“And not a tear is wasted” *

“if you weren’t haunted by those stories, you wouldn’t waste your time trying to write it.” (The Art of Memoir by M Karr)

It’s a fine line to walk, writing about deeply personal experiences, especially painful ones, and then putting them out there for the world to see. Deciding how much to reveal and how much to keep private. Working out what’s beneficial and what’s self-indulgence. Perhaps being British, with a history of not expressing our feelings – except at football matches! – doesn’t help.

I’ve written a lot about personal and painful stuff. I try to be very careful when it involves others, my family usually, asking for permission first, abandoning anything they aren’t comfortable with. I haven’t always got it right. I always try to ask myself if something is my story to tell or someone else’s.

Sometimes that’s unclear – because trauma, illness, doesn’t just happen to one person. Take my mother’s death, my father’s dementia, or my son’s bipolar. However, what I can write about is my experience of those things.

And there are benefits. Much of what I wrote during my Creative Writing MA turned out to be  therapy for me, processing traumatic events and putting them into context with the benefit of distance, rehab if you like. But more than that, the whole theme of my dissertation -a visual poetry collection – became the means of redeeming those events. I called it Prayer Stations: Acts of Reclamation. Like I was creating my own reclamation yard of experiences, using words and arts to upcycle them into something new.

The other benefit of going public with my experiences is when it chimes with a reader. I can’t measure (at this point) my worth as a writer in income or competitions success or any other commercial way. However, there are times when I get a comment, when someone says: “Yes, that’s me too.” And they feel seen, acknowledged, less alone in the experience. There’s something about putting it into words that makes a difficulty manageable, contained somehow’ sharing it dilutes its power somehow. Those comments are precious and it’s those moments that make me feel validated as a writer.

My faith helps. Not that it always makes things easy! But it gives me a filter to look at these experiences through – or maybe more like putting on the right pair of prescription glasses. I remember the first pair I had to wear all the time: suddenly I could see details, like individual leaves on trees, again and everything seemed to jump six feet nearer.  

The Casting Crowns song I quoted goes on to say:

And not a tear is wasted
In time, you’ll understand
I’m painting beauty with the ashes
Your life is in My hands

It sounds pretentious perhaps but that’s what I feel I am doing. Or what God is doing through my creativity. Painting beauty with ashes. Just as I buy preloved clothes and combine them with old things from my wardrobe into new looks, or repurpose old book pages into an Advent Calendar box, or put my garden waste out for the council to turn into compost, – it’s all redemption and reclamation.

Much of our past traumas are behind me now. My parents, although I will always miss them, are home with God. My son no longer even needs medication for his bipolar. And I am so much happier as a writer than I was in my later years as an occupational therapist.

I am no longer haunted by those experiences. And I don’t need to look back on them with regret because nothing is wasted.

(*Just Be Held by Casting Crowns)