Why
It started as a pastime. My friend and I were 11 or 12 years old. We both enjoyed English class, idolised our teacher. She encouraged us to keep a journal. We didn’t need any further encouragement. We spent the next two years filling notebooks with stories, poems, plays and illustrations. My friend had a flair for the comic and a catchy turn of phrase. She was a better illustrator too. Her journals were things of beauty. Mine were pedestrian to look at but the writing was there, not always fluid but getting stronger. I enjoyed words and the feel of them in my hand. We modelled our writing along the lines of Enid Blyton’s adventure stories. Secret caves, hidden treasure and picnics were crucial ingredients of the little stories that filled those books. We exchanged the journals every now and then and lavished praise on each other’s characters and plots and dramatic conclusions. Our teacher challenged us with 100 or 300 word story writing assignments. I treasured her comments, writing draft after draft to get the piece right. The year I turned 14, the writing evolved from the light hearted and superficial to something different, something even I didn’t understand I was doing. Life was brutally real that year and the strain of keeping it secret must have showed in my writing. My teacher’s comments were more guarded as she tried to gauge why my writing had changed so much. The innocence was already slipping away and later that year, she understood the reason.
I wrote a lot of poetry the year I lost both my brother and my writing friend. Dark, dramatic stuff spilt on to the paper, blotched and scarred. I wrote about claws and running away, of being left behind and moonless nights. All very adolescent, unfortunately all too real. I wrote all through my first relationship, the writing getting darker and easier. Tightly held in check, the grief oozed out in drips of bad writing. The anger made the writing hurtful and cruel. I tried for the sophisticated sarcastic touch and failed miserably. I just sounded raw and immature, even to myself.
The relationship ended badly. I must have given him my notebooks around the time a mutual friend died. I had written a poem about our friend and wanted him to read it. He held on to my notebooks, making excuses not to return them, eventually confessing to having lost them when we next met twenty years later.
I stopped writing. Losing my work switched off something inside. I didn’t write again until ten years later. I was in the throes of post-partum blues after my second son was born. I wrote two or three pieces then, one describing in unnecessary detail my brother’s death, one about sky diving and the third about turtle walks on distant beaches. At that time, I had only just begun to recognise the resentment I’d harboured inside for many years. My family had never spoken about my brother’s death. We had all gone our separate ways, grieving in secret, never meeting each other’s eyes. Familiar strangers, nothing to say. (Sometimes rock music gets it like no one else – thanks, RB and RJD.) The writing was the first time I acknowledged a need to tell his story and mine. It brought relief overladen with guilt. It would take years and another death before I could write without feeling that I was breaking an unspoken oath of silence.
I tend to lose the people I love in clusters. Last year, my mum to cancer and consequently, some beloved people to betrayal and hurt and the (I’m right you’re wrong) blame game. The anger that came roaring in the aftermath of mum’s death was frightening and overpowered me easily. It took a while and the wisdom of old friends to acknowledge that the anger was a result of years of banked emotions from the time my brother killed himself, complicated by the more recent losses.
A few months later, I wrote my first serious piece after a gap of fifteen years. It spoke of my brother, his life and death. This time, instead of saving it on the hard drive, I sent it out into cyberspace. The response was immediate and massive. Memories, emotions, love came back to me in the form of messages and phone calls and photographs. Something ancient inside me, hard and bitter, finally found an adversary worthy of its mettle. It’s hard to write this – I like to think of myself as a rational being – but the love that came pouring into my inbox turned that inner hardness into something far more malleable. Something I could finally take out and examine, even discard in part. The response to that piece loosened old inhibitions and anxieties about what the family would say or think. The words were clamouring to be written and this time, older, braver, angrier than I’d ever been in my life, it was easier to write from the gut, about the things that mattered very much, that had always mattered.
All the years I had spent silently mourning my brother, unable to speak of him freely partly because I’d been too frightened of how much I felt, partly because the immediate family had erased him from our collective consciousness, it had never occurred to me that there had been others mourning his loss too, who needed to speak of him too and hesitated because I never indicated my need to do so. That realisation came thirty years too late in many ways but it did bring the writing back.
It’s been a year of writing since then. Anger management, therapy, good old fashioned nostalgia, hazy memories, food – only subjects for that day’s piece. At first, I exhausted myself with the need to get the words out. I wrote hungrily, draining myself of all the feeling. My sleep was, as always, troubled by night terrors but these were not the old familiar ones. I woke, having dreamt new dreams, with new ideas raging to be let out.
That frenzy lasted longer than I’d anticipated. Four months of writing every single day, effortless, energetic. Then the wave receded somewhat and I am now writing with some thought, not in that unhinged instinctive way. I still edit and re-edit as I write. I read older pieces and want to find the time to hone the language and structure. The obsessive nature of my brain makes it hard to take a break from fresh writing but I must. I will. Soon. Just recently, though, there’s been a surge in the words. It’s enough. To get the words out. To write. To think. It’s enough for now.