Help! Has Motherhood Made Me Too Sensitive to Write?

In the fourth installment of our Tarot + Craft column, Sarah Elaine Smith gives advice to a writer who is having difficulty putting their main character through trauma

Dear Braindoggies,

Two years ago, I started working on a novel. A few months later, I gave birth to my first child.

I’ve always been a very sensitive person, easily moved and disturbed by the news or stories of suffering or triumph. That’s always helped me with my writing. But having a child has made me much more sensitive. For a long time, I had to avoid reading the news. Stories about climate change unravel me. Children separated from their families at the border. Children dying from diseases or accidents. I’m crying right now, just writing this.

Here’s the problem: My book is about a natural disaster, and there is death and destruction everywhere. There are dead children, missing children, injuries, panic, fear, etc. And I’m really struggling to write those parts. I’ve gotten the feedback that I’m too easy on my main character and don’t let bad things happen to her, and I agree, but every time I get to a darker moment in the draft, I either soften it or I put off writing it.

How do I put darkness and grief and suffering into my writing without falling apart and crying for hours? I feel like my mental state is already precarious (because babies and Covid-19 and climate change and immigration, and the world is such a sad and dark place sometimes) and I’m terrified of losing myself to that darkness.

Easily Moved

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THE SPREAD

You: The Two of Wands

The Problem: The King of Wands

The Ideal Outcome: The Empress

The Advice: Taurus

The Mood: The Queen of Cups

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Dear Easily Moved,

First of all, thank you for asking this beautiful question. I am also a tender heart and can relate to feeling swept away by suffering. Before I say anything else, I want to reflect the possibility that what comes up for you when you write these more difficult moments of the narrative might be trauma-related in some capacity. If that’s the case, or you think it might be, the first order of business would be getting therapeutic help around the issue. Those who specialize in dealing with trauma are invaluable guides for walking through it without overwhelming the nervous system. There’s a lot of bravado in writer world around being vessels for big emotions—“No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader,” etc.—but trauma is on a different order of magnitude. And frankly, who can say how traumatizing the last eighteen months have been for us collectively? I suspect we might not grasp this for a long time.

The Two of Wands is considered an auspicious beginning for a project, but it can also signal ambivalence about which way to go. The jungle is all hands under a pale sky. Where are we? The big things are small and the small things are big. It’s a sign that we’re going to have to go around the world to come back home again; everything might make more sense later. In fairytales, the hero doesn’t always want to go out on the journey. Sometimes they’re pushed onto the path because the world has turned strange and there is no way back.

There’s a perceived duality operating underneath your creative decision-making here—a right path and a wrong one, a sense of needing to choose. You’re about to cross the threshold, but you’re prolonging the moment out of a sense of uncertainty. Are you strong enough for the journey?

The King of Wands sits there, glowering in the weird day-for-night gloom of daytime eclipses and deadly silent highway bars. Yikes. Wands are passion and creativity, two qualities that have a generally positive, life-giving tone, but here we’re sitting in a smoky room under a wildfire sky. Fire has become one of the most visible avatars of climate change; it refuses to be hidden. There’s nothing subtle about blood-red clouds blooming in the mountains. Even a few weeks ago, as far east as Pittsburgh, our sky was yellow from ash.

On the face of it, it might seem as if the nature of the problem is that the King of Wands is such a fearsome-looking dude. If you’re inclined to see the King of Wands as a tyrant, you’d have plenty of evidence. I mean, just look at him! And surely a wildfire is, above all, a destructive force, right?

But we also know that some firs only release their seedpods after fires. There are reasons for things to burn.

It sounds like you’re well aware of the possibility that the beating heart of the story might require you to go into the fire, but a fear of the pain that may occur keeps you at the threshold: close enough to feel the heat, prolonging the fearful moment before you dive in.

The truth is—and this is a brutal truth—we don’t know whether events are good or bad when they’re happening. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is usually a story, with an attached meaning or a projection of the future.

There’s a second question hidden inside your question: Has becoming a mother made writing too painful? Is having a greater awareness of the preciousness—and therefore the precarity—of life a liability? I’d say the opposite is true: The ideal outcome is to lean into your embodiment of the archetypal mother. But this image is only a snapshot of the Empress at the fullness of summer, of fruit and blooming. As you well know, there are other eras in nature’s periodicity, and the divine mother’s presence is in fact divine because it makes space for them all, the contraction as well as the expansion. Your task is to find a way to embrace all of the contractions as part of the process too. To welcome and accept the fire and darkness along with the rest.

WHAT TO DO

Ground, ground, ground yourself. Get down in the body. Get down in the dirt. Move slow and heavy and wear a bell or a crown of flowers. Taurus is embodied feminine to the finest: an excuse to fall headlong into pleasure.

If pleasure feels like a complicated concept to you (as it does for so many of us), think of it simply as engaging the senses. A candle, a cozy set of slippers, a bouquet of flowers, a bath—these are all beautiful and simple options. Even just massaging your temples or caressing your forearm counts.

The magical thing about pleasure is that you have to be present in order to feel it. You can’t run off into future scenarios while also observing the pleasant glow of warmth that comes from the cat on your lap. Anytime I find myself marinating on the past in a painful way or projecting the future, I engage my senses to stay in the present.

Writing can be a really dissociative activity; it is literally building a habitation in an unseen world. Without embodiment, it’s easy to get lost in the moment or stay lost, even once you’ve stepped away from the page. What are some grounding processes you can implement while you’re writing? What kind of grounding ritual could you use to close your writing process and return to your life?

Emotional regulation is a lot like carrying a jug of water on your head: To keep it from spilling, you have to walk solid, even steps. Emotions are highly mobile; they can be contained, but care must be taken in deciding how much to bottle up and hold. The ocean, however, is always there to catch spillover.

WRITING PROMPT

The Ten of Cups

What will you catch in a hot pink cup? There’s rainbows up there. The hands below, grasping, can’t reach them, but the vessels of love can.

A story is only really happy or sad depending on where you place the frame. Some of the worst things that have happened to me later revealed themselves to be necessary parts of growth. How can you keep your stories (and here I mean ideas, as well as the actual story of a novel) open so that it’s possible to allow for surprising unfoldings?

Make a list of ten difficult things that happened in the past. Then make a list of ten good things that came, perhaps indirectly, from the difficulties. They’re there, I promise, if you look long enough.

MUSIC AND POETRY Rx

“Gracias a la Vida” by Violeta Parra and “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic

“The Blue Hour” by Yusef Komunyakaa (and really the whole book Night Animals)

xxx

Braindoggies

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Thanks for reading, and welcome to this column! Each installment addresses a craft question with a tarot spread and interpretation.

I know that “craft” usually means diction or dialogue or some other mechanical aspect, but here’s the thing: Writing is actually the art of risk. It’s a risk to write anything down, a risk to let anyone read it, and a risk to say what you really want to say.

As such, there are lots of little wars we all have to fight on our way to the blank page, not to mention the doubts and fears we battle when we get there.

Check out previous column installments here:

“Help! My Jealousy Over Other Writers Success’ is Destroying Me”

“Help! How Should I Embark on an Unfamiliar Genre Journey?”

“Help! Should I Write What I Want—Or Should I Try to Make Money?”

Do you have a question for Braindoggies? We would love to hear it! Please send your writing conundrum to Eliza Harris at eliza.harris@catapult.co with the subject line, “Dear Braindoggies”