Writing is an act of creation that is inherently healing. I wrote my path out of an eating disorder into recovery. I turned what had happened to me into art. I was no longer victim of anything. I had become a creator.
Writing—poetry, fiction, non-fiction, or journal-keeping—is vital to the recovery process. A pen in hand opens doors.
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, once commented that writing "is a matter of necessity and that you write to save your life is really true and so far it's been a very sturdy ladder out of the pit."
Making art out of disorder brings order and empowerment. Emotions come alive, find release, then cool. To record situations, emotions, and relationships rescues them from the blur of busy days, the familiarity of the old, and the discomfort of the new. Louise DeSalvo explains in Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, "As in photography, writing acts for me as a kind of fixer, like the chemical—the fixer—you use to stabilize the image."
I turned to poetry to better understand the dysfunction of my disease and the stumbling steps through my recovery. Michael Henry, executive director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, believes "We write these moments because we do not know what we know about them."
Journal writing provides a steadfast companion and mind-dump that brings daily clarity to what's really going on. But crafting a poem introduces different value. The required edits of content and the ongoing scrutiny of the elements of language and poetry (word choice, line breaks) bring depths of insight and release. The event of the poem remains a life circumstance but becomes also something viewed from a distance.
Clarity, integration, and wholeness come from literally looking at one's life at arm's length. Reading other poets was my starting point. That gave me permission to look closely at moments of my life. It taught me to express, to leap, and to make connections.
Now situations and complexities once so shameful I had swallowed them whole sit calmly on the page.
To contact Carolyn Jennings or to learn more about the award-winning Hunger Speaks: a memoir told in poetry or the Writing the Wings of Our Recovery workshops, see : a memoir told in poetry is also available on Amazon.
