Is Writing Hurting You?

Learning how to avoid rumination when writing about personal experiences

The other day, I sat down to write about something that happened to me when I was 13-years-old. It was a horrible incident, and at the time it caused massive friction in some of my most important relationships. However, it happened over 10 years ago, and I’ve barely even thought about it recently.

When I started writing about it, though, I began to feel a rooted toxicity. The action of writing the words on the page describing the event pushed all the emotions from that day into my throat, and suddenly, I wondered if I should stop.

All at once, writing about personal experiences seemed very risky. I’ve confronted that kind of emotional response several times when writing, often sitting in the thick of it for several hours.

When writing upsets you, it’s natural to question the significance of it.

In times when I’ve wanted to overcome emotionally taxing events in life, it’s often been my experience that moving forward in any way will always substantially hurt more than not moving at all. When you’ve fallen into a pit of sharp objects, it will hurt much more to find your way out than it would to sit still forever.

Writing about your experiences can be a form of beginning to navigate the pit. It feels horrible, especially when you first attempt it. It opens up old wounds, perhaps creates new ones and leaves you wondering if this amount of struggling is justified.

You can’t find the right words. You don’t know how to phrase it. Then all of these unanticipated words end up on the page, and you didn’t even realize you felt that way.

I seriously began to wonder if this process was serving me. When I didn’t feel immediately better after purging all the words, like I thought I should, I began to doubt if I should continue to put certain things down on the page.

When I reflected on this experience with a friend, she offered a perspective that seemed so obvious, and yet I hadn’t ever thought of it before. When you write, are you digging up memories and becoming suspended with them, or are you examining the events in your life and coming to new conclusions?

In the past, when I simply listed the events of a given experience, I was much more likely to ruminate in the feelings it provoked in me. When I began to write about why it happened, what it meant, and how it could be avoided moving forward, I found that I was actively processing and beginnning to accept otherwise negative memories.

When you write, are you digging up memories and becoming suspended in them, or are you examining the events in your life and coming to new conclusions?

This perspective allowed me to build a framework to come back to again and again when I write about fraught, personal memories. I found this process to be most helpful with memories I haven’t quite tackled yet, but it has also aided in reinforcing conclusions that I’d already reached. Both, in my opinion, are always worth doing.

It’s challenging to hold yourself accountable when it comes to writing because the process of creating can be one-sided. In a conversation, another person usually affects what you say, why you say it, and how you say it. In writing, only you and your experiences will ultimately decide the finished product.

Unless you have a great editor.