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Writing can keep us sane. It can be a creative outlet for overwhelming feelings and shattering experiences almost too powerful, too disturbing, to process. For some, it may be part of the struggle to keep emotional balance. In managing our sanity, writing can also keep us open to what is valuable about our insanity. Something happens in the act of writing that can transform unacceptable, unthinkable, and unknowable feelings that are too hot to approach, let alone metabolize.
Paradoxically, to express what is experienced beyond or outside of words, the writer feels compelled to put that experience into words. Fragments of language, spaces between the lines, bursts of creative expression, and the very act of writing itself all offer a translation of the unspoken. Frequently, one is surprised at what one writes.
This issue includes two poems by a psychiatrist coping with vicarious trauma. Her very difficult patients bring in feelings so intense, so moving, so painful that they are nearly unbearable for the psychiatrist to contain. She feels compelled to write in order to translate her unspoken feelings into words. Her creative being, bursting forth, intuitively finds a way to hold the almost overwhelming affect.
In a short narrative, one writer felt her lost child inside was the crazy one she had hidden away. Years later in treatment, she discovered the part she had thought to be crazy was actually her heart, her creativity.
In other poems, a woman, diagnosed with an incurable illness, channels her pain into creative expression as she confronts her own mortality; another writer struggles to contain the painful loss of her beloved father, while another contends with the survival of her self.
Reading these emotional and sometimes disturbing poems may offer a moment's chance to journey into their own internal places of sanity/insanity.