How Writing Found Me: Part one

Sarah Joyce Bryant — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:28:43 +0000

I can still see it – one of only a handful of memories from a heartbreaking childhood – my tiny body curled up, a barely perceptible silhouette of a C, on an over worn, tattered couch. In my hand is a book – an escape from the miserable world that I was living in. When I started school I found a new way to cope: I began to write stories. My head was always bent over my desk writing as the other children socialized, the intoxicating smell of fresh pencil shavings from the silver wall-mounted pencil sharpener fueling my need to reinvent reality. I created a peaceful world bringing a dead, blank page into something full of life and possibility. As I grew older I moved to poetry, frantically writing page after page trying to process the energy that escaped others and seeped into my bones. I could not understand the world around me – the hatred, the unfairness, the loss of control – and I wrote with such fierceness that I developed a callus on my finger which later would serve as a permanent reminder of the long lost passionate love affair I had had with writing.
Eventually my writing became buried underneath my need to be accepted, to be loved. It was drowned in bottle after bottle of alcohol, squelched by motherhood, marriage, and violence. My writing was as lost as I was. As I disconnected from the world, I disconnected from that most essential part of myself. I forgot about what it was like to write, every once in awhile claiming that I wanted to be writer some day. But it was a lost dream, something I never intended to go back to.

Twenty years after I had last picked up a pen to write what crawled within my mind, my world as I knew it was shattered. I lost everything I was attached to, everything I used to define myself. A domestic violence situation made it necessary for me to leave everything behind and start over or risk losing my life and that of my unborn child. I couldn’t have known then, as I cursed the hellish world that I lived in, that I was being led back to the only thing that could reconnect me to what I had lost so long ago, the only thing that could allow me to begin to heal from a lifetime of pain.

Next installment: How Writing Found Me Part II: The Events That Led to a Most Unlikely Reunion

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How Writing Found Me: Part one