Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing

Introduction

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introduction More than other kinds of writing, confessional writing can broaden the vernacular of human understanding. Readers are moved by the liberation that touches the lives of those people who have endured painful experiences and then had the courage to revisit these experiences. These are not only the voices of suffering, but they are also voices of resistance, reconciliation , and healing. A personal chronicle of survival in writing often mirrors historical chronicles of survival in war or political oppression. In both cases, the survivor is the one who refuses to go away, but is the irrepressible presence who is compelled to witness and tell the story of martyrdom and shame, guilt, and sometimes forgiveness. Although a common response to personal trauma is to banish it from consciousness, certain violations of the social contract, as Judith Herman shows in Trauma and Recovery, simply refuse to be buried. Yet still other occurrences are found in which personal writing is not only testimonial, but also redemptive, as is true for the writer who is contending with a life-threatening illness, chronic depression, or grief over the loss of a loved one. Writing about painful experiences can sustain a life. Even if a personal story only selectively captures what a life has been about, it will never diminish the worth of human striving and feeling. As Caren Buffum, a Philadelphia woman with advanced breast cancer confided online in 1995, “I think there is a comfort in knowing that as I slip closer to the end of my life, it is not growing smaller like a candle burned to the bottom. Writing is more like a road—though traveled upon—which continues to exist behind me.” Writing about painful experiences defends against world-dissolving powers that often accompany trauma, depression, and mourning. When writing is healing, it can intercede for us by demonstrating our strength to confront our own pain without descending directly into the abyss or retreating into lethargy. Writing one’s way out of anguish and isolation is only possible when the spirit can exist at the depths of despair and still shape and articulate the words for what arising out of despair is really 2 about. Words can serve to allay anxiety and dread; they can begin to lift the oppressive weight of dolorous moods and infirmity. On fragile wings the monarch butterfly finds leverage in the midst of its migratory climbs. Like the monarch’s, the distressed writer’s rise to light and stratosphere is through overcoming (its) inertia and gravity. The writer must be opened to vulnerability, to innerness and permeability, to grasp the edge of words, even when that edge is harrowing in its impermanence: hovering between death and life. Why do writers do this? Why do they continue to examine their pain when they are most at risk for more heartbreak in reminiscence? Why do they admit into their own psyches what Gregory Orr calls “the angels” of their own imagining, strange, even torturous angels that are welcomed, even repined, by the writer who allows them to exist? Writers do this because writing saves life in fact and function. In the recent New York Times article “Sustained by Fiction while Facing Life’s Facts,”1 novelist Alice Hoffman explores the transcendent quality of her writing as well as her own conviction to be true to it, even in circumstances that might silence another writer. Hoffman begins her narrative about her personal tragedy with what is not only concrete but also affective: “I was told I had cancer on a blue day in July . . . it was far too gorgeous a day for a tragedy. Roses in full bloom. Bees rumbled by the windowpanes , lazy with pollen and heat.”2 Hearing the news from her surgeon leaves her bereft, disoriented: “In a single minute, the world as I knew it dropped away from me, leaving me on a cold and distant planet, one where there was no gravity and no oxygen and nothing made sense anymore.” Her shock is characteristic of all shock: the body’s natural defense of numbing is a protection against a person ’s feeling more than he or she can bear in a moment of crisis. Writing through and about distress becomes a kind of moral conduct, a sensibility and approach to literary art. Such writing about personal experience translates the physical world into the world of language where there is interplay between disorder and order, wounding and repair. Gradually, fiction and reality can become...