Write Your Way Out, Again

I stand by my previous post “Write Your Way Out.” These past few weeks have been difficult for me personally. I’ve lost the person who was my rock, my best friend, and my beloved aunt. I can’t really be sorry for her passing. She was becoming frail, her memory and cognitive function deteriorating. She was sad, depressed, and scared. And I couldn’t fix any of it. With Covid I could rarely visit to offer comfort and reassurance. I tried as best I could to keep in touch by phone, arranged virtual visits, and visited in person when I was allowed. It has been hard on all of us. To top it off two of my family members have gotten Covid, and then there’s all the other shit that I’ve had going on in my life. I won’t bore you with the details. They’re personal and painful, and only mine to deal with.

But that’s my point. I’m back to writing my way out. I’m not working on my current work in progress. Ruby and Jay are pushed far from my mind at this point. I’m foggy and discombobulated in my head. My heart hurts, my mind cluttered. I’m grieving and in pain. So, what do I do to deal? I write my way out. I’ve gone back to my journal writing. It’s the place where I can put my heart on the page. It’s safe there. I can tell the page anything I want. There is no judgement, no ridicule, no worry that my secrets and my shame will be spilled out for others to see. If I put my feelings, my worries, my pain and shame on the page, I get it out of my system. The page will keep it for me and guard it. I can go back to reread, and sometimes I do. I look for patterns. I can look for a phrase or sentence that will inform a character or is something one of them would say. But mostly I don’t because looking back can be hard and painful. I got the vitriol out; the page can keep it.

Journal writing is a way to clear my mind. In Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, she recommends writing every morning when you first get up, before you do anything else, three pages. She calls them “morning pages,” and they must be hand-written, pen to paper. It makes your brain work differently than fingers on the keyboard. It also puts you in touch with your words in a visceral way that keyboarding cannot. It’s a connection. And when I do journal writing, I need that connection, because in those moments I feel alone and disconnected. I don’t do a lot of journal writing when I’m in a story. There are only so many hours in a day, and for me, the story needs to come first. I’m not getting any younger here. But I’m beginning to think I should rethink that strategy. It becomes part of my mental health care, my self-care, if you will, and that is important for all of us. But it can also inform me as a writer, inform my characters, who I want to be real and authentic. I want them to be flawed like the rest of us because at the end of the day, none of us are perfect. That’s a hard pill for me to swallow. Imperfection. I know it is for many people. And that’s a whole other topic. But writing in my journal allows me to sink into the imperfection. To turn into it in a way I could not otherwise. Acknowledging my own imperfections and learning that in spite of them, I am worthy of love, I allow myself to grow and be more creative. This will be brought to bear in my stories, I hope.

So again, I stand by my earlier post “Write Your Way Out.”