THEA journalistic writing is my language every day: it has clear rules, straight lines, little space for emotions. It is precise, dry, almost surgical. It tells the facts, it does not flow the soul. The luxury of hearing is rarely granted. I enrolled in a therapeutic writing workshop With the simple and naive idea of carving out my own space. A “room all for itself” to put it with Virginia Woolf. No article to be completed. Only the freedom to write without deadlines. I didn’t expect it to have had an almost magical effect instead. As “unlock”, a sense of lightness and liberation. A return “home”.
Take paper and pen! The benefits of therapeutic writing (tried for you)
The opportunity came thanks to an invitation: a laboratory of “Therapeutic writing in relationships”, led by Alessandra Perotti, Editor, Ghostwriter, Writer Coach and founder of theAcademy of writing. He collaborates with the free University of autobiography of Anghiari, in Tuscany, a “place” that is already a promise of depth in itself.
With me, in the classroom, ten other people: teachers, employees, teachers, aspiring authors, psychotherapy. I approached me, I admit it, even with a tip of satisfying security, the typical one of those who think, sometimes, to know long. “I know how to write, I live there,” I repeated between me and me while I introduced myself. On the other hand, I published various books, including a memoir, Talk to me about her (Cairo), in which I told my experience of denied motherhood. A book that generated an unexpected emotional wave: many women wrote to me to tell me “you also gave voice to my story”. A gift, really.
Learn from therapeutic writing
Therefore, I wondered: apart from some time for me, what could I still learn from writing? Yet, with the passing of the hours, something began to move inside, like when the dots are connected in a puzzle design and finally grab its shape.
“Therapeutic writing care»Explains Alessandra immediately, focusing on the original meaning of the term” Therapeuticus “: not medicine, but well -being. Not diagnosis, but relief. Breath. Clarity. «Treating his own story helps to heal. Understanding some joints of the past allows us to find the thread of our experience and testify to our history ». A revelation his introduction.
Write, a rescue act
After all, when we think of writing, we only think of the perfect phrase, the twist, the novel that holds our breath. We almost never think about what is born in silence and digs within us, often remaining unexpressed. While Alessandra speaks, I see myself again, immersed in my diary with the padlock, to trust only mine, like all the daughters of generation X, before the mobile phone stolen the intimacy of the paper. We wrote to keep us company. We wrote to exist. In how many we did. Who knows if you still do …
“When you cross a thought, an idea or feel a discomfort, I suggest you write»Continues Alessandra. «Because the thought, otherwise, is lost. In the mind, ideas, intuitions, emotions are crowded. Writing then becomes a rescue act: it is to stop a thought over timegive it shape, consistency, weight. In that deep dialogue with ourselves, In that listening that makes itself, something little happens little by little: we feel seen, welcomed, live».
Understand relationships, with therapeutic writing
Then he focuses on the heart of the workshop: the relationships. Invites us to choose one, only one to work on, It is to give us the opportunity to understand it, smooth it, rewrite it. He puts his hands forward: «No relationship is perfect. All, sooner or later, they cross phases of doubt, distance, of misunderstanding. It happens with children, friends, colleagues. Yet they are the space in which we grow. If we do not allow us to really understand them, we stay blocked. If I don’t know what I feel, I live in confusion ». Boom. Hit in the heart.
The analysis of calligraphy (in an era in which nobody writes more by hand)
In the classroom – where, in the meantime, the psychologist Rachele Cresci also enters, author of Lost women – There are those who look, meanwhile, towards the sky, who on the ground, who the white sheet. You can’t think about such deep concepts, on the two feet, with breakfast and lunch still to digest. The worst, however, is to realize me immediately that, apart from the notes for work on the Moleskine, I have not been writing anything more on paper for years, Let alone a letter or a series of thoughts.
Writing to whom, therefore, and on what? How did Chiara Ferragni do in Sanremo 2023 to the “little girl”? To a lost love? To my future or to the past as a proust?
Meanwhile, Alessandra He advises us to write by hand because “stimulates creativity, concentration and memory” and to analyze the calligraphy that “changes with the emotional tone”. It also suggests that we remain silent before starting because the first thought is often only superficial (such as the shopping list at the supermarket …).
The things that (not) know of me
We look at each other, an important undertaking awaits us. One of my literary myths, Gabriel García Márquez comes to the rescue. In Vivir paras out (Live to tell), the Nobel Prize claimed that “Life is not the one that has lived, but the one you remember. And how do you remember it, to tell it». At a certain point, I don’t know how, magic arrives, intuition.
There is a relationship that I can no longer avoid: the one with my father. Honest, yes, but also complex. Made of silences and issues never expressed. A silent affection, sometimes, and often communicated for side gestures. And, often, filtered by my mother. After an uncertain beginning (the hand struggles to move, accustomed to the computer keyboard), I put everything black and white all: love, anger, frustration, sweetness. A flow of consciousness, without punctuation or control. Of course, not exactly up to James Joyce, but enough to feel free. In fact it is just a relief.
Letter from a daughter
At the end of the workshop, the faces in the room appear more lying, more present. The air is like thin, truest. Alessandra Perotti asks us A word to describe the experience. I immediately think of “gratitude”, but I say “home”. Because writing that letter was like returning from a very long journey. Review the rooms. Recognize my voice.
I have never sent those thoughts to my father. I spoke to him, though. And something, in that gesture, has been recomposed. We really started telling us. Stories of aunts and grandparents, with that simple: “You remember that time …”. The letter did not change our relationship. He made it whole, transformed. I understood so that Writing is precisely this: a way to return. And find yourself. A month later my father was missing.