Writing Life as the Long Way Around
“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
~Emily Dickenson
Is there a better way to introduce my website on using the self narrative as a starting point than with a self narrative?
One of my burning questions is - How does living a healthy life contribute to healthy writing practice?
I did not arrive at this question as if it were a simple destination. It’s taken years of writing to unearth something I didn’t start out looking for.
Like many other writers, I began as a child, finding some need within me to make up a story as easy as opening a lined notebook and writing everything down. When I remember this time, I can clearly see there had been no internal debate about whether or not I should write a story. Of course I should write a story, but about what? Getting lost pulling down details of my choosing was an experience in learning to create a world of my very own. There was nothing like that feeling of being able to put whatever you wanted together into words, and they were free. In a world where I could rarely have what I truly wanted because my parents didn’t have a lot of money, I could have as many words as I could think of. I kept on until one day I found my parents reading through one of my notebooks and laughing.
While it was clear their laughter thought it was all cute, because the phrasing and spelling of a child untaught in grammar rules can come out wildly unique or interesting. Children often write from a place of highly dramatic description because they understand that a story always conveys a journey of feelings as much as it does of action and events, and they honor that intuition. I was humiliated in a way I could feel in my body, that kind that sprouts somewhere in the skin and then spreads everywhere leaving no nerve untouched. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone would find and read my words; I was overwhelmed by the vulnerability and put down my pencil.
I picked my pen back up in high school because I had to and by this time I had found poetry. There is no other type of language that can express the most profound feelings of being human in my opinion. Being a teenager is like always walking around on fire. Sometimes it’s only enough to cook food and sometimes it’s enough to burn down half of Alberta. It took one creative writing class in high school and a few people to say they liked what I wrote to understand that I had a direction I could comfortably walk. By then I had a little money of my own and the first journal I bought had thick pages the color of sand and learning that pretty didn’t mean easy to write on. I remember being profoundly sad enough to write that I didn’t feel as if I would live past age 17, but writing provided an outlet for me to give voice to that most desperate of feelings. I will never know what that act did or didn’t do, but it now lives as a memory I can access.
Many writers like to say that writing saved their lives, and I can comfortably add my name to this list, but it would be much later until I would find my way to that action and conclusion.
Taking the time to write regularly can eventuallly cause something to bloom forth.
It was perhaps inevitable that my health would fail when it did, which began at around age 19, I entered this era of being a medical anomaly. The state of an unbalanced body with multiple symptoms but ones that no medical test seemed to be able to provide a reason for. Test after test yielded nothing and all the antibiotics I was given made me way worse. I was in anguish and losing myself. At a certain point, I prayed for a diagnosis of something awful, just to know which direction to move in. That diagnosis never came. I had to find my own direction, but nothing in my life had really prepared me to do that.
I began writing in earnest to try and understand the source of being sick. Where did it come from? Where had a turned right when I was supposed to go left. An uneasy mind can often face a barricade of questions and in the wake of this huge pile of increasing unknowns, I turned to writing to figure something out. How could I describe it? It felt like a seven-headed hydra, each with a different colored head that did something uniquely awful, like spit acid. That was something I could lean into. I could describe the way it made me feel using comparative language and feel better. Now I could detail what I was feeling in a way that someone else might understand.
Eventually, I found I had to walk away from Western medicine due to certain limitations I found to be unbearable. Even with words, I found it was a system in which I had no voice. Part of “alternative” healing like homeopathy and Traditional Chinese Medicine actually required me to tell me story, even the one that began in my mother’s belly, in order for them to understand how to help me. Telling my own story was a beginning step into healing. To do this, I had to return to the place where I began on a cellular level and go from there. It would be my first foray into fusing personal narrative with a personal narrative with a health outcome while at the same time support my body with something like blue green algae for its highly bioavailable nutrient content.
I got well enough to go to college, a place where I was drawn to classes that allowed me to know myself better. It was easy to see that the more you could know language, the more you could understand what being a human even meant. More language meant I could know myself better. Although I was healthier, I still struggled with certain problems that made my life feel limited in a way that bothered me and made me feel incomplete. They felt like they could be solved somehow if I could get to the root of the problem. Because of that I comfortably spent my entire college career navel gazing. But it was in my English classes that found validity in being able to convey my painful experiences beautifully. They felt like they meant more if they could be turned into art, because it was a way to feel seen and heard that provided the same liberating feeling that pulling language out of the air had felt like as a child. Plus, it was fun.
