Finding The Words
“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”
Vladimir Nabokov
I sit and stare at the blank white screen in front of me, beckoning me to create. Where are the words??
Nothing.
The words refuse to come out.
It felt like I was wading through treacle. Ever since I mentally committed to writing a memoir, something shuts down inside of me and refuses to reboot. I’m ready to start writing, but the words aren’t ready to show themselves. I’ve done the internal work, I am not ashamed of my past, yet somehow there’s a resistance to write.
Before I call it a day, I decide to rearrange my internal frustration a little. Softly, gently but eagerly, I ask myself,
“What’s wrong? Why is it so hard for the words to appear?” Ridiculous as it seemed, I added “Can we talk about it?”
“Fear,” came the answer. The voice was crystal clear and unmistakeably my own. My inner voice, maybe? “I am embarrassed.”
“Of what, of whom?” I gently enquire, grappling with the idea that I had just engaged in a conversation with myself. It felt a little surreal, but I went with it anyway.
“Everyone, everywhere. What if I get hurt again? What if they laugh? What if my experiences, my writing, mean nothing to anyone?” What was once a wordless abyss, seemed to fill up in desperation and brimmed with fear, threatening to overwhelm me. But I didn’t want to give up this time.
“Do your experiences and words mean anything to you?” I’m now very curious and want to explore this in more detail. In what felt like decades, I felt a doorway opening up. I wanted to find out why it has been so difficult to write about my experiences as a child and how they had shaped me in adulthood.
“Well yes, yes they do. When you were in pain, your words bled onto the pages of your diary, across rows of ruled lines, up the margins, and into every nook and cranny of your diary covers. They can also be found on small pieces of paper stuffed tightly, surreptitiously into your diary. Dried tearstains and smudged ink still mark the places where your heart broke into pieces. When you fell in love, you wrote silly sweet rhyming couplets under the moonbeams of many stolen nights, which you sent to your intended on a summer zephyr. Your journal knows well the days when you watched the clouds from the safety of your bedroom, nestled under the window with the voile curtains passing softly across your face in the warm breeze. Do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember…” I replied softly, as I recalled the magic of a summer’s day breeze that caressed my cheeks and transformed into a dreamy soliloquy onto the waiting pages of my diary. I marveled at how the words would flow back then.
“Why did you abandon me?”
The question came quietly, almost fearfully. Yet, it was abrupt enough to snap me out of my reverie. My inner voice had somehow turned the tables. I could almost see the words as they hung in the air, accusingly, waiting for an explanation.
Abandon? That’s a pretty heavy word. Did I really abandon myself and my writing? At age 20, life turned a corner and I got thrust into adulthood, whilst still holding onto the remnants of a disastrous childhood. I immersed myself in this new way of life, for better and for worse. I put my pen down and over time, I forgot how to journal. Over the course of a decade, I took on identities I had fallen into as the industrious student, scientist, dutiful daughter, wife, and mother and I slowly and imperceptibly lost my voice. I lost my words.
They were always there, just shrouded in the thick smog of my confusion with life and trying to figure it all out.
“I try to write, honestly I do. But there is just so much pain to dig through before I reach the nectar of what and who I am or could be in spite of all the conflict of my yesteryears. It has all caught up with me, I’ve spent years working it all out and there’s much to say about it…but…” My voice trembles.
“But what..?” Comes the question, this time gently. “What is difficult about that pain?”
I sigh. The image of my pain comes easily to me, having written about it in a poem during an English lesson at school, raising alarm bells with the teacher. But nothing came of it. “Imagine a mirror, except that it is broken. That’s what my pain looks like to me. The edges are sharp and jagged, as though someone had hit it with a crowbar, hard enough to break the glass but with enough restraint so that the glass would not be allowed to crumble under the force. A savage gesture of kindness. The glass is splintered and has scattered my reflection into a hundred distorted images, holding onto each other with agonizingly fragile tension. I can’t see myself clearly. I can’t approach it for fear of getting cut by it all over again.”
“Tell me more about what you see when you look into that splintered mirror?”
“I see that what was once innocent, pure and simple is now damaged. Broken, much like how I feel. What good would that be to anyone? What would they learn? What would they take away?”
The voice inside persists. “When you’re ready, look into that mirror again. When you do, you may still see a splintered reflection, but you may also notice how each shard of glass is reflecting light off a slightly different plane. Each reflection offers a unique perspective of you. Do you see it?”
I considered this for a moment.
“Tell me, what happened to you as a result of this pain?”
