A Strange Alchemy
My daughter recently asked me how to cope with sadness, the kind of despondency that lingers in the air like a malevolent haze, shading every thought with grey.
I could have answered with the same remedy I give for nightmares: Think of a happy thought — it worked for Peter Pan after all.
But I knew happy thoughts weren’t working for my little girl, no longer as little as she used to be. Growing bigger and brighter everyday, but now plagued with the world shifting flood of hormones that marks the crossing into tweendom.
So what could I tell her to do with her feelings? I gave her the only answer that’s helped me through my decades. I told her to write.
Like me, my daughter is an incurable bookworm. She knows words are magic, but she has yet to learn they have healing powers.
I gave her a journal and a pen and told her to let it all out. The sadness. The anger. The frustration. The loneliness. The confusion. Let it flow out on the page and watch it transform.
Sometimes, into something beautiful.
While I have written since I was a child, I only began to learn the healing power of the written word when illness and loss entered my life. As a teenager, I watched a beloved aunt fight and finally fall to cancer.
I saw how dying could be cruel but death could be kind. The only way I knew how to process my experience was to step outside myself. And write about it.
Write the vision of her lying in the hospital bed, so diminished. Write the delirium spouting from her lips, the terror in her eyes as she saw things we could not. Write the songs we sang. Write the feel of her skin as I held her hand. Write the last words she heard before she exhaled her last breath.
I wrote it all. And the trauma was not gone. But it helped.
When my father died a few years later, after another terrible battle with a ferocious cancer, the pain was too great to write at the time. I treated my wounds with new love and new life instead.
But the grief lingered, as it always will. And eventually I needed to put it on the page.
And now, as I face my own battles with chronic illness, writing is the only way I feel seen and heard and understood.
While friends and family care and offer support, they cannot feel what I feel. And I fear by speaking too often and sharing too much I may wear out their sympathy and compassion.
But I can’t keep it all locked up or I will be consumed from within.
And so I write.
When the pain is too much.
When nothing seems to help.
When no one understands.
I write.
And in writing, my pain is transformed into something beautiful.
A strange alchemy that refines and strengthens me.
