What Wound Are You Healing?

I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my earliest lessons on creative writing, in which we explored the idea of yearning – what a character longs for in the course of a story—or in the case of real life, our journey.

As I bridge my movement building work and my writing, two areas that initially felt separate and discrete, I’m seeing how connected they are for me.

I think what artists and activists and maybe everyone have in common is that we’re all healing from something. Sometimes, that’s an individual wound, like a personal loss or attack. Sometimes, it’s familial, like displacement or violence. Sometimes, it’s collective, like genocide or racism. And of course,  these can be and often are interconnected – individual, familial and collective. In art and in life, we work to nurse those wounds that are hurting us, our families and our communities. 

When we choose to take on a social ill or solve for a systemic gap, we’re addressing a collective wound. For me, that wound is the feeling of “unbelonging” or exclusion that I know immigrants feel. But of course, I’m an immigrant and my parents were child refugees, so the work and my work are deeply intertwined.

As a writer, the stories I find myself writing feel similar in many ways. That’s not surprising. Writing is also a form of healing, of excavating wounds and finding new perspectives on what we, our families and communities have experienced. I heard the writers Edwidge Danticat and Roxanne Gay, two No. 1 Immigrant Daughters, speak last week about this very issue – the telling of the same stories until we get better at them. “Better” at craft, but maybe also better at understanding ourselves and the people around us. 

I’m not ready to share what my individual wound is, but it’s definitely connected to familial and collective wounds. I will say that knowing what it is has helped me understand how I move in the world. What about you? What wound are you healing?

With love,

Sayu