Writing is...
telling the stories that gather in our hearts, bodies, and souls...
I struggled with what to write about this week. Ideas floated by me - flotsam and jetsam of inspiration that turned to sea foam just as I reached out to them. I knew that opening up Pandora’s Box of writing those weeks ago would allow themes to resurface that I haven’t touched in too long. Unwritten pieces permanently saved in the drafts folder of my psyche would claw themselves out of the depths, begging to be expounded upon, aired out, and shared. Past webs of struggle, not yet fully unwound, would cloud my eyes, dance through my mind, and vibrate through my fingers - until that moment where I could, actually, put unfurl them into words.
Our stories live in our bodies and periodically emerge for us to look at: in our dreams, in our ideas, in our aches and pains. That night we dream about people we haven’t seen or thought of in decades, and we wonder - why did we let them speak to us that way? The dream zooms into the scene from all angles, allowing us to replay, reset, and say what we wished we had said. That idea we had for a children’s story on how to help other children live through what we did, what we are still unraveling. That tightness we hold in our back and neck -only on the left side - from holding babies who screamed for comfort over thousands of nights. That space within us that pulsates with permanent echoes of pain, where we store all the stories that we are too afraid to tell the people we share our lives with.
I don’t remember exactly when I stopped writing - before starting this up again - but I suspect it had something to do with the soul that never was. The wells of words that lived within me, sloshing their way out through my fingers, suddenly felt too trite. No letter, no word, no syllable would be strong enough to quell depths of alone-ness that bled from me. Running logs, that I’d meticulously kept for the previous 5 years, slipped from my night table to the floor, then to the back of the closet. Journals where I jotted down inspiration, ideas for lessons, and dreams gathered dust under the bed.
Then the aches began.
First, in my fingers - a relentless hum of discomfort that wound its way around my nail beds, eking its way down towards my knuckles. As we do, I found a thousand and one excuses - hormones, heat, long covid, gluten - whatever - anything but the welling up of words that I refused to hear. My joints began to ache in echoes of pain I hadn’t held in my body since the time my bones, actually, were too weak to hold me. Items fell from my hands - a phone, folders, my child’s hand. As I taught children to find and settle their heartbeats in their palms, mine thundered through my hands, then my wrists, then the tightness wound its way up, in, through. Imagine sitting in conversation with voices screaming at you from within. Imagine - your entire past - every cut, every pain, every misstep, every lesson - crawling up through your body, begging for a voice.
I used to write a lot about living with invisible illness - I would talk about it - on stages, podcasts, at high school assemblies across the country, and panels for emerging social workers and psychologists at their universities. The words would flow from me with the urgency of warning flare: watch out! danger is over here!
I would take the reactions home with me, folding them into the dough I’d eventually bake out of the story.
“I wouldn’t know how to help you…” a curly-haired graduate student spit into the mic at one such panel - to a room of a thousand of her peers. I think about her often, and wonder if hearing my story dissuaded her from pursuing the path - or maybe she went deeper, finding the missing pieces in herself. I wonder if she is out there, somewhere, trying to help others, and secretly grateful their stories aren’t hers.
“How did you get through it? How did you heal? Is there hope for me?”
I remember all the eyes - the girls at the high schools whose stomachs thundered at them with hunger hardly satiated by the apple they’d spent the last hour eating. Those who waited furtively by the edge of the auditorium, who whispered, me too, who begged to know whether there was another side, a way through. I think about them too - I wonder if they found their way. I told them that the first step is to tell yourself the truth, maybe to write it down. Most importantly, I thanked them for sharing, for their very brave act of raising a hand to be seen.
I wrote about my inner hell for many years before I ever uttered a word about it. I filled dozens - over a hundred - journals with an endless quest for healing. Wonderings, curiosities, and pleadings zig zagging across margins, etching their way towards some sort of understanding.
"Healing scares me more than anything - it is where I have to face myself - to stare- at my own reflection and say - "I see you. You are good." even when I am not feeling good."
