Writing Disenfranchised Grief to Heal
How to use fiction to heal through disenfranchised grief
Note to readers:
Taylor Swift recently released her re-recorded album, Speak Now, as she has done for several other past albums. Along with the re-recorded songs, she dropped songs from her “vault” — a collection that didn’t fit on a particular album, wasn’t ready to be publicly available, or didn’t make the cut.
I thought about how many articles I’ve written over the years that are safely within my own “vault.” As I was re-reading some of them, I couldn’t help but feel a little thrill. I remembered writing some of them and how much passion I’d had for the article then. And for some reason or another, it got sidelined to the vault. I found one that stood out and made me want to revive it.
It’s about disenfranchised grief and writing to heal that very particular kind of grief.
Unfortunately, we are all familiar with grief. Some more than others, but none of us escape this life without losing someone we love and care about. But that’s not the kind of grief we’ll discuss or demonstrate today. Rather, I want to talk about disenfranchised grief because it’s more common than anyone realizes, has a lot of tendrils to other parts of our lives, and yet, no one wants to talk about it.