I bristled a little. “Nothing was ever stable at home, was it? The fighting, the screaming, and the panic. Every single day. Chaos was the only constant in our lives. Well, chaos and our Mother. We fought for our sanity between these two polarities. All I wanted was to find a center point, a place of relative calm so that I could rest and process what was happening around me. Happiness, I learned, was not a destination but only a place to rest before the fickle emotion vanished into thin air. I longed to stop hurting. Each time something awful happened at home, I’d steel myself in order to hurt a little less the next time, to steady myself and survive with my sanity intact. At times I breached breaking point but reeled myself in before I got taken under completely. I could never just let go and be taken away by it all and just.. disappear altogether. The journey has been so ugly and I didn’t figure much of this out till many years later. It was not a heroic journey by any means. Or at least it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Yet, I think you also realise that none of it has been completely in vain.” The internal voice tries to reason with me. “Each time you hurt and healed, you learned something new about your spirit, about the world and the people in it. The pain was not a dead-end but a redirection down a different path. Like an actual cut to the finger, pain tells us “All is not well, let’s sort this out and maybe do this differently or go another way. We’ll heal somewhere along the way.” You endured it all, survived, and even reckoned with weeping wounds. Best of all, you are now learning to thrive. That sounds kind of heroic.”
“Frankly, the journey was what it was,” continued the voice. “You called your journey ‘ugly’ which is subjective. Some may find companionship in your writing, others may find resilience and hope. Your writing may make the journey for someone else slightly less arduous. Surely, that’s something that makes this endeavor worthwhile? Surely that’s not ugly?”
“Yes, this is true,” I concede briefly before asking “But who am I writing this for? What if no one reads it or considers this as just one more sad childhood? What if all I get in return is…pity? Or judgment?”
“Are you worried about your experiences not being validated?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Remember how you used to write for the child in you who was afraid, sad, and alone at much too young an age. Over the years, you amassed journals that were dedicated to her anguish, as well as her hopes and dreams for the life she would someday lead, the places she would go and the people she would meet. Your words shone a beacon of light into that child’s darkest hour. And that was important. That warrior needs an ally, a voice to convey her sometimes quiet, sometimes violent resilience. She wants to be seen and that’s why you have this urge to write. But you need to be able to hold her in her pain. Validate that child’s emotions.
Life is inherently messy, but your experiences did not make you ugly. You have not failed. On the contrary, much like a Kintsugi vase, you can gather all the splintered parts of you and seal them with gold. You still have the opportunity to heal stronger, and more beautiful than ever before and show others how to do the same. Learn to honor these gilded scars as a tribute to your strength and perseverance. You will likely break again, but you will also heal again to look even more luminous than you do today.”
Luminous? In my mind, I turn once again to face the splintered mirror with its sharp, jagged edges. In its reflection, I look tired. I look more closely at the fracture lines, the awkward shapes of each shard of glass, the crevices, and the parts that were no longer there.
I imagine myself picking up a brush and boldly approaching the mirror. The reflection gets larger as I get closer to it. I battle with notions of resistance and resilience with each step.
Cautiously, I begin applying layers of lacquer where the mirror had cracked. With the undivided focus of an artist and my loving hand, I tend to the cracks until they are sealed. Now there’s no danger of it all falling apart. As I gild the lacquer, I become intimately connected to the fracture lines, rounding the sharp edges, bringing life and glow to every chip and crevice. The world ceases to exist as I tend to the mirror, my eyebrows furrowed in deep concentration. I exhale as I stand back to admire my work. The individual crooked lines of gold flow like tributaries to join up with each other here and there. Each one seemed to have a life and beauty of its own. Altogether, it appeared radiant. Whole, yet different. Stronger.
“Good. Now, what do you see?”
“My reflection is still split into a hundred different images, but each part is now unique and outlined in gold. It’s beautiful. What started off looking fragile is now transformed. Each shard of the mirror is part of the whole story. My story. Something that I can write about.”
My inner voice completed my thoughts for me. “Each shard of glass is an experience, each gilded fracture line is a lesson in healing. You are a different person now, with the ability to simultaneously consider different perspectives on life and its complexities. You have the capacity to reflect upon your life events compassionately, sensitively, and with acuity. Reflect upon those shards of glass in this manner and look at what you learned each time you broke apart.
Don’t try to second guess what a reader might think or say about your writing. Write honestly and sincerely and those who need to read your words will engage with you. Your readers come with painful stories of their own and your words will be received in the context of their own lives. Each life is a kaleidoscope, containing many small pieces of glass, of different colors, shapes, and sizes. Lead with your intuition, the intuition that got you safely to this point, and share those messages.”
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” — Edith Warton
