Writing The Body

While in graduate school, I attended a summer writing workshop entitled, “Writing the Disaster.” I was fascinated by the idea and wanted to explore it, but once I got there, I felt I had nothing from which to draw—nothing I considered disastrous when I compared my spare life to others’. It’s all relative, I know, but still felt my troubles were small ones. The teacher told a story of her forebears who had fled as refugees from her ancestral country. She spoke of children in tightly packed vehicles eating strawberries; while in the countryside, her country-women’s wombs were being cut out. A violent story. A story of real disaster. I was in the early weeks of my first pregnancy—a baby we conceived on our honeymoon in Costa Rica. When I mentioned my fatigue to the teacher and its source, she apologized about her story, although I assured her I drew no parallels. I didn’t know as I struggled to locate disaster during that workshop that this pregnancy would end a few weeks later in a torrent of blood and grief. Over the course of the next three years, I would lose two more babies. I still have to breathe slowly and deliberately over phrases such as lose two more babies. Although the first of the pregnancy losses was almost ten years ago, I’ve never actually written about them except in journals. I’ve only just begun in very recent years to speak about it more openly.

I don’t know how to write about it. What it means to a woman’s body—how to write it?

It’s a huge leap that allows me to share this here in such a vast and open forum. And although I do it willingly and willfully, my body responds—the tightening in my lungs, the tremble in the center of my abdomen, the dull aching in my chest. There was a time—a long time—when I could not speak of it at all and felt a deep need, a paralyzing fear, to conceal it. I never thought I would be able to reveal it. Time, as they say, does heal and I have the joy of my children which soothes. But the difficulty of writing the words still surprises me. I can say the words, although I still hold them close and give them away with care. But writing them is harder. Perhaps it’s the deliberate action of articulating, of conjuring them first in the mind, then the slowness of the pen in hand forming the words on the page. Maybe it’s the permanence of the written word—words on the page don’t dissipate, don’t fade as does the sound of the voice.

We carry in our bodies all the scars of disaster and brushstrokes of happiness. These encounters and events—words spoken to us and by us—caresses and roughnesses, they carve and form us, whittle with a chisel, smooth with a feather. All this we carry in the body. We write our way through trauma, as many words as it takes. We write the pain and we pull it again through the body and it burns the belly, the heart, seizes the breath for the moment. We write the words in order to remove them from the body, contextualize them elsewhere. Sometimes it works. Little by little. We write so the trauma can gain some reasonable sense. To set it into some manageable shape. We write because the pain is too heavy to hold and the words make it lighter.

I’ve only begun to write about this. The words are still difficult and maybe they always will be. I will write what I can and then I will wait for more words.

Experiences of the body, spirit and psyche engender a visceral response. It takes some space of time to gain healing and perspective—to locate the very words to write the experiences. But from this space and this place of courage, the most authentic of truths and voice can emerge. I can’t rush it; I won’t write it before I am able. I allow the trauma—the disaster—to migrate through my body and place itself where it will, and leave its marks. I will feel the roundness of its presence. Survive it. Take notes and journal it—when I am ready, I will simply know.

I write this here; although as I do, I am filled with a palpable fear and some disbelief that I can and write it here. I write it because to do so I arrive at some expansiveness in my body. I feel bigger and there is spaciousness for my organs and bones, for my breath—it bestows a strength. I write it because, in some small but not insignificant way, it makes me free.

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