How Writing Saved My Life

It is hard to write or express pain and suffering in any form. Firstly I would prefer that I never had or have any suffering to speak of and I wish that for all sentient beings. However I realize that life comes with suffering — not just my own but the pain I feel when I empathize with others who matter to me.

In the span of merely two weeks, I have heard the following stories of injustice and pain.

A female attendee at a technology conference had her modesty outraged by a total stranger. She keeps blaming herself when there is nothing she could have done differently. She was simply emotionally and physically affronted.

Parents of numerous friends are aging and in hospitals. Deaths. Despair. Depression. Dementia.

Cheating spouses.

Unemployment.

Addiction.

Loneliness. Suicide.

I am not going out to look for pain. I simply see the struggle of daily living and loving. It hurts sometimes to be human. Relationships can be difficult and challenging.

I first started to write a diary when I was 10 encouraged by my mother and my English teacher in school. I still have that diary. It make me smile. You can see my brain development. Simple sentences.

Today was chocolate milk at school.

It was hot.

I made a new friend.

All purely descriptive and talking about something external.

It reminded me of how life seemed more simple than too.

Eat-Drink-School-Sleep-Play-Family-Teachers-Church

Contained and easy to understand and be a part of.

I have kept most of my diaries and as years progressed — their depth of experience and life also darkened and become philosophical and at times downright depressing.

At 15, my diary read like one big sob story. Some of it was the usual peer ostracization. The only girl whose shoes did not match what the in-clique of girls were wearing. The girl whose grades in school made her enemies and earned her the name of teacher’s pet even when she was not trying to be one. It was classic teen blues. The girl who watched as others got the guys.

However the most challenging ones spoke about the pain of watching my parents’ marriage and their quarrels. The childhood innocence pendulum swinging between hope and hopelessness of my dad stopping his drinking and smoking. He never would. The anger I would never be able to express to him at how disappointed I was with having him as a dad. I would be a teen and rebel but I would not be able to speak those words to him out loud. That would simply be too dangerous not just for me but also for my mother.

Now as an adult and counselor, I have seen so many teens cut themselves as a way to release the pent up anger and frustration of having no voice with which to speak about their family pain. Cutting is done by rich kids and poor. Boys and Girls. They hide their slashes under jackets too hot to be worn to school. Or cuts near their thighs beyond normal gaze. In my time as a teen, more than one friend would cut themselves — small cuts near their wrists, never deep enough to be of danger to their lives but almost as a badge to tell the world; “I am in pain.”

Of course, many other teens and adults use their anger and sadness to hurt others instead. Fights in school. Gossip at work. Sabotaging others in their teams. The list goes on.

What I found helped me to process my anger and sadness then and now, is my writing. I wrote most if not all of what I felt on a neutral piece of paper. Here I could shout cuss words at my father which I had running always at the back of my head while living as a young adult at home. Here I could have a list of guys I liked and did not worry about liking someone’s boyfriend or some other close girlfriend’s crushee. Here I could write — express- explore and make sense of the mess of emotions I had in me.

In my early twenties, my writing scared even me. I was seeing too many things that did not sit well with my beliefs. I was contemplating my adulthood and it seemed very bleak for someone who had such a great life on paper. I actually stopped writing because I could not bear to read myself. It all seemed to be simply sad stuff and I did not need to see sad stuff in the real world and then in my private world relieve the pain through my writing.

I stopped.

I pretended everything was alright.

When I was sad. I drank instead. Eat instead. Watched a movie instead. Danced instead. Worked instead. Planned a vacation instead. Shopped instead.

I would go out with friends (sometimes even people I barely liked) just to avoid being alone with my thoughts. This lead me to many a party night where I was being used by that self absorbed person. I just did not want to be alone. So I chose poor company over no company.

While all of the above is simply the way we manage our emotions. They were mainly external sources of happiness I was seeking to make my internal despair go away. What happened when I stopped writing was I was trying to edit out the sadness by pretending I did not possess it. I can say this now in hindsight but at that time; I simply wanted to stay HAPPY me. Sad me — if I ignored her long enough, she would go away. Right?

During this period I trained a teacher, counselor and finally my proudest moment — my Masters in Psychology. I was understanding stages of development, cognition and also emotions. I was understanding but the deep knowing was still a mystery box to me. Like so many technicians who can describe the component parts of an engine or machine; but cannot make it better. I was unable to understand the sadness that would always be in me. And not just me — in many of the clients I saw and students I counseled.

In our counseling diploma class, we are expected to attend a counseling session ourselves. To feel what is like to be on the other side of the chair. To be a recipient of counseling rather than the counselor. My counselor then taught me alot about myself. She helped me see how I was trying to overcompensate to my mother for a bad tempered father. How I was always trying to save my mother and wanted her to be happy. I probably had it in my mind that my mother suffered because she had to stay in a marriage with my father because of my brother and I — and in some way I wanted to make it up to her. Which was not my role as a daughter. No one can make anyone else happy. Happiness is an individual’s choice.

She also told me something that has made me return to writing and confidence in myself. She said I was one of the most self aware people she had counseled. Basically I managed to unpackage all my own challenges and lay it all out — part by part and yes I knew my pain and my emotions intimately. While most never spoke to their pain or their emptiness. “Hello darkness my good friend.. I have come to talk to you again” to borrow the famous line from Simon and Garfunkel was not my issue. I knew my darkness. I also managed to see my light.

Some people talk to a good friend. I talk to myself — my best friend through my writing. I guessed I never wanted to bother too many with my woes. When you are a kid and your father lays outside the door drunk and you have to help carry him in with your mother. His weight more than both of you can manage, it is not what you share with your friends at recess. As the years passed, I shared less and wrote more. It felt safer. It felt also more constructive and healing.

I am sharing this long post here today as many of you have seen my sharings now made public on Medium and Facebook. I have no longer hidden them as so many strangers, friends and mentors I respect have told me how my writing has moved them and helped them. I started writing openly when faced with my mother’s emergency health issues and her long term stay in the hospital at the brink of death. She could not and did not want to see our relatives and friends as the effort was simply too much. Yet everyday love surged to my brother and I through social media and phone lines by our family and friends. So I decided to simply write daily or every two days, the journey of hope, fear, anguish, anger as we watch her sway between death and life. Three months of openly sharing that most traumatic period of our lives allowed me to see that writing does not merely save my life. It helps save others too.

(tearing here)

Writing is not the only way. You can also tape voice audios. Sing. Draw. Paint. Dance.

Just express all of you

and All of your emotions

Unbashedly and unafraid of censure and judgement.

It is like using a voice you never used or that has gone rusty with little use. The voice of your soul.

Whatever secret you are hiding from someone or society. You can and should find an outlet to deliberate and discuss it. Keeping it all inside simply gnaws at you and it is almost like rotten fruit. Write or express it in the safest way you know how. Write and burn it. Just write.

This call to write or express is an open invitation to you to explore what it means to fully feel again. After I began to write deeply about the journeying with my mother to her deathbed and disclosing the secret of my father’s alcoholic abuses. I was able to FEEL all of me again. The child was not afraid as the adult writer Marion knew she would be safe. Emotions on paper cannot swallow you up. Emotions unexpressed and swallowed whole — eat you up from inside.

Write

Feel

Know that the world has suffering but it also has hope

Express the joy and the despair of a life

Yours

With so much compassion for your Journeys

Marion