Writing Trouble

We sometimes remember traumatic events with an unusual intensity, and when we write about those memories, we reenter a state of hyperarousal. We can use the intensity of the memory to create sensory details that allow the reader to connect to a story. And for ourselves, the memory’s intensity will allow us to write an account that does it justice.

“All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that crevasse between space and time that stays fixed in the imagination.  I remember it all because I remember it all.”               –Gail Caldwell, in Let’s Take the Long Way Home

“One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala…When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience.  The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last.” –David Eagleman, neuroscientist, quoted in The New Yorker (“The Possibilian,” April 25, 2011)

Slow motion and out-of-body

During a trauma, “Perceptions may be numbed or distorted, with partial anesthesia or the loss of particular sensations.  Time sense may be altered, often with a sense of slow motion, and the experience may lose its quality of ordinary reality.  The person may feel as though the event is not happening to her, as though she is observing from outside her body, or as though the whole experience is a bad dream from which she will shortly awaken.”         –Judith Herman

“’Have you ever had a moment where everything in your life just stopped?’ This was the way that this question was raised by Kris Jenkins, a three-hundred-and-sixty-pound Jets defensive tackle, after he tore, six plays into his tenth NFL season, both his meniscus and his anterior cruciate ligament. ‘So fast, but in slow motion? Like all your senses shut down? Like you’re watching yourself?’”       –Joan Didion, in Blue Nights

The difficulty & the gift: re-inhabiting the experience.

It is difficult to re-inhabit traumatic experience. There is the risk of being traumatized all over again, because when you really get deep into it, you’re there.  Right back there on your island, while the rest of the world goes about its business. Be aware of that. In service of writing an immersive description, you partly re-experience what happened.

Jessica Handler has written an excellent guidebook for taking care of yourself while writing about traumatic experience, Braving the Fire. The book includes her own experiences, as well as interviews with writers, doctors, and therapists.

The gift is that you remember.  Write a description from that time that uses as many senses as you can summon. Make whole images. Fall into the sound of the words, letting sound pull you along. Write everything that you saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted.

The second gift is that you may see yourself as if from outside yourself, giving you the ability to construct a narrator character with unusual objectivity.  What do you see?  Who is that person? How does he or she appear?  The narrator is a character who must be created and developed just like any other character in nonfiction; whereas we usually have to fight hard to get enough detachment to see ourselves, the experience of crisis may allow us to.

And maybe your experience of trouble could be constructed as a fiction, or a poem, with the freedoms that those forms encourage.