\n<\/p>\n
For years now, I\u2019ve read and loved the writings of Penelope Lively, a Cairo-born British author. <\/p>\n
In addition to her Booker-prize-winning Moon Tiger<\/em>, my other favourite of hers is Making it Up<\/em>\u2014a 2026 novel based on pivotal moments in the author\u2019s own life. However, instead of writing down or fictionalizing those moments, Lively asks: \u201cWhat if?\u201d As in: \u201cWhat might have happened or unfolded if, back when, I had chosen or followed a different or alternate path?\u201d<\/p>\n The result? A book of made-up counter-stories.<\/p>\n Recently, as I prepared for a podcast interview in which I knew I\u2019d be asked for my writer\u2019s origin story, I posed Lively\u2019s \u201cwhat-if\u201d question to myself. <\/p>\n That long-ago winter evening in the late 1970s, when I sat \u2018doing homework\u2019 in my girlhood room in Ireland, what if I hadn\u2019t abandoned that convent-school textbook to instead start scribbling my thoughts in a notebook?<\/p>\n Sans<\/em> writing, who would I have become? Who would I be now, in middle age? Would I have discovered or found a different, non-writing path to an inner or existential life? Or would my life have centred around day jobs, paying the mortgage, shopping for groceries and choosing my next Netflix series?<\/p>\n Unlike Penelope Lively, I flunked my own \u201cwhat if\u201d game. I couldn\u2019t conjure or imagine a non-writing life. Or maybe I just didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n What I did do was sit down to write a sort of meta-analysis. In my present-day house and journal, I wrote about why I sit down to write. Then I grouped those \u201cwhys\u201d into six named categories. <\/p>\n As a kid growing up in rural Ireland, I loved to play with words and languages. Song lyrics, poetry snippets, lists and conjugations of regular and irregular verbs in English, our native Irish and classroom French. <\/p>\n I recited words inside my head. Tried them on for size. Chewed on them like soft candy. Why? Because words were (and are) my emotional \u201cblankie.\u201d <\/p>\n Thankfully, on and beyond the journal pages, this \u2018words-for-comfort\u2019 factor has endured.<\/p>\n After secondary school, I left that rural home to start college in Dublin. There, I was a year-plus younger than the other first-year students. I also had what we\u2019d now tag as \u2018imposter syndrome.\u2019 So I did what I already knew: Some nights, I sat in my dormitory room writing.<\/p>\n After college, I worked in a lonely, watchful town, where again I turned to my pen and notebook. Ditto for when I landed in a small, snowy city in upstate New York. Back then, I\u2019d never have guessed that international researchers would publish more than 300 clinical studies on the\u00a0evidence-based health benefits\u00a0(emotional and physiological) of writing down our thoughts and feelings. I just knew that writing made me feel more like me, while also making things more manageable.<\/p>\n Haven\u2019t we all encountered that person who says, \u201cThis is how\u00a0you\u00a0should feel\u201d about something that happened to you? Or we\u2019ve encountered those who try to top our stories with one of their own (\u201cmy grief or illness is worse than yours\u201d). <\/p>\n As writers, it\u2019s our job and our privilege to protect and lay claim to our own stories. It\u2019s also our job to mine and preserve our own deeply-held truths\u2014all by writing them down.<\/p>\n Writing lets me take some control over past events or lingering memories\u2014over which, otherwise, I often have little or no control. It lets me tell and validate my lived experiences as an immigrant in the United States. I write to be heard in our loud, hyper-digitized world, where it\u2019s easy to be silenced and where I\u2019ve often silenced myself.<\/p>\n Sometimes, my journal entries morph into a public-facing essay or story about immigration, displacement or racial and social class disparities. Even in those early, scattered drafts, I know that my ability to write for and about social justice is a privilege that\u2019s derived from my race, literacy and current social class. It\u2019s a privilege that many others don\u2019t have. So writing, I hope, lets me use my privileges for some public good.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t belong to any formal church or religious practice, so writing is my spiritual home.\u00a0Also, in times of crisis, pain and loss, writing is my first release or Band-Aid. Even when it\u2019s just a few sentences, the words on the page bring some measure of relief, clarification and comfort.<\/p>\n The researchers mentioned above assure us that writing doesn\u2019t work for all of us, or for all life situations. But at a minimum, it helps us to know ourselves better\u2014to ask ourselves the hard questions or address or readdress our repeating life themes.<\/p>\n In her 2015 memoir, Penelope Lively also does some meta-analysis. In remembering and telling her life story, she analyzes memory itself, describing it as \u201cthe moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around.\u201d Lively later adds: \u201cThis is how we know who we are and where we have been.\u201d For my money, this author\u2019s observations also describe the act of expressive writing.<\/p>\n Or, as the Greek philosopher Socrates put it: \u201cThe unexamined life is not worth living.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00abRELATED READ\u00bb<\/strong> WRITING AFTER AGE 50: Pen a memoir and leave a legacy\u00bb<\/strong><\/p>\n image: Aaron Burden<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For years now, I\u2019ve read and loved the writings of Penelope Lively, a Cairo-born British author. In addition to her<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18211,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Pleasure<\/h3>\n
Feeling better<\/h3>\n
Claiming my stories<\/h3>\n
Being heard<\/h3>\n
\u201cSpeaking\u201d for the voiceless<\/h3>\n
Comfort and spirituality<\/h3>\n
Writing helps us know ourselves better<\/h2>\n
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