Author Ginelle Testa has a beautiful story of writing to heal. Check out her new memoir, Make a Home Out of You.
by Ginelle Testa
Whether you’re writing a memoir, a personal essay, or even fiction tinged with real-world experience, stories can evoke feelings about choices you’ve made throughout your life or traumatic experiences you’ve had.
Although most of my craft experience is memoir, I also encounter healing in my fiction writing. My characters are influenced by my own experiences and those around me. When we spend time putting together characters on paper, real or imagined, we grow to forgive their flaws and see their humanity.
The same can be said for the self. I made many mistakes as a young alcoholic, some of which I felt could never be forgiven. I also was wronged in more ways than I cared to acknowledge. If you’re anything like me, forgiveness doesn’t come easily. It’s something that’s won through time, space, and processing, and a long-term writing practice offers that opportunity.
Writing to Heal Takes Time
At first, the writing process was excruciating. I was putting myself in scenes—reliving the smells, tastes, sensations, sights, and sounds of my most traumatic moments. All I could look at was the blame and shame for myself and others. I had heard that writing was supposed to be therapeutic, but it felt a bit like sitting in my own filth in a bathtub, the dirt from the day coloring the water a yucky brown.
I sat in this for some time, perhaps years. The writing process felt like a slog. This may not be everyone’s experience, but I just want to say that if writing is hard for you, you aren’t alone.
Eventually, with a little magic from the writing process in 12-step programs (through the fourth step—a moral inventory) and never giving up on my writing through the years, I began to turn around these deeply held beliefs. I got up from my own filth, let the dirty water drain, turned on the shower, and began to wash away the shame and blame.
Writing to Heal: The Process of Forgiveness
What eventually made the process healing was that I had spent so much time with these characters in my story, including myself, that I began to see them as flawed people who were unwell rather than people who were innately bad. I began to forgive.
Spending hundreds of hours rehashing stories over the course of years forced me to look squarely at what I had done and what had been done to me, and I realized our shared humanity.
It wasn’t a flash of lightning moment when I realized I was healing. Rather, it was a gradual process where I began to look around and say, dang, that haunting shame is a lot less than it was a few years ago. I feel like I can tell this story without feeling like I need to run and hide.
Molly Dektar wrote an article in Writer’s Digest: Writing From Shame Is Hard, But It’s Still the Best Place to Begin, where she talks about how writing from this place actually gives her direction because it helps her process. This was my experience—writing from a starting point of shame eventually led to healing.
The Role of Reflection in Writing
Reflecting on our shame and blame is a necessary part of the writing process for any good writer, and it often leads to deeper understanding. By taking the time to reflect on what we’ve experienced, we can see patterns and themes that we may not have been able to see before.
This came about in my memoir, Make a Home Out of You. The theme of making homes in people, substances, and behaviors occurred only after I thought about the thread that ran through my writing. I had tried to force titles for years, but it came to me in a magical way when I reflected on what I’d written in totality.
I highly recommend practices that allow you to reflect while you’re writing, enmeshing your inner thoughts with the pages.
Suggested Tools to Use Writing to Heal
While there were many processes, tools, and supports that helped me along this path of healing, I’ll share the top three.
Morning pages
Julia Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. I recommend the whole book and practice, but in particular, her strong suggestion of starting each day by writing longhand journaling pages is the most helpful.
Although I don’t always do them in the morning, I do often journal before I begin writing anything. Letting all the junk of my day and life onto paper before writing to produce something helps me clear the way. It helps me to process what’s on my mind so that it doesn’t interrupt the process of writing a story.
Writing first and foremost for me
The way I approached writing for years was that I was putting it onto paper without the intention to show a soul. I knew, eventually, I would publish, but first, I needed to get it all down. I could cut and shift and add later, but for the sake of processing, all the junk went onto paper.
As a result, only a small percentage of my initial writings actually made it into the book, but I was able to see so much that before, I was scared to look at. Molly Dektar said in her WD article:
“A necessary condition of writing from shame is intentionally forgetting that your friends and family will read the book.”
Being in community
Writing is surely a solitary act the majority of the time, but it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the major tools I used to process and heal when I was writing was writing with others, showing my work to them, and accepting constructive criticism. It was their kindness and empathy that showed me that although I had done some messed up things, and so had others, we were not innately bad.
Forgiveness was reflected to me in their compassionate eyes. I’d recommend finding a community and committing to it.
Final Thoughts
Like we do in recovery, committing to a long-term writing practice can be a one-day-at-a-time thing. You don’t have to commit to writing for the rest of your life. Just show up bravely to put your experiences, thoughts, and stories onto the page, and you may be surprised how much you’re able to forgive and heal from as the days, months, and years pass.
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Ginelle Testa is a writer originally from Hudson, NH. She has an MS in digital marketing and design from Brandeis University and a BA in sociology from Rivier University and has been featured in Insider, Byrdie, Tiny Buddha, and other places.
She’s a queer person in recovery. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys doing restorative yoga, playing video games, and thrifting eclectic clothes. Ginelle lives in Boston, MA.
For more about Ginelle and her work, please see her website, and connect with her on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
Make a Home Out of You
Born to an abusive mother and a drug dealer father, Ginelle Testa is not exactly set up for success. By the end of her thirteenth year, she’s started experimenting with alcohol and drugs, has fallen prey to anorexia, and has been sexually assaulted. And that’s only the beginning of her spiral down into addiction and disordered eating.
As Ginelle progresses into young adulthood, she plunges deeper into substance-related lows. In her senior year of college, after blacking out and ending up naked in her dorm’s community shower, she goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and gets sober. But steering clear of drugs and alcohol, she discovers, is not a cure-all—she still has a long way to go before she can truly heal.
Powerful and relatable, “Make a Home out of You”, is a riveting tale of making the slow, confusing, and surprisingly funny slog back from the brink—and learning to make a home in oneself instead of in substances and other people.
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.