the point of writing

What does it mean to confess on the page? To acknowledge a hurt experienced or a harm enacted? What does it mean to try to heal from a trauma or set of traumas, and how does writing parallel that healing?

“The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday.”

When my students walk through the threshold of my classroom, they not only carry the weight of these experiences with them, but they also reproduce negative and destructive interactions with one another because they haven’t often experienced a world of safety and empathy.

In fact, the process of brainstorming and writing about meaningful aspects of your life can be an incredible way to practice self-reflection and think more deeply about who you are, what you value, who you hope to be in the world,