Скачать или смотреть How memoir can turn pain to joy

If you're struggling to write painful memories, here's the flipside. 👇

Writing memoir inevitably means we go back to the past—and all the emotions we had then as well as the emotions we have now about the moments of our lives. 🌀

But we have an advantage: we bring our current selves, sitting safely in the space where we're writing down the words. 👭 The present self has distance and perspective, and can bring compassion to help the past self as we revisit the memory. The present self can help regulate the intensity of the memory in new ways our past self couldn't. 🧘

The result, in my experience, is that the emotion is fuller because it contains what both selves feel. Pain and compassion, anxiety and soothing, fear and safety. For me, this is what joy is: the experience of holding all of it. 🌈

What's cool is that all these emotions get naturally encoded in the words we choose, the way we phrase things, the rhythm of our language. It comes out that way effortlessly if I stay in the moment as I write. Readers can feel the complexity of this experience.

That's what makes memoir therapeutic—both to write and to read.