How I’m Learning to Trust the Writing Process

These days, I’m working on essays for my memoir collection. Every essay has its hard moments, but the one I’m writing now has me particularly stuck. Rather than give up, I’m learning to trust the stickiness as part of the process of becoming a better writer. Only when the fast, easy writing stops do I know something wonderful is about to emerge.

The essay I’m writing now focuses on an experience that lives in my chest as a heavy, gray blob of emotions. The event happened thirty years ago, but its persistent presence in my body tells me I must write about it. As I write my way through the weighted gray mass, I face a conflict between my head and my heart. With my head, I can describe this event that happened thirty years ago and call it a day. I don’t have to make sense of my emotions or what it all meant to me. I simply tell my story and move on.

Writing from my heart is harder. It requires making sense of a story I’ve never told anyone because I’ve never trusted myself enough to tell it. Doing so means I must allow myself to feel emotions I’ve cordoned off for a very long time. There’s the story I’ve told myself all these years, and then there’s the real story that lives in my heart. I want to tell the real story, but I don’t know how.

Writing into a more authentic truth

As I write, I thank the universe for leading me to Melissa Febos‘ book Body Work. In the book, she describes the story we’ve told ourselves as “a kind of imaginative prophylactic…of narrative threads that were previously sewn into [us] by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity.” This armor of a story I’ve built around my experience tries to fit me into a box of how a girl in my position should have acted and felt. While that narrative has served me well as a shorthand for understanding my experience, it reduces my complicated lived experience to a trope that doesn’t quite fit the story that lives in my heart.

After I wrote about what happened that day, I realized that the version I’d written simplified everything to a convenient trope. It would have been easier just to leave it alone, but Body Work inspired me. Febos writes that we “just have to punch through that false wall.” This advice helped me reframe the task of rewriting. When I come to the end of my carefully constructed narrative, I turn to the intriguing project of peeling back the layers until I reach the story’s essence. By pushing on, I trust that I’ll write my way into a more authentic truth.

But how does one go about such a task? How do I find the parts have I hidden from myself? What must I expose to fully understand the lived experience that has embedded itself in my chest? I could let my brain ruminate until I reasoned my way into good-enough answers. While this strategy has served me well for years, it also masks deeper truths begging to be revealed.

Rather than reason my way through, I’ve decided to trust my body and the creative energies of the universe for answers. Febos explains that writing a memoir requires accessing “many of the memories and experiences that we did not have access to during the events that we describe.” As a thirteen-year old girl, I could articulate neither my emotions nor the reasons behind my actions. As a forty-three year old woman, I have more experience to draw upon in telling my story.

Still, I return to the question of how. How do I make sense of my past in light of my present self? “In order to write a memoir worth reading,” Febos writes, “I had to recover all my disgust, arousal, humiliation, and fear during those years as a pro-domme.” Writing my authentic story means letting myself feel the emotions I dismissed at the time as illegitimate and unworthy of my attention.

Breakthrough

Yesterday, instead of letting my brain take control, I started by listening to my body. I recorded my own meditation (a suggestion by author Octavia Raheem) to guide myself toward listening for answers to questions specific to my essay. I closed my eyes and focused on inhales and exhales until my body relaxed. After a few minutes of simply being, I asked myself one soft question at a time. Responses came as ebbs and flows of tension and emotions. Through all of the questions, I sat still and listened. When my brain tried to take control, I thanked it for trying to protect my by resolving the uncertainty, and then I dropped back into my body.

After my session, I wrote pages and pages of insights in my journal. When I began spiraling into one insight as The Answer, I stopped, breathed, and continued with my felt experience. I tried to let the uncertainty be there without need for resolution.

Eventually, I stopped writing. Trusting the process means leaving things messy and unsettled for a while, so I closed my journal when it felt like enough. As I did so, I thought of soup. All those ingredients I’d just dropped into the pot needed time to simmer. Unless I want a bland soup full of disparate tastes, I can’t force my work. Instead, I’ll wait for the flavors to blend into a work of surprising depth, insight, and clarity.

The sense of ease with which I set my journal down felt unnatural. I’m so used to my brain spinning in problem-solving mode that I didn’t know what to make of its eerie silence. Then, with a grin, I realized that I felt completely safe leaving my unsolved problem there on the couch. In this moment, I knew that I’d just learned how to trust the process of breaking through the simplified story so that eventually I can tell the real story that’s been embedded in my body for the past thirty years.