By Sonya Ewan
I believe we should not ignore or dismiss our fears of the writing, but, rather, befriend those fears. – Jeannine Ouellette
I counted twice. Exactly seventy-eight times, my developmental editor had suggested I write more on how I felt about events in my memoir. That process—delving deeper into repressed and unexpressed emotions and coaxing them forth with a promise of potential book success and the bonus of greater emotional maturity—took me six-and-a-half, early-pandemic months. It felt like forever.
Growing up, I hadn’t been given permission by my mom, an adherent of toxic positivity, to express feelings and emotions of the negative variety. I’d felt those feelings regardless, of course. But they arrived as flashes that I quickly trapped and stashed out of conscious range. Not acknowledging my anger and other uncomfortable feelings enabled me to survive the infuriating circumstances of my upbringing.
My denial left me woefully unable to describe how I felt and devoid of the vocabulary to try. One day, it occurred to me to google it. So, I typed How does a person who’s been through [insert experience] feel? And a list of options appeared!
Googling offered a jumping point for me, though it seemed almost sly. Was I being swayed by the power of suggestion? I sat with the results until I was confident which answer reflected how I had genuinely felt.
Also, in the pandemic’s first year, Dr. Marc Brackett, Yale professor and author of Permission to Feel , hosted a free Zoom book club. I bought his book and joined. In the back pages, Brackett offers a feelings grid that he calls “The Mood Meter.” It became another tool that enabled me to pinpoint which emotions best matched my reactions to past events. What a gift for someone who struggled to not only find the words to describe her feelings, but to even recognize discomfort.
Brackett encouraged us to check in with ourselves throughout the day to avoid having our unprocessed emotions derail us from our productivity goals.
“How’s it going?” my husband would ask before sitting nearby to eat his lunch.
“Fine!” I always answered before taking a beat to notice that, in fact, my feet were cold, my arms covered in goosebumps. The honest answer would have been chilly, followed by irritated and fatigued . But instead of pulling on socks or a hoodie, I sat in shorts and flipflops, shivering and working less efficiently.
Clearly, I needed more practice checking in.
Adding all those feelings to my manuscript significantly increased my word count, so I offered a manuscript beta read trade to a co-writing colleague to check whether my prose was still smooth. Under “Areas for Growth,” her second bullet point read, I kept wanting to ask, how did you feel about that? What was that like?
In the moment, my reaction was, Ugh. Seriously?
Despite all my effort, I had to admit that yielding to emotional awareness was an ongoing inner fight. That distracted me from the importance of her question’s second half: What was that like? (It sucked— duh .) But I realized that in many instances, I had been too afraid to say.
The following day, I sat at my desk intending to revise. Instead, I wrote an essay about a never-shared experience of being sexually assaulted in high school. Maybe it was a warming up—a practice run—for writing about other experiences I’d kept secret.
The following week, I sat on the toilet and sobbed over the seemingly never-ending task of lowering myself into a space of anguish over my mother-daughter relationship for the sake of my memoir. Wrung out, I trudged to my desk to face the fear of recounting how I felt, but again, a previously unshared experience sprang forward instead.
The story had to do with my mom’s drinking. In my original draft, I’d made casual references to it before hastily diverting from what I’d just revealed. Now, I allowed myself to describe the time my intoxicated mom pretended she might burn my arm with her cigarette—and that led me into how I’d felt during that experience. Next, I googled trying not to attract attention . That evoked how embarrassed by my mom and wholly powerless I had felt.
There, at last, was the answer.
I’ve been through therapy twice: to save my marriage and to save myself from a mom who has (undiagnosed) narcissistic personality disorder. The therapy, along with googling, prompted me to answer questions in my memoir so that I could engage with my readers.
The answers often aren’t easy, but the rewards are generous when I’m courageous enough to authentically answer the question throughout the day and in my writing, How am I feeling? And if it takes Google to get to the answer, so be it.
____
Sonya Ewan has contributed online to Brevity Blog, HerStry , and FiveMinuteLit and published features in print with Women’s Health and The Hockey News . She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two air-purifying plants. Find her on Instagram and read her introspective blog .
All Rights Reserved Book Blog