Have You Ever Broken Yourself with Your Own Writing?

I have been sorting through my writing archives lately. Perhaps it is due to the distance I feel from my family, perhaps it is curiosity about how my mind worked 12 years or so ago. The process has been interesting. Absolutely rewarding. But today I stumbled over a few pieces that reminded me what has been lost.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

One poem chronicles the death of my grandfather. In it, I say,

When Jido died
I wrote a letter to the family.

I clipped my nails
and saved the scattered white arcs.

I stared at a wall through spread fingers.

I washed the dishes in the sink.

I lay in my bedroom, crying

The emotion I felt as I re-read those lines rolled back over me. Again, I cried. As I cried, I thought about how I would reorganize those lines, make the poem stronger, and how that process would be a release. I have always written through trauma. I wrote poetry as a child, fiction as a young adult and nonfiction once I became a parent. I have been putting together a chapbook of poetry about Lebanon and my time there. This piece, I think, may cap that collection. It will be a relief to refine it, but it will also hurt.

I set the poem aside and kept sifting. I opened a short story and began to skim. In it, I use many true elements of my family's life to create the backstory of a character. The combination of circumstances that create his backstory could be someone else's true story, but what the story actually is, is an anchor for a short story collection.

I went to Indiana University for my MFA in Creative Writing. My subject was Fiction. My thesis was a short story cycle based on my family's experiences in the U.S. and Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War and resulting Lebanese American diaspora. Much of the collection holds truth, but only one or two stories follow and tell relate true events as they happened.

I've been considering editing this collection, but it is painful. It is essentially a memoir; the raw wanderings of a very broken-hearted young woman through her family's hurt in order to heal.

I didn't heal.

Moving back into the stories, refining them, that is where the healing will take place. This frightens me. I know I will break over and over in this writing. However, I have learned that what scares me is what I need to be doing. It's time to buy printer paper and ink. It's time to weed the garden I started with words.

Has this happened to you? Have you created a shore and broken upon it over and over?

It is okay to break. If my words are a shore, I am a wave. I will keep moving over them until they sparkle miles of sand in sunlight. Until they are secret home for the footprints of the night wanderer. I am ready to break, heal and grow stronger.

Have You Ever Broken Yourself with Your Own Writing?

Has this happened to you? Have you created a shore and broken upon it over and over?

Recent Posts