Take your trauma out for a walk
While these days I have a reputation for an even temper, that wasn’t always the case. Early in my career, everything bothered me. The many indignities, big and small, of being a woman in tech, were not yet the subject of humor and creativity, and I had no defenses against them. Every piece of feedback was an echo of That Guy in college who thought all women were minority tokens to use in recruiting brochures.
Fortunately I had a manager who had his own anger issues that he’d spent a long time working through. Maybe because he was Canadian and the cognitive dissonance of two angry Canadians was a little much, but he was good with me. Every time he sensed I was getting upset, he’d come by with a smile and ask if we could go for a walk. We’d walk around the grassy California pathways for a half an hour or more, while I got whatever it was off my chest. Usually, just articulating the situation made me feel better.
Then, one particularly bad month it was… a lot. I took a two-week break from work and went to Ithaca, New York to decompress. It was early spring, a perfect time for exhausting walks, in air that was still a little crisp. I walked, and I wrote The Divine Comedy of the Tech Sisterhood. I stopped writing only to eat, sleep and walk. The entire piece just arrived in my mind whole cloth, and burst onto the page. It was cathartic, rather like spring itself.
Writing has always been that, and if I sometimes forget in the chase to complete a scene or make a submission or meet the requirements of a genre and the writing seems a little dead, I stop and ask myself which of my childhood traumas I’m trying to exorcise (exercise?) right now. Then I gently take it for a walk around the neighborhood. If that’s not enough, I fly somewhere new, forcing my mind out of the rut of the everyday, and give myself a place to walk, and tread new ground with old thoughts. The immediacy of articulating that experience is usually more true than if I simply tried to explain. (Never explain, any writing teacher will tell you that).
Driving by Starlight is about my experiences growing up in Saudi Arabia (and apparently only £4.99 on Amazon UK right now). But I couldn’t go back there to explore and research, so I drew heavily on a lot of other walks, particularly in Iran. I saw myself and my childhood best friend, and Leena and Mishail, healed and together in these moments below:
And of course, actually reconnecting with a childhood best friend helped a lot.
Writing is hard, and it can be lonely, but doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, if you take your trauma out for a walk, the new friends and sights and smells it discovers can be enough to turn it into a creative muse instead.