Loss is the most universal human experience. Regardless of age, location, background — we have all lost something. A friend; a job; a child. Severity may vary. Loss is loss. What differs from person to person is how we learn to carry it with us as we move forward.
Writing is a powerful tool useful for much more than persuading, entertaining or informing an audience. Your words on a page can be life-changing, even if you ultimately keep them for yourself.
The Power of the Journal
I’ve kept a journal on and off for 25 years. While this practice can be beneficial when sorting through ideas and looking toward the future, it can also force you to be honest about your thoughts and feelings and confront the difficult moments you may be facing in your life (or will face at some point).
Writing things down in a private space allows you the freedom to “speak” freely about the things you’re going through. You don’t have to have good handwriting or even compose complete sentences. You just have to put your feelings into words. Not always an easy thing to do. But it becomes a habit after a while. Sort of like how therapy gets easier the more sessions you attend and the more work you put into it. (Not that having a journal is necessarily a replacement for talking with a therapist; I’ve found that both together can be extremely beneficial.)
I admit things in my journal that I’d never say out loud — my worries and fears about what I’ve lost and may never regain, mostly. Something happens when you write down the things that hurt and scare you. They become less painful; less scary. They don’t disappear. But they do become real, and you are faced with the choice to learn to live alongside them rather than letting them continue to consume you.
Everyone’s Story Has a Different Ending
To lose something you loved or cared deeply about (or needed) is to feel helpless, hopeless, and hysterical. Nothing makes sense. The thoughts running through your head come faster and faster with every day that passes, and for many, those thoughts become less and less logical. That’s normal. Grief, though experienced by everyone, affects everyone differently. But the symptoms are similar. It can begin to feel as though you will never escape your lowest points.
This is where writing comes in. We must teach ourselves to use words to slow down and organize our thoughts in an attempt to make sense of what we are really thinking and feeling. When you start writing down your experience, it almost becomes like a story. YOUR story. and while grief has no true ending, as the author of that story, you get to choose how you close your various chapters of pain and how you will move forward.
We are all living out our own respective stories, and even though there is only so much we can control, we can choose the direction we think we want our story to go, follow that path to the best of our ability, and see where it takes us.
There is No ‘Getting Over,’ Only ‘Going On’
That is the biggest misconception about loss — that we get over it, or move on from it. That is where we often find ourselves stuck with seemingly no way out, thinking that we have to stop feeling or stop thinking about what we’ve lost in order to consider ourselves healed.
Writing has become a lifeline for me in figuring out how to continue living despite all I’ve lost. The more I write about the things I no longer have, the deeper I understand myself, what matters to me, and how losing so much has begun to change and shape who I am becoming. I’ve always believed that you’re never truly you unless you’re writing — because as a wrier, you are the whole you; you bring every part of yourself to your stories and even leave traces of yourself behind in every sentence you compose.
When we write through our grief, it thus becomes a part of us forever. and that’s how it’s supposed to be. We don’t move past the things we cared about. We figure out how to incorporate those things into our new lives “without” them. We find ways to honor those who are gone. Ways to look back, in a healthy way, on the experiences we can no longer take part in. That is what writing can do for you. It can transform you into a stronger, wiser, more fearless version of yourself. Just because you’ve lost a lot doesn’t mean you yourself have to stay lost.
Meg Dowell is the creator of Brain Rush, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words, and Not a Book Hoarder, celebrating books of all kinds. She is an editor, writer, book reviewer, podcaster, and photographer passionate about stories and how they get made. Learn more
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