The Synergy Game - A Journey From Death to Life
Chapter 1 - Writing to Heal
This is my book The Synergy Game. I am serialising it here a chapter a week. Each chapter will be available for everyone to read because, after all, that’s why I’ve written it, to help others, to share what has helped me to rebuild my life. I will be adding extra insights, sharing my poetry and adding audio to a section below for paying members.
Chapter 1 - Writing to Heal: Scribbling My Way to Sanity
"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."
Flannery O'Connor
I think writing literally saved my sanity. When I really thought I was losing it, when the unanswered questions just wouldn't stop whizzing around in my head, I would write about it.
By writing I would make sense of things, of my world that bore no resemblance to any world I'd ever been in before.
Let me just back up a bit though and tell you how I got into the writing habit.
Yes, it is a habit, and like anything that is good for us, it has to become a part of what we do, and who we are, a habit.
When I was a child, I always kept a journal and wrote endless stories, then as life got busier, marriage, children, work, I stopped writing. Well not completely, but I wrote sporadically.
A few years ago I started to learn more about spirituality and how it related to me. I learned about gratitude and the suggestion was to write a gratitude journal. So I did. It seemed like a great thing to do, I had a lot to be grateful for and I could see the value in reminding myself of that every day.
I did research as I always do when starting something new and read somewhere that you should get yourself a journal that you look forward to writing in. I'm very tactile and visual so I liked the idea of Moleskine notebooks as they feel nice and come in pretty colours! I now have a cupboard full of them, like a rainbow of the last ten years of my life.
At first, I would write a list of ten things that I was grateful for right then, in that moment. Sometimes I wrote the same things every day.
Gradually though my mindset changed. I didn't need to force being grateful, I just was. It was literally changing me, this simple habit. I have never been a negative person, but I did tend to worry and dwell on issues. But instead of just dwelling on all the things I was grateful for, I became someone who always had a smile on her face.
It gave me confidence in what I could do because I was always thinking about how much I already had. Then it just became who I am, my paradigm, and I didn't need to write about it anymore, I lived it.
But I still wanted to write and the timing was not a coincidence either. I thought I would write about my life, or more accurately my feelings about my life.
I was in my very early fifties and things were rather challenging. I had issues with my family who were not happy about the direction my life had taken and some choices I'd made, and so had decided to cut me off and not talk to me. (I'd left a religion that I'd been part of my whole life as I didn't agree with the policies.) Those family members were my mother and my brother, so it was very traumatic to deal with their rejection and shunning.
I started to pour my hurt and sadness out into the pages of my journal and the effects were amazing.
First of all, it was getting it all out of me, releasing it from my mind and body. It was like a therapy.
The second benefit was that I often wrote things down on the paper before I'd understood them in my mind, hence the quote at the beginning of this chapter.
I didn't always think about what I wrote, so I really was accessing my subconscious and finding out how I really felt about things. I kept reminding myself that this was just for me, no one else was going to read it. That meant I could be totally honest and pour my heart out.
This turned out to be excellent practice for what came next, when writing each day became my lifeline.
When I had to let go of what was inside before I exploded.
I had spent two years writing about what was going wrong with my marriage, how frustrated I was feeling, how it felt to suddenly seem invisible, to feel old and unwanted.
It was through writing that I realised what I had to do.
It was by putting my jumbled-up thoughts down on paper that I began to see what my logical thinking mind would not let me see. I began to see that I was losing myself, losing my dignity and finally seeing what I hadn't wanted to see, everything had changed.
So I left to come back to see my daughter in France. I came back to our home here and two weeks later my deepest fears were realised, and my world fell apart. I finally faced what I'd known for some time in my subconscious, what had been making me sick for the last two years, the chronic stress and stomach problems that I'd put down to menopause. I found out my husband was having an affair. It's as if the distance (he was in Asia) had given me the clarity I needed to see what was so obvious once I'd seen it. We were talking on FaceTime, and I just knew. Desperate this time for the truth, I just couldn’t take it anymore, I begged for honesty. My intuition, sharpened by reflections penned over the past two weeks, had already revealed what I sensed to be undeniable.
I don't think I've ever needed my writing practice like I did in those next few days, weeks and months as he turned into, or rather I was seeing, the man that I had loved for over thirty-four years had disappeared, and in his place was someone I didn't know. I was more scared than I've ever been in my life before. It was a suffocating fear that I had never felt before. As if I was lost at sea, all alone and certain I was going to die, there was no help. I was suddenly faced with a life I didn't know how to live, a house I didn't know how to fix (we were 2/3 of the way through a renovation) and a car that I had never taken to a garage or had to maintain.
