Why write your truth?

Splitting the world open

The truth very rarely arrives in neat paragraphs. At first, it probably won’t arrive in words at all.

It is much more likely to take other forms:

Tendrils of lettuce left at the bottom of a plastic lunchbox.

A wrinkled sock, draped over the radiator.

The cold, hard floor of an airport departure hall.

The pulled threads in your favourite sweater.

The half-remembered dream, the song playing on the car radio, the catch in your breath. 

When we’re looking very hard for the truth of something, when we try to stalk it down in words, it so often escapes us. We know it’s there, just a little off to the left, outside the margins of the page, in between the lines.

But even as we try to translate the pulse, glimpse, flash into a word, it’s already slipping away, becoming something else.

Perhaps the trick, then, is to sidle up to it, this felt truth, to lie quietly in wait for it whilst pretending that we’re not doing anything in particular. 

When you create a soft space, a place to wait with curiosity for what might emerge,  then sometimes the act of picking up your pen and moving it across the page makes things happen. 

Sometimes, we have to begin with what isn’t true, with ‘no’ rather than ‘yes,’ with ‘I don’t know but I’m going to write anyway.’

But why go to all this trouble? 
Why try to find this truth -  your personal truth - at all? And once you’ve found it, why write it? Why share it?

You don’t have to, of course. 

Except that sometimes it wants to find its way out of your body. Like that song on the car radio, it has lodged itself somewhere in the back of your brain, and now it’s buzzing like static.

Or perhaps it’s sitting in the bottom of your stomach, cold and heavy.

Toni Cade Bambara wrote:

‘Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure.”¹

Writing can help you to find your way to the truth that is waiting inside you. Perhaps this truth will set you free. Perhaps first, as Gloria Steinem once observed, it will piss you off. But perhaps it will also set you in motion. Perhaps it will set the world in motion too, make sparks, start fires, conjure magic.

Poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser wrote:
 

‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.’²

It takes courage to tell the truth when you’ve been silenced. It’s hard to tell the truth –even to ourselves – when we’ve learned that our truth is the wrong kind of truth, too loud, too needy, too inconvenient, too much, not enough. 

It starts with us. 

It starts with one of us feeling our own truth. 

What is my truth? is probably an unhelpful question. 

An easier place to begin might be, what do I long for? Where am I hungry? Where and how have I been silenced? 

Where in my life do I feel lonely? What is my great joy? What are my secret shames? What am I learning? What do I want my words to do in the world?

Begin there. Write for three, seven, twelve minutes.

Let your words set things in motion. 

Join us TOMORROW Saturday 24 FEB 2024 for WRITE YOUR TRUTH!

Saturday 24 February: WRITE YOUR TRUTH!
4.30pm - 6pm (UK time)

In this workshop, we’ll explore writing our way towards our personal, felt truth - whether through private writing or writing that we’d like to share. As always, we’ll talk about approaches we can take to keep ourselves safe. We’ll also discuss how to write our truths and share them with others when this feels scary or risky or provocative. We’ll experiment with some gentle writing in a supportive space. No public declarations or sharing of truths required!

When you join us for a Writing Together paid subscriber session, you’ll find a gentle and restorative writing space where you’ll receive support and inspiration for your writing and reflection. Camera on or off, we’ll write together in response to writing rituals, suggestions and prompts and then have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve written and the process. The first part of the workshop is recorded for everyone so that you can catch up later if you can’t join us in ‘real time’. The second reflective part of the workshop is never recorded, in order to honour confidentiality.

I send out a new Zoom link a few hours before each month’s workshop session.

Thank you, dear Writing Friends, for your hearts, comments and encouragement, all of which fuel Dear Writing and help us to build this space together. I’m so grateful that you make time in your inbox for my words.

Let me know in the Comments if you have any thoughts or questions. How can I help to support you?

With love,
Sophie x

1. Toni Cade Bambara, ‘What it is’, 163.

2. Rukeyser’s poem in tribute to artist and sculptor, Käthe Kollwitz, here.