H is for Healing

Long Term Benefits

How has writing a memoir helped me heal? First, I’ve been able to turn my former self into a protagonist in a story, a flawed but hopefully likable character. I can empathize with her. I can slap my forehead and say Doh! Why is she doing this? This is a bad decision.

But I know the story has a happy ending, and these are necessary mistakes for her. She gets insight as she goes along, but not as much as I, the narrator, as the emotions settle. The narrator sees a fuller, broader picture. Insight is an iterative process, reseeing past events from a larger and larger perspective.

The Act of Writing Transforms

Second, the experience of putting shame down on paper transforms it. I write about others in the same circumstance, and I understand and forgive them. That allows me to extend forgiveness to myself. I can see that it wasn’t greed that motivated me, rather it was my inability to say no.

In the context of micro-transformation, I’m just as reluctant to write about my injured right toe as I was to write about my cancer. Why is that? I’ll wait and write about that once I know how the story ends. Right now, I don’t know if there will be a crisis or not. Will the nail fall off or will it continue to grow in its graceful and gruesome way?

The Right Timing

It’s hard to write about a process that is still in the midst of transformation. It’s like trying to write about the stage between a caterpillar and a butterfly when the insect is just a mass of shapeless goo. I had a moment of clarity this morning as I made my coffee.

With an unfocused gaze out the window, I listened to the subtleties of sound as the water poured out of the coffeemaker. The moment of clarity came, and it went. But I sat down to my morning pages and began writing.