Bill W. was an incurable alcoholic, until he got better. With another drunk, Dr. Bob, Bill W. would indeed overcome alcoholism and go on to found Alcoholics Anonymous. In their recovery bible, The Big Book, Bill writes, “The dark past is the greatest possession you have – the key to life and happiness for others. With it you can avert death and misery for them.” Bill W. and Dr. Bob made an astonishing discovery as they rebuilt their lives: by helping others get sober, they could maintain their own vitality. I want to follow their lead and help suffering people find peace and meaning the way I did: by writing.
Writing was my earliest form of therapy. I still have a scrap of scribble-covered paper from kindergarten that reads, “im sad and i want my gram and i dont like peepl.” I knew, even then, that there were feelings inside me that could be dangerous if left to smolder. My mind was a pressure cooker and language was its safety valve. When I moved away from my beloved grandmother, writing helped me feel connected. When my parents’ marriage exploded like an atom bomb, writing was my bunker. When I fell down the rabbit hole of anorexia, writing helped me stumble my way back into life. It wasn’t the act of writing itself that was my salvation; it was the distilled, uncensored, primal honesty of it. I took my suffering, held it in my hand, turned it over and examined it closely, then gave it to the page. I want to help others do the same.
One of my literary heroines is Anne Frank. In her Diary of a Young Girl, which she penned while hiding from the Nazis, she observed, “The nicest part is being able to write down all my feelings; otherwise, I might suffocate.” That simple remark gave me an idea: What if I can share the gift of writing with people who are suffocating? What if I can help them find their voices, help them breathe again? People in pain have often been told to buck up, look on the bright side, or don’t say anything if you have nothing nice to say. Eventually many did just that; they shut up, not only outwardly but inwardly as well. They sought some substitute outlet for their agony, in bottles and needles and pills and food. Those things didn’t work, because they didn’t allow the afflicted to do what they most desperately needed to do: tell the truth.
I want to give people permission to tell their stories of longing and heartache and fear and rage. I want to develop a workshop in which people struggling with all manners of addictions or illnesses can still their minds, observe their thoughts and emotions, and write until their hurt subsides. By partnering with counselors, social workers, and clergy, I will put in place a framework of clinical support for people as they navigate their past and current trauma.
Each session of the workshop will begin with a meditation exercise in order to quiet the mind. I will then present a thought or question as a prompt. One prompt might be, “Think of yourself at six years old. Where is home? What does it look, smell, and sound like? Who shares it with you? How does it feel to be there?” After the writing is complete, participants will be invited to share their writing, describe what came up for them during the process, and offer one another encouragement and solidarity. Each session will delve a little deeper, poke a little harder than the one before it. It’s not meant to be easy. Nothing worth doing ever is.
My own road to recovery was an excruciating one full of missteps and regressions and hopelessness. I believed for a long time that I was simply too fractured to ever piece myself back together. But I kept writing. I kept telling the truth, even if some days it was only a few words. “Got up today. It hurt.” I wrote until I eventually came alive again, resuscitated by my own honesty. Like Bill W. and Dr. Bob, I understand the gift I’ve been given and my responsibility to share it with people who still suffer. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of this reciprocity, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” How beautiful indeed that by holding a hand out to lift another we can keep upright ourselves.
