Writing Trouble

In the midst of or after trauma, life may feel as if it’s broken in two, a before and an after. Or we may remember it in fragments that float into our minds. Some of the fragments seem unimportant, or unconnected to anything. There may be flashes of disturbing images that we see again and again, or we may hear something a person said, or a sound.

In fact this experience of fragmentation may be truer to actual life than we realize. Maybe life actually surrounds us with data, and we’re always instinctively turning it into art, or story.

“Life, man.  Life.  It’s so crazy.  If it were a movie you would not believe it.  Why?  Because it has no plot.”                 –David Mamet

“When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.”        –T.S. Eliot

Usually, it turns out, we walk around with whole stories of ourselves in our minds, subconscious or conscious. But difficulty messes up our stories. Life doesn’t make sense anymore. Life may feel meaningless. What’s the point of anything? We may be disoriented. How did I get here?

Crisis disrupts the “continuously rewritten autobiography we all carry with us in our minds.” –Charles L. Mee, in A Nearly Normal Life

“For a trauma is a rupture, a break (literally ‘wound’), whether brought on by a single experience or…the infliction of a repeated injury that cannot be integrated; the normal continuum of growth is violated.”   –Sven Birkerts, “Trauma and Memory,” in The Art of Time in Memoir

“Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.  Traumatic memories…are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story.”  –Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman’s insight is that usually our memories get tucked into the ongoing life story that we’re always telling ourselves. But now, in a difficult time, we feel overwhelmed. We’ve lost control, and we’re unable to make this new material fit in to our story.

The difficulty & the gift: fragments.

You may not be able to see the story whole, but memories may come in flashes. Write them that way—in flashes, in fragments, in pieces.  Trust that you have remembered those pieces for a reason.

Write about something—no matter how small, partial, or seemingly insignificant—that has stayed in your mind from a difficult time.

Respect the form of what you have written. Is it a list, or litany? Is it a poem? Is it a prose piece in fragments? Is it a piece of flash nonfiction? Maybe the form connects organically to the content.  Maybe later the fragments will be knit into a narrative.  Maybe not. Let them be for now.