The Day the Words Came Back

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it — don’t cheat with it.” Ernest Hemingway

Not to be too melodramatic about it, but around a year ago, I lost my ability to write. This wasn’t due to a stroke or an amputation of my hands or anything that horrific, but it did coincide with the night that began the worst month and a half of my life.

Oh, I could write simple things: tweets, Facebook updates, emails, messages on Skype, stuff for work, but what I couldn’t do was write about what mattered. I couldn’t use writing as a tool to get me through what was going on. This has never happened to me before. I’ve always written. I’ve written when I’ve been happy; I’ve written when I’ve been upset. Most importantly I’ve written as a way to help me organize my thoughts and to process things. I’ve written after arguments to apologize, to explain. I’ve written to comfort people. I’ve written to make people laugh. I’ve written for fun and for work, and when I’ve been lucky, those two things have been one in the same. I’ve written love letters and break-up letters. I’ve written poems, stories, and theses. I’ve written 1000+ page manuals. I’ve written commercials and scripts. I’ve written journal entries and blog posts. I’ve written for myself and for others. I’ve written to let off steam and to tear someone apart, sometimes sending the tirade but more often deleting it, since simply writing it all down was usually enough to make me feel better. I’ve ghostwritten and I’ve had bylines.

So, I think you get the point: that writing is as natural to me as breathing, and that losing this ability was seriously disruptive. I remember talking to different writer friends a few weeks after that night about being able to use what had happened in my writing. Not writing about what happened, per se, but tapping into that pain and experience and using it creatively. In a fucked up way, I had been given a gift, because I came to intimately know how it feels to truly, truly hurt so badly that waking up in the morning is a disappointment. I learned what fear feels like when all of your security, everything you know, is gone. I saw the incredible lengths people can go to in order to justify their actions in their own minds. I fell into trap after trap without realizing it, seeing only later how I’d been manipulated. I discovered how much one’s pain can hurt and shock and terrify the people who love you. I found out that black humor is bloody essential. I learned how desperately even a non-religious person can pray, praying so hard that the prayers continued through my dreams and I was still chanting them when I woke up. And I learned the most extraordinarily touching things about friendship, love, and kindness that no one can ever really know unless they’ve hit the end of their emotional endurance.

These things are all so primal and raw and cut to the essence of being a human being, which is why they are a goldmine to a writer. I knew I couldn’t use the gift artistically at that time; I was far too scared to face any of those feelings, let alone use them, and even now, it’s hard write this without some tears and without my hands shaking. However, I also knew I had to get that poison out somehow and, as always, my first inclination was to write. AND I COULDN’T. Literally. Words would not come to me at all. I’d sit at my keyboard and stare at my screen. I’d open a notebook and hold a pen. Whatever I tried, no words. I felt something in my head close itself off and not let words come out. Occasionally I might get a few bullet points down. A little more often, I’d just fill a page with:

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

…

Mostly though, nothing.

People say it takes two years to heal from a major personal tragedy. In my case, I felt that I moved on very quickly, certainly faster than I expected. I threw myself into all kinds of things — relationships, athletics, new experiences, travel — and in an ironic way, my worst year was also one of my best, certainly one of my top two, especially in terms of personal growth and understanding. I developed this laugh — one of those big laughs that you have to turn and stare because how often do you hear a real, loud, unabashed, belly laugh from someone over the age of three? I laugh like this all the time now. I was like, “Two years? Psssshhhh, I have this shit in the bag!” I found myself well and truly happy in relatively short order.

And so, I wanted to write about the things I was doing, not in terms of healing or anything mundane like that, but about the things I was interested in: events going on in the city, new restaurants, wine tastings, travels, funny stories, utterly ridiculous dating stories. I went to a food writing conference and a travel writing conference. AND STILL THE WORDS WOULD NOT COME, not even about happy or at least neutral topics. Or if they did come, they just didn’t have any spark and they didn’t go anywhere. They were just black marks on a white page, readable, but why? Despite my general happiness, this became a point of real frustration.

Something great started happening a week ago, though. Words started trickling into my head. Not ideas, which thankfully never left me, but paragraphs. Openings. Scenes. Monologues. Sketches. It wasn’t much, and I didn’t write them down — they were really too short and too fleeting — but they were enough to give me hope that I wouldn’t be wordless forever. I just felt things start to take shape. Then, today, I was doing some mindless task and the thoughts and topics and ideas and words just kept flooding in, so much so that I had to stop what I was doing so I could sit down and capture them to work on later. And then I wrote this, out of gratitude that the words came back. And then I wrote this, because now I know I can write again.

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