Personal Writing is Important!

This chapter reminded me the very reasons why I love personal writing (especially the classes I’ve taken here, which include Personal Essay, Intro to Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction and this one). I had been so accustomed to academic writing that when I first took Intro to Creative my sophomore year, and we would freewrite everyday, I was surprised at the things I would pull out from inside of me. These simple prompts would pull up moments I thought I had long forgotten, even some painful ones, all in this way to “move [stories] from a narrative that skims the top of [an] experience to one that unearths it.” (161). While not all of my essays came from sad experiences in my life, I felt really drawn to writing about them when the time did come, because of one of the key points MacCurdy brings up which is that “we sense painful memories even if we cannot verbalize them,” (162) and in writing about these moments, we try to make sense of them. What was even more strange than the magnetic pull towards writing about them was how much relief would come after the fact of writing about them. They didn't make me any more depressed, especially in the moment of remembering the sad moments. Getting it out of me and on the page and writing about how it all had made me feel was indeed therapeutic.

I love the way MacCurdy sectioned her piece. When she was talking about how our brain operates with the limbic system and the amygdala and hippocampus, it really did remind me of Alice Brand’s piece about emotion in the brain. I thought the most compelling part was how she says to think of these moments in images, little snapshots in our mind. Or imagine holding a film camera trying to capture that moment, what was said, heard, touched, smelled? And how did you feel? “Speech which does not integrate concrete images and the emotions those images convey into the concepts that they can produce will not provide a healing function for the individual.” (167). Because that’s where most of the therapeutic nature comes from writing about these difficult, traumatic experiences, placing yourself back in that moment (into those images) and describing how it felt to be back there.

One of my questions for the class comes from MacCurdy’s statement about how traumatic memories leave a mental image in the limbic system – and in the amygdala – to which they are given emotional weight. What about some of those traumatic memories that people have repressed and simply cannot recall? What happens to those and where are they stored? Because I’ve heard of women who have blacked out and cannot remember the trauma of childbirth and how painful it was, does our mind shut off if something is ever too painful physically or mentally?