ones you’ve lost or of family holidays that were a mix of love and conflict and fear.
Soon enough, an image will emerge, and then a memory, and then a paragraph or two to write it down.
In free writing, there is no right or wrong. Whatever shows up on the paper is private and personal and revealing, a manifestation of associations that are personal to you, and a way to begin the practice and discipline of writing.
I love the idea of free writing as healing, as an empowering tool, and as a path to self-awareness. Writers write, and the more they write, the better they do.
I often think of fingerprints when I think of writing, no two writers are alike, no two lives are alike. The biggest problem my students face when they take up writing is that they struggle with how to get started, with where to begin.
Free writing can begin anywhere, at any time, and be about anything you see, remember or call up in your mind. We all live in a world of objects, all we have to do is look around us.
This weekend, I’m presenting the idea to the students in my writing class, I wanted to pass it along to you as well.