Again, I found poetic language to best express the depth of what I wanted to convey on an emotional level. Nothing else could come near that. It became one of my favorite mediums for personal writing, because it distilled language to its most dramatic elements, casting aside the articles, being verbs and canned language in favor of conveying the language of anguish, the bloody and beating raw nerves or a sunset so ethereal you wish you could sew it delicately into memory. To see it on the page and know that it is true in a way that nothing else could be. It’s also the language of play, of asymmetry, of rebellion. It mirrored something in me.
Perhaps unsurprisingly my graduate degree focused on poetry.
I thought everything would follow a progression from there, going from graduate school to book deal, or at least teaching. But I had a child who I couldn’t expect to just live the starving artist lifestyle with me and there weren’t a lot of decent paying jobs for literary skills in my area, so I chose the next best thing: The dietary supplement world that had become my lifestyle. This move would turn out to provide pivotal information that would offer a world of insight to this quest for self-knowledge, although it would prove pretty disastrous for my personal writing. Anything that took 40 hours out of the week would have.
Eventually I worked my way into researching nutrients and botanicals and this world of reality inside the human body started unveiling its secrets like unfolded origami. Fascinating realities such as the way botanicals exert some kind of beneficial effect because they’re functioning within a body’s epigenomic structure, turning on certain genes and others turning certain genes off – one’s we prefer not to have expressed. The things I have learned researching the body presented an opportunity to get back into writing regularly, which I deeply missed.
Since I wanted to focus my attention, I found nutrients I could provide to my brain to help it function optimally, that to even understand what a cell was made of and how supporting the lipid bilayer that surrounds every cell in the body could help my body communicate in a way that could facilitate my creative process. I could take omega-3 fatty acids, phosphatidylserine or medium chain triglycerides and fuel my brain directly in a way that was noticeable and yet each produced a different effect, the way drinking a glass of wine provides a different experience than drinking a bottle of beer. I could learn the ways in which my body functioned in order to learn me through being able to explore what thoughts and ideas came into my mind in a new way. I could find these things that were unique to me and build something to help me live my life and be creative in this optimal way. And as soon as I felt that, I wanted everyone to be able to feel that way too, to fuel themselves in whatever creative pursuit they felt called to. Just being able to stay alive is a profoundly creative act.
I am a trauma-informed writer, which means that the traumatic events of my life have shifted my perspective on how writing, no matter the genre, benefits the human. It would not be an exaggeration to say that writing has saved my life multiple times because it calmed the automatic fight or flight response. Writing regularly, like anything done regularly, tends to create a rhythm that can calm the mind and helps to increase the theta waves. Once started, the process of writing becomes self-generative.
There is simply no way that I could have gotten to this point in my life without the ability to write. I analyze my process of self-discovery through writing, and I’d like to show you some things I’ve learned along the way about how to be in a writing rhythm. When I am living in rhythm it allows me to be more and more creative, pulling things down from seemingly out of nowhere.
What works for me is going to be different than what works for you. Writing allows you to create a process to find out who you are so it’s easier to know and plan for what you need. It’s more insightful than a spreadsheet and a hell of a lot more fun.
It took me three years of writing regularly for things to arrive unprompted in mind regularly. For a long time ideas would come to me and they would just not come to anything, which was profoundly frustrating until I realized I was in the process of coming to a place where things would land that would stick. That part of me was learning not to keep things too precious and to simply toss those ideas that had seemed somehow profound at 3 am. Now I write and organize ideas everywhere, on the elliptical or dreaming at night. I often wake up with a head full of ideas sometimes at super inconvenient times. 3, 4, 5 o’ clock in the morning. I’ve learned to honor this timing as much as I can; it’s what I’ve cultivated.
If my life experience has taught me anything, it’s that writing is not simply of the mind but begins in the body. Addressing what the body needs makes the process of writing more fluent; based on the research I encounter almost daily, it may also make it more profound. I’m just as spiritual as I am scientific. You will find a wide range in what influences me included on this website. I’m a real variety-is-the-spice of life kinda lady.
Living means the heart will break from time to time. Not simply from romantic love, but from feeling alone or alienated, having a body that refuses to work in a way that’s expected, not being able to find a solution to a complex relationship, feeling like there is a shit monster who comes to stay from time to time. Writing can mend our broken heart by helping everything make a little more sense. Or if it can’t ever make sense, it can help to make art of it. To break something releases an enormous amount of energy. Instead of using it to find answers that may never be available, that release can fuel your creativity and I’m here to share what I’ve learned so that you can find your way back too.
The writing life may sometimes be the long way around, but this way has more fruit and flowers.
