The Midwest has tornadoes; the eastern seaboard has its hurricanes and super storms. A large part of the country just dug out from another snow storm, while here in California, we’re wondering how long our water supply will sustain the state. Wherever we live, we complain about the weather. We look north, west, east or south and most often decide where we live is where we want to be. But for those of us who have an enduring love affair with California, we remember droughts of the past, wildfires that occur year after year, and more, we expect the earth to move from time to time. It’s not the sudden jolt of first love or attraction we might have felt for the golden state. Rather, it’s a somewhat predictable occurrence, like tornadoes or hurricanes in other parts of the country, never far from conscious thought. It’s the accepted risk of living along the earth’s fault lines, whether the San Andreas, Hayward, Oak Ridge or any number of smaller ones. Sooner or later, we’ll feel the earth heave, the ground undulate beneath our feet and sometimes, disaster. Some of the most memorable jolts have demolished highways and buildings, as in the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1992 Landers quakes in Northern and Southern California.
This potentially destructive movement is created by the sliding boundaries or fault lines which define the earth’s tectonic plates. California has many of these faults, and even though the plates move past one another a couple of inches each year due to their irregularity, we’re often unaware of the motion. But as the plates continue to push against each other, they sometimes lock and may not move for years. Stress builds along the fault, and the strain threshold is finally exceeded, energy is suddenly released, causing the plates slip several feet at once. Waves are sent out in all directions and felt as tremors, or at worst, a damaging earthquake.
Several years ago, I began teaching a course on writing to heal for UCLA extension’s Writers’ Program, initially naming it “Writing from the Fault Lines.” I chose the title because my language and the metaphors I use are influenced—like many writers– by the landscape where I live. Writing out of difficult life events often reveals the vulnerable landscape of our psyches, where painful experiences of our pasts may be buried. We cope and may seem “fine” on the surface, but when the stress created by something like a cancer diagnosis or unexpected loss or trauma, stress builds along our psychological fault lines, and we may experience the sudden tremor of raw and difficult emotions–fear, anger, grief—and the feeling that our lives are literally falling apart.
When I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer, followed by heart failure several years ago, I filled page after page of my journals with disbelief, unanswerable questions and even guilt, as if I was somehow to blame for my physical illness. But it didn’t stop there. Old scars opened to painful losses I’d soldiered through and buried years ago. My “real” story was not about a very treatable cancer; it lay beneath the surface, where old wounds were buried, building up pressure, begging for release.
It’s something I witness frequently in my cancer writing groups. The experience of cancer brings us to our knees. Life as we knew it is a thing of the past. Yet beneath the surface, there are often other unresolved emotions, other painful memories or traumatic events which have lain dormant but, like the locked plates of the earth, building up pressure inside us. Those memories are often triggered by the most benign of writing prompts, rushing out like unleashed dams of emotion and tumbling to the page. Whether in a cancer writing groups or the transformational writing course I continue to teach for UCLA extension (Transformational Writing: Writing to Heal & Make Life into Art), writing our healing stories often takes us beyond the “presenting” hardship, and in writing, we begin to plumb the depths of our lives, bringing into the open what we could not do before.
Emotions can inspire us or hold us hostage. Negative emotions–anger, fear or feelings of unworthiness–accumulate, just as pressure along the earth’s plates. They weaken our ability to fend off illness, depression or disease. Writing allows us, if we let it, to translate those negative emotions into words, make the connections between what we feel and why, and begin to understand or even forgive ourselves and others. It is in the act of writing and sharing our stories that we release the pressure of old wounds, that we begin to heal.
This week, try going deeper in your writing; explore what stories linger beneath the surface. Write from your fault lines.
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
(Bertolt Brecht)
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