I haven’t written for my blog in a long time because I haven’t had the spirit to write; I’ve been exhausted, sick and depressed most of the time over the winter. The weight of the trauma and PTSD crushed my writing spirit entirely.
So, I’m going to jump start my writing spirit not by trying to force myself to finish all my research articles (which is too overwhelming at the moment), but by doing writing practice. And I’m going to do this using the book Writing Ourselves Whole by Jen Cross.
The first writing practice prompt in the book is, “What I want my words to do…” (Page 10). For this article, I’m going to post the results of following this writing prompt for 5 days. In a future article, I’ll review the book (it’s really great!).
My own working definition of writing practice is the following (it may change slightly as I read the book and keep practicing):
Writing regularly as a daily routine, 10 minutes or more a day. Taking an inner stance of being open to self and universe. Allowing uncensored, stream of consciousness, free writing, either with a writing prompt or just writing what spontaneously arises in the moment. It’s fine to let myself keep writing over and over about the same topic or idea, trying to tease out the heart of the matter and exploring all the words and how each word sounds and feels, making the words my own. It’s also fine to just see whatever flows through and jump into the next and the next and the next thing. Patiently noticing the different thoughts that come up and writing down anything at all that comes into my mind. I may experiment with adding body awareness, writing whatever is happening inside my body, as well. I will come up with my own writing prompts and also seek them out. My overall sense of writing practice is that it’s supposed to be messy.
Just to clarify, I think writing practice is one part of many strategies and resources for healing from trauma that work best together, such as therapy, self-therapy exercises, nature, medication, nutrition, music, talking with friends, community healing events, meditation, yoga, social services etc.
Following are the first things I wrote while doing my writing practice (some of them are minimally edited for clarity):
What I Want My Words To Do
Writing Practice, Day 1
I want my words
to be buoys in stormy waters
their ropes tethered
to a somewhere lost but familiar.
I want my words
to link things that are fragmented,
spiders casting nets into the ether
reaching across hollow voids
of incredible brokenness
with whispy threads of tenderness.
I want my words
to organize my life and mind,
to find places for things,
to make sense of things,
to create assignments and classrooms and graduations for things.
I want my words
to be a path to my truth,
a path underwater to the sun.
I want my words
to be a place for sorrow to leave me,
an opening for the flood of tears to trickle through,
composting grief into rich wet soil for planting the as yet unknown.
I want my words
to connect myself with my past
in ways that don’t destroy me but instead create me.
I want my words
to connect me with the world again,
utterances unheard, never heard, and then, heard?
I want my words
to witness me,
to pray for me,
to forge solutions,
to create the long road to forgiveness.
I want my words
to open up the hungry places,
to imagine better things,
to sift,
to sew,
to discover,
to find the means to understand the rightness within my past actions.
Day 2
I want my words
to find things
that are as clear as the
trickling, sparkling stream
in the woods behind her house,
coursing through all the brown leaves
like heaven.
I want my words
to resurrect dreams,
wishes, longings,
to whisper around, underneath
the bed, underneath the
heavy weights of oppression, repression,
drudgery, silence, giving in and giving up.
I want my words
to carefully liberate.
I want my words
to reveal pathways out
and pathways in,
pathways together
and pathways apart,
to give a shape to the despair
that wails on in the night,
that wails on, wordless.
I want my words
to make amends, restitution, burning
off of the faces of old hopes now
dead, or mostly dead, or still alive and
harassing these moments now
until these moments die, disintegrate, decay,
the constant destruction
of the present.
Sometimes, I want my words to
sponsor the slow
restoration of present time.
I want my words
to make new roads
into the past,
to find the rivers of home,
to see
the way they glint in the sun,
to see
the way they always have.
Day 3
I want my words
to get me out of here,
to lead me out,
breadcrumbs
thrown into the future.
I want my words
to pierce and drain the wounds
that are unbearable,
that are not bearable
anymore.
I want my words
to define the edges of the wounds
so they stop spilling over
everywhere.
I want my words
to be the threads sewn along the sides in neat stitches
defining the end of the bleeding
and the beginning of the new skin.
I want my words
to ride the blood river
in my center,
the hole where I was
before,
small boats
in this vast pain:
Why?
Why is it broken?
Where am I?
Where do I go?
Day 4
I want my words
to walk through this despair
boldly, slowly, charting territory,
turning up the earth,
holding all the handfuls
of sorrow, bringing them
into some light if only a soft
shining down.
I want my words
to gather up the tears,
to play with them on the shores of mud pools
and oceans and wide expanses of reeds,
the uncried tears.
I want my words
to find the things that live
under the out-of-sight place,
the things that cry
tiny silver fish
and
that hide them,
that hide them because they are
so small.
Day 5
I want my words to
remove the repetitive
obsessions from my head
and give them a lush green garden
to live in forever.
I want my words to
scaffold my courage,
build it up brick by brick,
make it taller,
make it count,
make it real.
I want my words to
allow me to
fall apart.
I want my words to
bring grace
into my memories.
I want my
words
to worship
newness.
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Heidi Hanson is an artist and writer in Asheville, North Carolina currently working on an illustrated book chronicling her journey healing from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
One Response
I read unread ok have read your writing about your words, prose poems with a depth of feeling running throughout. Very moving. Becomes rhythmic with repeated readings. Alive with different forms of water, both welcome and unwelcome.” Breadcrumbs thrown into the future“ indeed.