Writing your way to hope

I am not sure people completely believe me when I say that creative writing (along with its twin, the reading of other people's creative writing) has saved my life on more than one occasion. Certainly it has been the thing to sustain me during some incredibly bleak times, to help me metabolize tough experiences and feel both my individuality and my humanity, my connection to others. Yet, I never really understood or articulated the reasons and ways it can do both of those things-- can be both a healing art and a connecting art-- until I came across some words by other people recently which helped me to fill in the blanks.

Michael Henry wrote, "Those who've endured difficult circumstances often feel that their world is hopelessly fractured, yet by writing-- stories, poems, memoirs-- they find a way to regain control over their experiences. Writing helps reconnect the shards, and the writer reaches a deeper understanding of self and the world around them."

This quote struck a chord with me as I reflected on difficult experiences that I once felt unable to recover from or "get over".  Various strategies and supports were of some assistance, but none so much as penning the deep truths of what I had experienced, either straightforwardly in journal entries of poetry, or dressed up as story. It was this writing process through which I came to feel that my memories belonged to me rather than that they were controlling me, so they could begin to take their rightful place in my past.

But while I have known for years that writing has enormous value to me personally, I saw it as primarily a private affair, something between me and a notebook and pen or me and a book full of another writer's words. It has only been recently, as I have spent time with women writers who were also using their writing not just as an artistic pursuit, but as a way of processing and communicating the challenges and complexities in their own lives, that I came to a new conclusion. I need the writing and the reading, yes. But I also need to interact with other writers who are working at this in a similarly personal, transformative way. I need to hear their stories, and I need them to hear mine.

Addiction recovery expert Bill White refers to relationships like these as "hope-engendering". He says that these kinds of relationships offer a kind of "kindling", as he put it, for hope.

In writing alone, as well as writing and reading in the company of people who value and practice writing as a type of self-care, a healing art as much as a creative art, I find hope. Sometimes, hope finds me. In community with writers like me, hope is contagious. I want both to catch it and to spread it around.