The Power of Writing to Reset Your Mind
It took me almost twenty years to write my first book.
I had the idea fairly soon after I’d left the Disney College Program, a seasonal internship wherein I’d lived in a dorm and driven the Walt Disney World Monorail.
My friends and I regularly recounted our outlandish adventures and I knew there was a story there. Honestly, I think there’s a comedy movie buried in there somewhere. I was just unsure how to write it. That didn’t stop me from working on it, but it did stop me from finishing it.
It was two years after Covid when I picked it up again for the first time in probably ten years.
The woman I loved had broken my heart for the hundredth time. A year later my best friend of twenty years had done the same. He was one of the people from my time in the Disney College Program. I think that’s what compelled me to start working on it again.
I was hurt.
The people I loved had let me down. Worse, they had dismissed me in a way that made me wonder if they had ever really cared at all.
It was like pouring your heart into a glass with a hole in the bottom.
So I got to work.
It started with her. My whole life started with her. And though she is a minor character in the story, she’s an important one.
Twenty years will rust and ruin your memory, so I had to reconstruct mine by combing through my past like my own personal Elijah Snow. But as I did so; as the story came together and the writing took off, something happened.
I relived my life. Writing is the closest thing we have to time travel.
In reliving those times, I addressed them. I pulled out the pain and the hurt and I said what needed to be said to those old ghosts, even though they couldn’t hear them.
In one story, I recounted a falling out that I’d had with my roommate, Buffalo. By chance, he found the story on my website and we ended up talking about it.
Some of the other people in the book also read it. And they loved it.
They confirmed that it wasn’t all just silly stories that I’d made up. They were real for all of us.
I’m not an expert on trauma. What I can say is that your demons have power over you only so long as you hide from them. Writing them is the most effective way I know to cage them.
