OMG Digital Magazine OMG Issue 280 12th October 2017 | Page 6

OMG Digital Magazine | 279 | Thursday 12, October, 2017 • PAGE 6
SoulFood
A Secret Solace for
Hard Times
The author of Faithful shares her coping strategy for those times when we ask ourselves, "Who am I,
what do I want from the world, what do I have to give, and how do I survive?"
By Alice Hoffman
I began to write when I was 8, the year my parents divorced,
the most difficult year in my young life. When my father
took off, he left behind a box of books, which I turned to
for solace. That year, I carried a book with me at all times. I
read on street corners and long after my bedtime. Looking
back, I realize those books were the only connection I had
to my father. I had always been a reader, but that year I
also began to fill notebooks with my own writing. I did so
secretly, and never showed my notebooks to anyone. They
held my private grief, and, in time, they became my private
way of healing.
Years later, when I was cleaning out my mother's house,
I found these notebooks in the back of my closet, hidden
away for more than 30 years. It was only then that I realized
I had changed the names and circumstances in my entries,
but I had remained true to the emotions I had experienced.
Fictionalizing my real life helped me to escape my family
situation while still allowing me to delve into feelings that
were too painful for me to access in my everyday. I could
express my fears and sadness in a way I could not have
otherwise. The notebooks overflowed with the emotions
I kept locked up. The character I invented may have had a
different name and lived in a different city, but she felt as I
did: frightened and lost.
Broken hearts and souls and bodies can begin to heal
when we face our emotions. Ever since those early blue
notebooks, I've turned to writing as a kind of therapy, a
way of better understanding myself. In Joan Didion's essay
"Why I Write," the acclaimed author says, "I write to find
out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and
what it means. What I want and what I fear."
Our subconscious selves may know the answers to our
most pressing psychological questions, even when we
don't have a clue in our everyday lives: Who am I? What
do I want from the world? What do I have to give? How
do I survive? The more I write the more I understand that
survival is the theme that most interests me. Writing helps
me to understand how it can be possible to endure and
even learn from trauma.
At no time was this more evident to me than when I
was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, a yearlong
process that included surgery, radiation and months
of chemotherapy. Every day, when I went for radiation
or chemotherapy, I escaped by floating down a river of
words that I planned to write later. I created characters
while sitting in waiting rooms. I envisioned an imagined
town that I could escape to whenever my world was too
frightening and raw. During this time, I moved a mattress
onto the floor of my office and went back and forth
between my "bed" and my desk. Writing seemed to me
a form of meditation. I could go deeply into myself and
come back to my life renewed.
There are times when certain subjects are too painful
to discuss with even your closest friends, but when you
express your feelings in writing, you begin the healing
process. Retraining emotions is stressful; writing them
down not only is a release but also lets you know you
are still very much alive. Early research into the benefits
of writing shows that women with breast cancer who
wrote about their experiences had fewer symptoms and
less unscheduled visits with their doctors than women
who were not in such a program. Writing courses offered
through mind-body programs at cancer centers around the
country have had similar results. Creativity fights darkness
and fear, and gives us a sense of control. We can write our
own endings, change plotlines and discover who we are at
our cores. Even when your outer life is out of control, your
inner life can be rich and full. To write freely, with no one to
judge you, is an antidote to stress and sorrow. It gives you
back something you may have lost: your voice.
"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart," wrote
the great poet William Wordsworth. When you do so,
you make your own heart stronger. For months after my
father left, I barely spoke, but who I was didn't disappear.
Confronting emotional or physical wounds head-on is
difficult and sometimes impossible, but writing down
what happened to you—fictionalized or as straight
memoir—can remind you of who you really are. "A novel
is like a dream in which everyone is you. They're all parts of
yourself," writes novelist Janet Fitch. Those parts add up;
they're all pieces of the puzzle of who you are.