Writing Trauma and Grief

I have just read a beautiful flash fiction – prize winning – Fearful Symmetry by Holly Barrett. (Here)

It is about a complicated grief. Grief for a sibling never known, a family living with trauma. I have a lump in my throat that refuses to be swallowed.

Beauty and trauma. Grief and the carefully chosen words, wrapping around each other in tangled fragile sentences.

I came away with a recognition of my dilemma as a writer. Why am I writing? Why do I share stories? To create beautiful worlds? To make people laugh? To offer escapism or to articulate truths? And the very real question – how deep or dark am I prepared to go?

When I find a character I want to write about, I fall in love. I want them to be o.k. I worry that my temperament is more social worker than writer.

How do I work with my deepest fears?

What are you afraid of Mummy?

Moths.

Did I tell you about the time one landed on my foot just as the hand came out of the grave whilst watching Carrie?

But what are you really afraid of?

Losing you. Messing you up so bad, you leave me. Knowing that when you cross roads you rely on those around you. That your thoughts get deep and dark and distrustful and you might…

I can’t write about the wretched fear at my core.

Let’s make up a story together instead. Remember how we used to smile at the Magic Hannah tales we built together and the world she inhabited where everything was better once she wriggled her nose and fluttered her fingers.

I used to write about trauma and abuse, for a living, as an academic. This meant that there was a way to structure the words. I could start with aims and methodology. Lives torn about were ‘findings’. There was discussion and bullet points of recommendations. And in the empty spaces on a bulleted list were the threats and fears of working with people who needed healing and not being enough for them.

Bulleted lists don’t work in creative writing. Creativity is about filling those blank spaces on the page with a fiction that faces the truth.

I don’t want to write about grief, trauma and abuse, but I’ve learned that sometimes stories find me anyway. That glibness on the page also leaks out fear and suspicion and doubt.

I learned so much from sitting at the edge of a focus group and listening to women speak their truths. I learned that hard lives, fear and dismissal are also accompanied by a knowing humour and wit. That trauma is mixed with friendships and company. That worse than any abuse is not having a witness to your experience, not having your words believed, of being belittled by people who weren’t there.

I’ve also stood on a stage and embellished my own truths to make people laugh. It is powerful and thrilling. It is, I have been told by others, brave. But I don’t feel courageous. I feel happy and in a moment. Reciting words, reacting to an audience, co-creating an atmosphere and a joke. Audiences love the dark, the flippant, the silly, the wise, the joy, to groan at a tortured pun or to giggle at the unexpected.

So, how dark am I willing to go? Will I ever be able to write about the tragedies of a life without feeling a pain I want to dismiss?

I think my truth is that I will have a locked box of some experiences that are just for me (or maybe a paid therapist). That box will occasionally spring open and fragments of trauma will leak into the world. But they are just fragments. No trauma is bigger than the life that lives it. No story is only ever grief. And all stories, no matter how weird, will resonate with someone.