Your Write to Recovery
The best way to recovery isn't always to tell someone. It's to write to yourself.
What’s done is done.
You move on, wanting nothing to do with what once transpired.
The mind boxes the memories away, pushing them deep into the back of your mental closet.
Over time more boxes are slid into storage, blocking access to the past. To the trauma. The box gathers dust, its walls bulge under the pressure of other stacked memories. And yet it’s always there. It remains. Waiting for you to recall a happier experience, only to stumble upon the past you never wanted to remember.
The past you hastily tossed aside.
Because reliving the past means reliving the pan. And nobody wants that.
But the only way to truly move on is to uncover everything that has been buried away.
Boxing It Away
My life hit a rough patch at the tail end of 2009 into most of 2010.
My father went from healthy to dead over the course of a week. Within six months I discovered my wife had been cheating on me, and to close out 2010, my grandmother died, her funeral landing squarely on my birthday (a funeral I missed because the battery in my car ceased functioning and the folks at Sears Automotive decided to take eight hours replacing it).
I had little time to process anything. Like a pinata, by the time I twisted around from the previous life blow another crack of the bat came crashing down, until eventually I fell to the earth, split open, onlookers rushing to gobble up whatever spilled out.
Death, whether it be the physical loss of the human body or the emotional loss of a failed relationship, takes time to even begin processing. To begin fully grieving and unraveling what took place. To sift through the rubble and find those little momentums you’d like to keep while uncovering what ultimately caused the failure.
Timing didn’t allow me to do that. So, I boxed it up and pushed it away.
I didn’t begin thinking, digging, analyzing, what happened between 2009 and 2010 until nearly a decade later when I started writing about it.
Peeling Back the Layers
I’m not sure what nudged me into doing it, but I decided to write about discoveries made after divorce. It had been long enough that I decided to crack that coconut open and pour out what I could. I discussed feeling lost, how sex with someone else felt strange, how the love for someone doesn’t just suddenly disappear. A bathtub doesn’t drain instantly. Nor does love.
More people read that story in a single day than everything else I’d written the previous year.
Originally I had no plans on returning to the subject of divorce, but after connecting with so many others I decided to push deeper. Dig deeper. Reach for the box of memories I’d long since hidden.
I exfoliated away the top layer of memory to uncover thoughts and feelings I hadn’t realized existed. It provided new insights, not only to readers but to myself. We were learning together in real-time.
Every new story pulled back the curtain further. Gave me a different angle to view from. Provided new information. Of course, all of this already existed within my head, I simply hadn’t allowed myself to spend time with it.
I went from fully blaming my ex-wife for the entire collapse to identifying my own flaws to discovering how my actions led to her reactions. I don’t know if I’d call the writing therapeutic, but more enlightening.
Every item, every memory I pulled from the box brought discovery. Understanding. Sometimes it hurt. Often it ripped open new wounds. But sometimes it’s necessary to rebreak a bone for it to heal properly.
There are times you must do the same to your heart.
Without writing, my ability to heal would have remained in that closed-off box, shoved in the back corner of my memory.
Write Your Recovery
Every new discovery of myself, every removal of defensive clothing, left me more exposed to the reader. Far more than any naked portrait I could ever take of myself. These stories were the raw inner truths of my very being. Of my mind. A completely unedited offering of what made me me. No flattering lighting. No filters or tweaking. Just me. I owed it to the readers as much as myself.
And yet, the further I dug, the less I minded. Eventually, you’re so exposed there’s no point in holding back any further.
But that’s me. That doesn’t need to be you.
Not everyone is that open, or at least ready to be that open. It doesn’t mean you can’t use writing to help with your recovery.
Maybe you want to publish and put yourself out there. To hold yourself accountable or to feel the price of ripping away your protective barrier. There are many out there who will lift you up. But there are also those who will rip you down. And yet, maybe you don’t want others to know those things about you. It’s a private matter, and you’d like to keep it private.
There’s no right or wrong way.
You don’t always need to write for others. But you do need to write for yourself.
You can write about that top layer of your experience. Of that trauma that’s buried inside your own closet. Let it out. Let your thoughts and fingers become one as if bypassing the rest of your body.
Then do it again a few days later.
And again.
And again.
Write about different aspects of that trauma. Different points of view. Different moments in time. For a smooth finish, you must sand every angle more than once. You must change the grit to expose the true beauty of the wood that is yourself.
It’s not easy. Going back through times of your life that hurt. And not just in the initial memory of the moment. It can hurt in ways you never believed possible. You might realize, as I did, some fault rests on your own shoulders. You might realize others could have helped but instead stood aside. You might realize you misread an emotion or you mistook a reaction.
There are movies I watch, and yet on the tenth viewing, I notice something new. Different. Something that enhances the story and draws out deeper emotion. There are music tracks I’ve spent my entire life with, and yet I will still uncover new chords, beats, and instruments, buried in the mix that, once discovered, can no longer be unheard.
The same is true with those moments in time, once boxed up and buried away. Writing about those moments will do exactly that. You’ll notice things, see things, and experience things, in entirely new ways. You’ll make those new discoveries and possibly answer decades-old questions.
And with it, you’ll begin to heal.
Because wounds, like memories, can’t heal when pushed aside and forgotten. They need air, attention, and yes, they need time.
So write to recover. It doesn’t have to be for the benefit of any reader out there, but instead just for you.