after pain a feeling comes
april 30 | weekly warm-up
Write about a small-t trauma or BIG-T trauma that you’ve experienced in your life. Tell yourself the story using your writerly skills to apply a healing narrative. Think about what approach you can use that makes sense for your personality and the story. You might use humor like Camonghne Felix mentions below. You might use poetic language, symbolism, or metaphor. You can use juxtaposition to show the contrast between the light and the dark in the situation. You could apply a healing narrative through the way you assign meaning to the circumstances. Ultimately, tell the story in a way that allows you to be authentic and also responsible for providing you and the reader a pathway out of the pain.
“In Dyscalculia, I talk a lot about what hurts. But I talk just as much about what it felt like to heal from that hurt. Many readers, to find value in the trauma narrative, need to know that there’s an end to trauma’s harm, and writing Dyscalculia offered me a profound opportunity to understand my healing as not just an event but a literary technique.” — Camonghne Felix
In this Lit Hub craft article, Camonghne Felix explores the gentle balance of writing about trauma while taking care of yourself and the reader. How can we take care to write about trauma in such a way that we don’t retraumatize ourselves or make the reading unnecessarily painful for the reader?
Our traumatic experiences are part of our shadow selves. Psychotherapist Danielle Massi says, “Anytime the brain feels [something is] too traumatic to hold onto, it represses it into the unconscious.” She says traumatic experience can be big or small. From small-t traumas of being teased on the playground, to Big-T traumas of being physically abused or losing a loved one, she says that these experiences (even ones we can’t remember) are etched in the unconscious mind and continue to affect our lives.
As Felix says, “So it makes sense that so many writers and artists make art about trauma, personal and fictionalized — we write about universal themes because we want to be able to relate to our audiences. Few topics are as relatable as trauma.” I would go on to say that we feel compelled to write about it so we can find healing narratives for ourselves and to hopefully share some of that healing with the reader.
Felix goes on to describe how she approached writing about trauma in her book Dyscalculia:
“I knew it was important to include the authenticity, and important that I help inoculate my reader from the trauma, two goals that felt irreconcilable. Does it have to hurt the reader for them to get it? Must they really be in my shoes?"… And then, I began writing Dyscalculia, and I knew I would need a working theory of how trauma would function in my book before I could put it out into the world. Through humor and by writing into a healing narrative instead of a trauma narrative, I found ways to offer the reader reprieve and safe space… Building the healing into the language helped me truly see which parts of the trauma were necessary to include, and where to pull back to offer my readers a way out of the book’s trauma.”
In this week’s exercise, let’s practice writing about trauma with a healing narrative.
P.S. The title of this post is inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” which is a lovely example of writing about pain with a healing narrative. You can find the poem and an analysis of it here.