In writing about pain, people from D.C. to Africa are finding healing
“I finally gently nudge it under a nearby bush and hope it stays sheltered. I hope. I hope. I reach my car and realize I’m crying. This is the first time I’ve cried in months,” she later wrote. “I find I am not alone in this; I tell my co-worker about the rabbit. He nods and says, ‘It was the Christmas dishes for me. I dropped a box of them moving and just broke down.’ Another nurse adds, ‘I cried over burnt chocolate chip cookies, and I don’t even like chocolate chip cookies.
During a Zoom therapy session, Malawista listened as the doctor described with horror how she couldn’t help a 28-year-old woman breathe and watched her die. Malawista doesn’t normally assign homework to patients, but that day, she offered the doctor a suggestion: What if she tried writing about her experience?Nothing could have come of that moment. The doctor could have avoided that additional work, or she could have done it and found it made her grief no more bearable.
So far, more than 700 people have participated in the free writing project. They have come from across the United States, as well as Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Pakistan. Museum curators know that there is an art to archiving the emotions of a moment. They have to carefully consider what signs left over from a protest capture the tone of it. They have tothat arrive after horrific events such as mass killings or natural disasters and pick the ones that will later tell a generation how people mourned.
“The impact of the project on the lives of participants was far more powerful than imagined,” Malawista wrote recently about the project. “Paradoxically, while our participants recalled painful experiences and feelings — guilt, anxiety, dread, grief, fear and longing — they also related feeling more enthusiastic at work, with less fatigue, less burnout, and a greater sense of meaning. Processing trauma through writing and reflecting allowed them some control over what happened.
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