So I wrote about all my fears and about my sadness and pain and devastation and as the weeks turned into months I was able to make sense of things that made no sense. I was able to see beyond what I was feeling. My writing gave me clarity and helped me make decisions. It was while I was writing one day, on our thirty-third wedding anniversary, one of the saddest days of my life, that it came to me that I wanted a divorce.
There was no fixing things, he wouldn't even speak to me, plus what kind of life would it be for either of us if we got back together? He's late home one day and what am I instantly going to think?!
No, it was over, and I wanted closure and to take control. I didn't file for divorce straight away, I wasn't quite strong enough for that, but I'd made the decision.
Over the next months, as I wrote, I got stronger. It's like I was able to understand myself better. When my marriage ended, I didn't know who I was. Who am I if I'm not his wife, his partner, his friend? We had been together for so long that I wasn't even sure of my likes and dislikes anymore. I don't mean I acquiesced to all his wishes, our relationship wasn't like that, for so long we were best friends as well as lovers. But my identity was all wrapped up in him. We did everything together, worked together, travelled together and had fun together, until we didn't. So to actually figure out what I liked, just me, not considering anyone else, was tough.
I remember being in the supermarket one day and I was just putting the usual stuff in the cart, and I suddenly thought, hang on, do I even like this food? I had to relearn all over again who I was as just me. What clothes did I like to wear, what did I like to drink, what did I want my house to look like, and the big, huge one, what the fuck do I want to do with the rest of my life? Guess what helped? Writing! I wrote about how I felt about all the newness, which was now starting to feel like freedom. And the more I wrote about it the more I found out who I was and who I wanted to be.
One day as I was writing I wrote about how nice it was to not have to think about what someone else thought of how you looked.
I'd tried everything for the previous year in an effort to get him to notice me, new clothes, new lingerie, new hairstyle. It was such a relief to be able to look in the mirror and just think yes, I look good, for me. I like the way I look, and I don't need to wonder if anyone else likes what I'm wearing today or how I've styled my hair. It was one of those times when my writing told me how I was feeling. Just like Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” When I first read that quote it was like a hug from a close friend. Someone had put into words exactly what was happening when I wrote. It was another one of those times when I felt heard and seen and understood, a connection.
As I entered the dating world after a very very long absence, writing helped me to figure out what I wanted in a man. I'd never thought of it before. I fell in love with my husband in my late teens, I didn't think too deeply about it! He was my friend, we fell in love, we had lots of fun and we liked the same things. He was also very good-looking and dressed nicely. All things that are so important when you are in your teens! But now what was I even looking for? I realised I didn’t have a clue. I made a list of all the qualities I wanted in an ideal man. It took me quite a while to make the list and I surprised myself with what I came up with. Things like I want him to be kind, thoughtful and generous, not just to me but to other people. I want him to be healthy, something I’d never considered before, but at my age, many people haven’t taken care of their health and when you get to your 50s it starts to show. I wrote that I wanted someone who was a good communicator as that was one of the factors in the breakdown of my marriage, maybe of all marriages. And I wanted someone who had some of the same interests as me so that we could above all be best friends and not just lovers.
When I went on dates, I wrote about it afterwards. I wrote about the attention I was getting and how it made me feel. I liked being seen again. I liked feeling like a pretty woman again, instead of a middle-aged invisible wife. I wrote about the possibility of falling in love again and how it terrified me and then I wrote about the fact that I was not ready to date. As fun as all the attention was, I needed to just be me for a while. I needed to finish discovering who I was before I could give my full attention to someone else. And so, for the first time in my life, I became truly single.
I started to write about the incredible freedom I had for the first time in my life. How it really wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be but was so very liberating. My childhood experiences of sexual abuse had ensured that I was aware of boys from a very young age. My first crush was when I was about five or six on a boy at school, and it never stopped, there was always someone I was 'in love' with and then I got married at twenty. So to be completely 'man-free' was a new experience and one I desperately needed for my own growth. Through my daily journalling, I realised that I was quite enjoying the freedom of not looking for a date or waiting for someone to text me back or call me. That for the first time in my life I was just me.
And that's when I started to write this book!
*There are many writing resources on my website georgiaclare.com. Tips on how to start and what to write when you decide to journal, ideas and prompts to get you started.
Introduction - The Synergy Game: A Journey From Death to Life
Next Chapter - Embracing Gratitude: From Daily Ritual to Lifeline
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This next section is for paying members only. In it, I’m sharing some poetry I wrote in the weeks following our separation and some further personal insights, feelings, and musings. There is also an audio reading of the chapter.
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