/stares at opening paragraph. recognizes the point./
Anyway. The resultant grapevine set in front of me a study wherein some psychologist found that people who had been through major trauma and processed it through writing about it were better able to cope with life than their cohorts who did not carry out the same exercise. Some underlying theory about how the brain did not fully "let go" of the experience until it was recorded in words. And apparently it was not enough to talk about it. According to some commenters who claimed to have been part of the study, it was not even enough to type it out. It had to be done in handwriting.
(I have thoughts about that last bit, being rather addicted to typing over writing, but I'll pass that over for now.)
It makes me think back to my obsessive journaling in college and young adulthood. I still have them all...dozens of books crammed with my thoughts and experiences over five years or so. I've never re-read any of them. The couple times I picked one up and scanned it disabused me of the notion that what I wrote was all that interesting, and beyond a few nostalgic sighs and chuckles over a few passages, my chief emotion was embarassment. It was all, as the young folks say, very cringe. We really are quite foolish at 19, 20.
I don't think anything I wrote then was trauma-processing, though I had plenty of it to process.
I think all my trauma came out in fiction-writing. Fanfiction, more specifically, since that's been my primary creative outlet. I poured all my childhood abandonment and abuse into a character backstory, and all my hopes and self-actualization into her triumphant escape. I gave her the adulthood I wanted--one that I did mostly achieve for years. But I haven't been able to write, now, in over a year, and I wonder if it's because my own story has turned down a path on which I can't bring myself to carry her along with me. One of us needs a happy ending, but imagining hers no longer brings me the joy it once did.
My initial post spawned a lot of comments from folks of a similar age undergoing similar adjustments. This had its pros and cons. Misery does love company, and there was comfort in solidarity--but it also felt demoralizing, a sort of confirmation that this partial loss of identity must be inevitable somehow if everyone experiences it. I was assured that creativity doesn't die but often just takes a new form, as though even the Muses obey the Law of Conservation of Mass. But I'm not sure I feel the truth of that settling anywhere. When I lie awake at 4 am, lost not in the vivid fantasies that once sustained me during such moments but in a spiral of anxiety and grief, it's hard to believe in any hypothetical future phoenix buried somewhere beneath the ashes, biding its time.
Problem is, this spills over into practical areas. Loss of creative energy seems comorbid with loss of physical and emotional energy, and impossible to know whether any of them are causative for the others. Maybe it's a physical issue underneath everything; maybe if I could just sleep decently, everything would improve. But wish in one hand and spit in the other...
Forcing myself to write anything at all feels like maybe the only thing I can do, so here I am. I was going to say "shouting into the void", but it feels more like just...whimpering into my coffee. Which is still, perhaps, healthier than following my impulse to go say all this to chatGPT just to have something to talk to that responds like a sympathetic adult.
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