I wrote one January, hoping that this would be the year that I could, indeed, look in a mirror and see beyond my scars.
"Does it count as relapse if it only happened one time?"
I wrote in May of the same year - the question living alone on a page, as if still waiting for someone to answer it,
"Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle. Even a small light can brighten a dark room."
I tentatively advised myself in a July, where more than anything, I wished to lie alone in the darkness - to lie in it forever.
Yet, I still refused to believe that the pain in my hands belonged to emotions unfelt, and words unwritten. I barreled through days, pursuing the goal of creating healing for others, as the boulders in my joints multiplied, and weighed down my body. Time passed packing and unpacking rooms, putting up my diplomas and taking them down, tacking images and words up on a vision board - none of which spoke to the true desire within.
I want to feel whole.
The older we get, the more we are fragmented - pieces of us left behind in all of our stories, our jobs, our relationships, our children. We walk around as incomplete sets, because parts of us are forever in the places we have been, and the people we have impacted. If we spend our lives trying to gather up all those pieces, to reclaim what was lost, to reattach what as cut away, then we dishonor the people we were at those times. Who we were in the depths of pain, illness, sadness are as valid, as important as who we are in the throes of joy, success, and inspiration.
We are fragmented, but we can feel whole. When we come to terms with this, when we are able to hold the space where the piece once fit, and not beg for it to be filled - we can see the whole image of our life, and honor it. A puzzle can still be whole, even with missing pieces, if we know how to fill the holes with our creation, our imagination, our living. A heart still beats, even when it has been broken.
Some of us come to this later than others, and some of us not at all. We know the people who live with regrets so poignant they etch craters in their bodies. We know it when we are those people. We know it when - even in the midst of success - we linger in our failures. We know it when - even int the midst of healing - we still think - it could happen at any time. What we forget is - this is true for everything. If anything, modern life teaches us that things can change in measurements of time quicker than the blink of an eye. A microsecond, a nanosecond, the time it takes for an atom to split. One moment we are, and the next we are not. One night it’s a holiday, and the next morning - a massacre.
When pain burst through the seams of monotony and seeped deeply into the fabric of family, school, and community - the words became too big to hold. I found notebooks with blank pages, sticky note pads at the bottom of my bag, a loose napkin and started again. At first a few words here and there - tentative, shaky. Then, longer pieces, a letter to my unborn child promising protection and love. Long, meandering rambles strolled through thoughts about what home is, where we might be truly safe, and the insufferable feelings of helplessness in a time of great suffering made worse by global gaslighting. In corners of papers, I even dared to explore the memories of that young Jewish girl who knew what it meant to be a target. Those pieces motivated action - even if small, but still lay crumpled under the bed, in the cupboard, and tucked away in folders.
The inspiration to share writing publicly again - whether it is good or not, whether I feel its impact or not, whether people read it or not - came from an unlikely place. An internal newsletter at work that had, arguably, nothing to do with me - that a colleague decided I should be getting (hi). That act of sharing, that message of I want you to hear my words, was another thread of community. These weekly musings, lessons, and shared thoughts sparked a little bit of bravery - let’s try again.
All of our voices matter, especially now. Sharing from ourselves may have no impact at all, but it may inspire others to share too. We come together when we tell stories. Stories of love, loss, fear, and sons at war trickle their way across generations. We weave our words together to create the tapestry of us - the Jewish family, community, humanity. Lend your voice to the collected story - tell your woes, your hopes, your dreams, your jokes. Let your aches and pains tell their tales, and let those longings out into teachings. Let your hope collect and bubble upwards, imbuing our people with the strength to continue on.
I didn’t know what to write about this week - a little bit of nostalgia, a lot of thinking about children, Jewishness, loss and hope. I still don’t really know if the piece came together - you can let me know. Yet, I will hit continue, I will set it to publish, and I will go on, and next week - I will do it again. You will react, perhaps respond - and maybe you’ll think about the stories contained within you that you need to tell - and maybe you’ll send a couple my way, so that I can say, “thank you for sharing…”