Stories, especially stories about our most traumatic experiences, tend to take on a life of their own. They often run away with themselves, rendering us helpless. But taking charge of how we tell the story, finding our voice after having been silenced, and being as honest as possible about what happened facilitates the healing process. If we can also make our stories beautiful and rich with detail, all the better. And if someone else can finally witness our story and share what they love about what we’ve written, that’s icing on the cake.
Our stories often live inside our bodies in jumbled Gordian knots. Sometimes they’re so pre-verbal that we struggle to even tell them in words. But when we start to write down our stories, we not only disentangle all those knotted cords inside; we also get to write something that others can witness, relate with, validate, and maybe even learn from.
For example, let me tell you a story from my past. (Trigger warning: Domestic violence)
I was standing right next to the guest room bed, near the door to the garage where my art studio lived, when his hand grabbed my arm so tight that his fingers bruised me for weeks afterwards. I’d seen him bust holes in the drywall of our house when he got angry, then grumble as he patched it back up and tried to paint it with paint that wasn’t quite the right color. I’d seen him grab the large canvases I painted and crack them over his knee, ripping the painted canvas artwork right off the stretcher bars and destroying what I’d created. But until that moment, my body hadn’t been the target of his rage.
I hadn’t seen it coming when his hand smacked across my cheek and left my cheekbone smarting, when I was too frozen to fight back, when I wound up on the floor wondering, “How did I end up here?”
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had egged him on using a weapon of my own- my words. He wanted to cheat on our taxes. Goddamn government didn’t deserve his hard earned money, he said. He never authorized those mother fucking socialists to build goddamn roads with his wages, not to mention that he had no business being expected to pay for some immigrant’s health insurance or pay some poor bastard in the police department his salary.
He called me a goodie two shoes, just like Alison Baylor did in the eighth grade, right before she told the boy I was crushing on that I’d never put out because my parents made me wear a promise ring to dedicate my virginity to Jesus.
So I cut him down to size. I took the scalpel of my words and sliced right through his fragile self-esteem with as much ease as I’d first cut open a human in medical school. You cheater criminal entitled loser tax evader thief. You asshole think you can put me in tax evasion jail just because you think you don’t have to pay for all the public services you use every day. You think you’re so special you rebel bad boy, but really you’re just a pitiful excuse of a human being pretending to be anything other than the bully on the schoolyard who slapped you silly before your hormones kicked in.
And then the fist came flying, and I was one down, just like that.
And there it is. Now it’s on the page. Now it’s not in my left bicep or my right cheekbone or both psoas muscles. It’s right there, the evidence of a memory he might dispute but still smells like the wildfire that was burning outside when it happened and tastes like the flinty blood of my tongue where I bit myself. Now it’s outside of me, where others who have gone down in a power struggle can say “Me too” and “Never again.”
We also benefit from digesting our joy, writing down the beautiful, tender, and poignant moments, the ones we might be tempted to pass right by if we didn’t bother to write them down and bring them to life on the page.
Like last week, in Sausalito, when the pea soup San Francisco fog was rolling under the Golden Gate Bridge and creeping towards the park where the blues band was playing a Grateful Dead cover as the sun was setting right there on the water. The setting sun turned the fog bank pink as it floated in waves like cotton candy ripples over the bay, and a fog rainbow arched halfway up one side and landed into the bay on the opposite side.
I was processing the ragged way people fall out of love and how sad it is when people we love can’t find their way back to each other after a rupture. As I danced, I could feel the impact in my knees, the shock absorbers of the news I’d just received. And then this fog-bow blew through me like a ray of hope, and I was mesmerized for a good half hour as the sky put on a show and the saxophone blared out the blues.
I was flattened by the impermanence of it all. The sunset fog-bow fading into gray and the shattering of a romance erupting into an earthquake that shakes the ground beneath us and reminds us how much change we’re processing in the world right now, all around us. And then we catch our breath and ground our bare feet in the damp grass as we remember that uncertain times demand that all of us dance. A baby shakes her booty as her pregnant mother waddles with her, as the sliver of a new moon begins to rise.
The quaking is unsteadying, but then my partner Jeff reached out and drew me to him and giggled like a little boy getting tickled while he danced his stiff Boston jig. For just one moment, everything was okay.
And now that moment has been anchored and I can relive it with my heart full of compassion for how much uncertainty we’re all holding right now, as the tectonic plates beneath us rumble underneath.
These are times when writing our stories can be medicine for us. I started teaching writing classes during the 2016 election, and then I taught Alchemizing Uncertain Times Through Writing and Memoir As Medicine classes consistently, during the pandemic. We’ve compiled the best of the Memoir As Medicine live classes I co-taught with Memoir As Medicine author Nancy Aronie into a homestudy version.
If you missed the live classes and wish to learn more about memoir writing at your own pace, you’re invited to learn more and register for Memoir As Medicine here.
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