How Can You Write About Pain Without Retraumatizing Yourself?

We often write about painful things not in spite of the pain, but because of it—the pain is what tells us that something important occurred.

This is my last full week to work on my book, and so of course every time I look at it, the problems all but leap off the page at me. A problem might be an entire scene I feel shaky about, or a single punctuation mark I’m questioning; I have no sense of scale or objectivity. Anxious as I am, I love this kind of close line-level work—it is my favorite type of writing. I would be thrilled to do it for another year. I’ve got a week.

I have been collecting feedback from my small but mighty group of early readers, some of whom I basically consider book therapists at this point. Last week, one of them asked if I was nervous because the process was rushed, and I had to admit that it was not, at least not entirely: I started this book in 2019. But then my mother got sick, and when I was able to focus on writing again, I realized I would need to scrap nearly everything I had written and start over. I’ve been working on this version for about a year and a half. “If it were a baby, it wouldn’t even have all its teeth yet!” I said, which suddenly seemed to me like a very good point.

“But it’s not a baby,” my friend said gently.

This was always going to be a difficult book to write and a difficult book to stop writing, which is not to say that any book is easy. When I started it, I knew I wanted to write about losing my father, as I was grappling not only with his death, but also the reality of how he died—like too many people in this country, he spent decades unable to access the medical care he needed. At the time, I didn’t know that my mother and I would soon be facing another crisis, or that the story I was working on would take another form in a world mourning millions of COVID-19 deaths. By the time I started over, it seemed as though everyone I knew was traumatized and grieving, and here I was, spending what little spare time I had writing about trauma and grief.

We often write about painful things not in spite of the pain, but because of it—the pain itself tells us that something important occurred. In the last memoir workshop I taught, a student asked me, How do you write about something painful without constantly retraumatizing yourself? One of the things I said in response was that I try to recognize when I may not be ready to write about something, and give myself the time I need.

But this project afforded me few opportunities to protect myself, because the pain was both recent and ongoing, and because I wrote most of it during a pandemic. I had to find ways to write about things that hurt, and would always hurt. At minimum, I wanted to try to do so without feeling worse, or losing ground that I’d fought for.

I’m fortunate to have gone into it with a community of good people looking out for me. I talked with my editor and my agent, and with others I trusted, when I needed advice. I talked with my family and loved ones, who care about me far more than they care about my work or anything I produce, when I needed perspective. I kept going to therapy, because I knew that this book was not therapy, not catharsis, and ultimately not how I was going to heal. When I struggled to write, when I had setbacks, I tried to tell myself that was okay.

I did not always take care of myself as I should have, but I did what I could to be as patient and gentle with myself as possible. If I wrote an especially hard scene, I might give myself a few days’ grace before tackling another. I didn’t work in a linear fashion; I skipped around a lot, focusing on what felt doable on a given day, knowing that I’d need to go back and fill in events I couldn’t bear to describe yet. I made walking a part of my process, because having that time away from my desk and away from my words, time to think and feel and move and reconnect with myself, was crucial. I learned that I couldn’t work late into the night, or I would be unable to fall asleep afterward, so I gave myself a book curfew and tried to stick to it. I read as often as I could, especially poetry, never more so than on days when I found I couldn’t write.

I tried to lean into the dark, unexpected humor of grief when I found it, and recognize the places where light could seep through the cracks. I reminded myself why I was writing this story in the first place, in the hope that others might read it and feel less alone, because I have always felt that this is partly how personal writing justifies its existence. And on the hardest days, I told myself, This will take as long as it takes. If you aren’t ready to write it now, you can wait.

Grief is, as many have noted, love in another shape. As another friend told me: It’s how you know that something precious was lost. It can be a powerful place to write from, which is not to say that a writer must do so, or that we ever owe anyone else our wounds. Eventually I decided that it was not only unavoidable, but also perhaps important for me to feel the immediacy, the constantly shifting nature of loss, while I worked on this story. After so many things I didn’t choose, I chose that much—not to offer a clear-cut answer or tidy lesson, but to try to name and make sense of where I was. Where others who mourn may be, too.

Now I’m running out of time with this book, and it scares me, if I’m honest, stepping back from something that still feels so immediate, gently prying my own fingers away from a story in which much remains unsettled. But in the end, every book is a process, and this one is also about a process—one that all of us will face, and one that, in my case, has yet to end. I’ve said this before: The things we write and share are like time capsules, holding the moments we choose to write about at the precise moment we write them. If I had written this story decades from now, it would be entirely different, because I would be different. Yes, with additional time and distance, parts of it might have been easier to write; it might have felt more conclusive, more settled. It would not necessarily be “better.” And it would not be the book I needed to write and read right now.