Left home long ago? Seek connectedness in writing

Today’s concept of home can be blurry for some of us. In some cases, home is a place far away from your birth country. In today’s world, you can be displaced voluntarily or against your will from what you considered home until the time you decided to leave or were forced to do so.

It takes time to assume that you have been adopted into a new land. It involves learning from your new countrymen some of their customs and traditions. You do it out of respect and to be able to join in their celebrations. Meanwhile, your past rituals on anything from cooking to spending time with the extended family are left behind.

The novelty of your adoptive homeland at the beginning might fulfil your social and personal needs. As time passes by, though, it is very satisfactory to reconnect with your roots. One way in which you can achieve this is by remembering stories that reflect the happiness of your past. Make a list of what your birth country or previous homeland offered you. Writing a gratitude letter to the friends and relatives you left behind has a very powerful effect on your wellbeing.

Ripples from creative writing

I was very happy to learn that my first cousins - with whom I haven’t met in 15 years because I have refrained myself from visiting my birth country due to insecurity - were talking about my books during a family gathering. This was one of the many family gatherings I haven’t been able to attend due to being away from my previous home.

One of my first cousins I had not heard from in YEARS sent me a direct message commenting on how hooked she was with a book that I wrote three years ago. She said another one of my cousins had given her the book. She was pleasantly surprised and wanted to read more of my books. 

Three times a winner

It is the third time that a close member of my extended family connects with me again after years of being disconnected, after reading my first book. Somehow reading my autobiographical novel brought them close to me again or for the first time. Maybe the fact that I opened myself up in a book allowed them to discover the real me, and any misunderstanding was forgiven.

Your takeaway

If you are living away from home, I invite you to write about the happy moments you lived there. Share them with the people who are part of your story. And let their reading do the rest.

Creating a story in your mind heals too

Do you wish you had the time to write but somehow never get round to it? You don't have to write down a story in order to create it.

The healing power of writing lays in the way it allows us to create stories based on our own awkwardnesses. Fiction allows you to create ANY story based on your own experience and make it take any turn you are too afraid to admit to yourself you wished it followed.

Creative writing is based on having a time and a space to put our ideas down on paper. When used as a therapeutical tool, you are allowed to destroy what you have written down, especially if you've let your anger loose. In the absence of time, you can still let your feelings out as you create the story in your mind, purposely.

I wouldn't suggest you harm a loved one in your story but I would definitely encourage you to stop them from doing or saying what hurts you. If it's too painful to write a short story about you and that person, get out of the story and write about characters A and B, inspired by this particular situation that feels too awkward to even think about. You will be surprised as to how much you can discover about your own feelings and about how you would feel if things were different.

In my own experience, I've felt the healing effect of realising that there was a lot of drama in my own mind. In some cases, the simple exposition of a situation can make you understand that what bothers you is no longer there or that you are a more mature person than when you felt aggravated the first time and you can let go of a resentment that only harms you.

Why don't you give it a try? Next time you take time to walk or you get stuck in traffic, don't allow your mind to wander. Take control of your own thoughts and deal with that issue that bothers you in a proactive way. Have that conversation you've been avoiding, create those circumstances that have been missing and let me know if you have felt the powerful healing effect of creating your own story.

Writing for divorcees

People going through a divorce were used as subjects in a research to analise the effects of writing on general health indicators such as blood pressure and heart rate.

A recent study by Bourassa and Allen (2017) looked at three groups of divorcees who were asked to write for 20 minutes on three occasions over a period of almost 8 months.

Alexis Blue of medicalexpress.com explains that there was a creative writing group, asked to write about their pain, a second group who were asked to write about their feelings within the framework of a narrative with a definite beginning, middle and end—essentially telling the story of the end of their marriage, and a control group, asked to write about their day-to-day activities without considering their feelings.

The results showed that there was no difference between the control group and the divorcees in the creative writing group, whereas the narrative writing group showed the best levels of blood pressure and the most variable heart rate, which are both a sign of good health.

The leading researcher Bourassa explains what makes narrative expressive writing good for the heart.

"To be able to create a story in a structured way—not just re-experience your emotions but make meaning out of them—allows you to process those feelings in a more physiologically adaptive way. The explicit instructions to create a narrative may provide a scaffolding for people who are going through this tough time," Bourassa said. "This structure can help people gain an understanding of their experience that allows them to move forward, rather than simply spinning and re-experiencing the same negative emotions over and over."

Read more at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-05-narrative-journaling-heart-health-post-divorce.html#jCp

In a previous study, five years earlier, asking divorcees to write about their feelings just hindered healing for them. They also looked at three groups, in the same research centre, the University of Arizona, and found that the health indicators from the groups that carried out either form of creative writing were worse off than those who wrote about mundane tasks. They explained it in terms of the repetitive effect of going over the reasons for the divorce and the painful feelings with creative writing, in people who were already keen to understand what was happening to them. For that group of almost 100 subjects, it turned out that writing about their daily activities took their mind off rumination over the causes of their marital separation. Read more at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-post-divorce-journaling-hinder.html

It is interesting how the results changed over a period of five years. This could be reflecting a more empathetic and open-minded world in which people do not need to ruminate on the causes of their divorce.

Would love to read your comments. Do you have experience with creative writing?