Have you ever heard someone say,  after a traumatic or startling event: “I just can’t talk about it right now.”  They may describe themselves as “lost for words,” as if the right words have not yet been invented to pinpoint feelings with precision. This is a normal, healthy reaction. An early response to grief, shock or surprise may be simply unintelligible sound, like a keening from the soul.

When the need for self-expression arrives

      Eventually, the need for detail, for lyrics, emerges. We want to convey how we feel to readers and listeners, or just to ourselves. Some people will re-find their voice by writing poems, essays and memoirs or keeping a journal.  Music might be a natural choice. For those who are visually oriented, the voice may speak through a painting, a photograph or a sculpture. Color, stone, landscape and abstraction contain their own vocabulary.

The power of intuition

        I believe that intuition tells us when we’re ready to codify feelings; to unpack experiences by naming them with words or portraying them in images. For some, the impulse to jot down notes or keep a journal might happen spontaneously. Anne Frank, yearning for a friend during her attic confinement hiding from the Nazis, named her diary “Kitty” and wrote her daily life in vivid detail using all five senses.  Others who are finding their voice might need to fictionalize the story and tell it as if it happened to someone else. It can take months or years to find a form that suits the story you want to tell.

Don’t worry about rules

        Whatever the starting point, it’s important to be merciful to yourself and acknowledge that there are no rules for when it should begin; reflection and expression after an unspecified period of time coincides with the natural healing process. You’ll be ready when you’re ready, and when it does finally begin some have described the experience as walking forward in circles, or taking four steps forward and two back. It may take decades  to begin to articulate your feelings. Judith Barrington in Writing the Memoir, says, “Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring …was first published some forty years after some of the events it describes and demonstrates an extraordinary insight into childhood – one that clearly required many years of reflection before it could be written.”

The right time will come

         I began writing about my husband’s death in Vietnam more than thirty years after it happened, starting with a fictionalized one-act play in the 1990s about a young woman whose boyfriend is killed in war. Today, my story has become an 84,000-word memoir. But, even a work that has simmered in the mind and on the page for many years does not pop out of the oven as if magically spun into a cake of gold overnight. It takes its own time. Even after writing the memoir, I am still making sense of that time in my life and writing essays that relate to that experience.

Go with the flow

       Once the writing commences, starting with words, sentences and finally scenes recalled bit by bit, there is a wonderful and reciprocal process that takes place during the discipline of continued writing. As the volume of writing increases, the need to structure the story and make sense of what happened begins to build. The eventual architecture, the beginning, middle and end, emerges through trial and error, and revision. The writer’s bonus is that she discovers: “oh, so that’s what happened to me,” or, “that’s what was happening around me,” or, “now I finally have words to say what it was like to live that.”

      And what about the reader? Is there a benefit to reading the life experience of another? Sven Birkerts in The Art of Time in Memoir, says that, the way the story is told leads the reader through the healing process of the writer. The writer’s then and now stir  the reader’s sense of past and present.   The voice of the writer is heard and received and becomes part of the healing process of the reader.

Find the form of expression that suits you best

     I speak mainly about writing here because this is the medium that I know best, but all paths through the expressive arts can lead us in the same direction. To find our voice through writing, music or visual art is a gift to ourselves and others and reconnects us with the freedom, joys and pleasures that might have seemed lost forever after a difficult life experience.

A little sign on my desk reminds me daily: “Stay calm and write on.”