Healing Through Writing: Unburden and Move On

Writing as a way to heal, unburden ourselves, and move on is at the heart of why we write. The pain and injury we’ve endured, whether from a horribly critical or abusive family member or a total stranger—we make our stand and say what we have to say. Sometimes, we pull out a notebook or grab a napkin if that’s all we have and write it down before the thoughts evaporate. It becomes prose, or poetry, or even a novel, or just a simple narrative, a few words strung together. Enough is enough. After this unburdening, we are free to set boundaries with either the person or the event and move on.

The same goes for situations that impact our lives. The writer has a voice at her disposal. And so it is that I wrote a while back about the impact of the farm right up the road from me being developed for hundreds of houses and a massive swim complex. As Joni Mitchell wrote: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot…and put all the trees in a tree museum and charged a dollar just to see them.”

These farm fields, now sprouting with row after row of young corn, will soon be covered in asphalt if we allow it. This is still a proposal, not a finality. Fields to asphalt pose an explicit and implicit danger to our lives. We lose the land, we lose ourselves, our way of life, and our peace of mind.

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This July 4th, a deadly storm raged through our area at night, darkening the sky and bringing high winds. The large black walnut trees in my backyard swayed, their branches bending in a frenzied dance. That night, a large limb came down, but luckily it landed in the center of my backyard. Yesterday, my son, Daniel, came over…he broke it up, sawed it apart, and disposed of it for me. His strength and his support of me make me a lucky woman, one who lives alone, widowed now for thirty-two years, but with not just one, but two strong sons, the other being Alex, who lives close to me, too, and cooked a delicious barbecue dinner earlier in the holiday weekend.

My house is paid off and offers privacy, yet that privacy is threatened by the specter of unreasonable development up the street. Traffic is already a nightmare in this fast-growing county, once mostly farms and open spaces, but now overrun with townhouses priced from $700,000 and up. Storms have intensified, bringing more flooding and downed trees.

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But others aren’t so lucky to have a home to call their own. In Brian Goldstone’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America, journalism takes center stage as he unflinchingly uses narrative reporting to offer us an up-close and personal lens into the lives of the working poor, African American women and men who have no safety nets. They live in motels, roach-infested low-income apartments, and even sleep in their cars, using gas stations as washrooms before going to dead-end low-wage jobs.

The ideals of friendship, family, community, and reasonable reforms in government, as we face climate change, homelessness, or whatever concerns us, come down to expression and sharing that with a voice that is both true and unflinching.

Writing is a way of healing, and it also offers us that moment to be touched by the beauty around us. The sun on our faces, the darkness serving as an ultimate backdrop to the magic of lightning bugs on a warm July night. A million and one flowers in bloom across the landscape.

While we chronicle the beauty, we also chronicle the pain, the ugliness, the destruction that forms in the path of greed. Yet with turbulence comes hope. With chaos comes calm.

This is why I love writing. The unburdening, the voice, the peace that it brings, speaking that there is no right way how we word it, just that we put it in words. Our Women’s Writing Circle prompt for July begins: “Something I am choosing to let go of this morning…“

What are you choosing to let go of, and do you have the courage to write it?