It’s been 18 years since I first told myself I would write this book. It’s been 18 years since I came home from the war in Iraq. That’s a lot of procrastinating.
Maybe I should give myself some grace. Tim O’Brien didn’t publish his critically acclaimed Vietnam war novel, The Things They Carried, until 1990 — a solid 15 years after the war ended.
Yes, I know I’m clearly no Tim O’Brien, but there is something to marinating on my experience that has helped me put things in a new light. My mind has been filtering my memories over the years and the things that remain must remain for some reason. Maybe they are the stories still worth telling.
Perhaps I have also figured out why I need to write this book and who I am writing it for — years ago I would’ve said something cliché like, “I dedicate this to my wife who stuck with me through the war and our future kids.” Well, we divorced and never had any kids together, so its a good thing I waited. [Update: I have an amazing wife and kids now and I hope they will be proud to read this and the book.]
What has become clear to me is that writing and especially storytelling is cathartic. It is certainly cheaper than therapy, but it was through psychotherapy that I learned how freeing it can be to express one’s deepest emotions. If you don’t let them out, they just boil inside of you until you explode.
It was through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that I learned to access and surface some very deep-seated stories that would often appear as fragments in my dreams and sometimes as nightmares. My Subjective Units of Distress Score (SUDS) would jump every time I would write about one of these experiences, but the more I would write about them — and put these memories back in to their proper historical place in my past — my anxiety would lessen and lessen.
I agree in part with the late English writer Graham Greene, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” While I agree writing is therapy, my reason for writing is not escape, but to confront my fears face to face and bring closure to those traumatic experiences of my past.
Writing about suffering in the context of when and how it happened helps us to realize this simple truth: just because something happened before does not mean its still happening or that it will happen again.
If I can wrestle with, write, and publish my experiences that still haunt me, then maybe just maybe it will encourage others to do it as well. And if it helps just one other person heal some personal trauma and see that their life is worth living, then that’s enough for me.
So, I am committed to finishing and publishing this book — coming soon in the Spring of next year. I am writing it for me AND for all the warriors who left the war, but the war never left them.
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