Many people use writing for catharsis. They do it privately, in their journals, and never look at it again. Or they make art out of their suffering, and share it with others in the hopes that their readers will find comfort in their work. Writing about pain and suffering is a way to come to terms with it, make sense of what happened, understand yourself, and even convey to others what it is to be stigmatised, isolated, mistreated by systematic forces. It brings people together; it can act as a catalyst for change.

All the same, you do not have to write about the things that have hurt you. For a long time, I did not understand this. The short stories and essays I read--and saw being celebrated--in literary magazines all dealt with themes of loss, grief, pain, and trauma. I did not find any essays about things going well, of people being happy. At most, I read about people going through terrible suffering, and at the end, accepting the pain or acknowledging it. Very rarely, however, did I read stories and essays of joy.

And so, when I sat down to write something that I hoped would be published by a magazine, I thought about what in my life had gone so badly that I could write about it. At 16, there wasn't much--we'd moved cities twice, we struggled financially but always made it to the next month, my mother had a brain surgery without which she would have died.

This last event I visited several times in my writing, trying to describe the seizure my mother had had, and everything that happened afterwards--the relatives who took my mother to the hospital, her stay there, my last visit to her before the surgery, and the first time I saw her in ICU after it, on my 15th birthday. It was a terrible time, and I cried a lot. But when it came down to writing about it, there was nothing I had to offer except descriptions. I had learned nothing from the experience, even when I sat and thought hard about it. Even now, there is no life lesson embedded there. It was just a terrible thing that happened, and I'm glad my mother is still here. I can hear her as I type this, singing her daily aarti in the other room, a small bell in one hand, the small plate with the divaa in the other.

I made a couple of attempts, describing the whole thing, but I knew my essay had nothing to offer. I tried telling it as a story, but my imagination failed me there too, and I could not make up a sad story about the characters in the aftermath of the surgery. The thing was, she was safe and we were happy. I was happy because she was alive, and I was tired of trying to force meaning into an experience that I was glad was over. When I read other people's essays about their painful experiences, a part of me thought that perhaps it is a proof of my inability to write well that I couldn't make something beautiful out of the whole thing, and that if I were a better writer, I would have had a published essay to my name.

But any attempts to return to the topic failed. I was tired of recounting the same story--those memories aren't painful anymore. At 23, I can look at them with more clarity, and all I see is a natural reaction to something so unexpected. But there's nothing to add to it, nothing to grieve, no morals to offer.

It took me a long while to recognize that this was okay. That I wasn’t less of a writer when I couldn't make art out of a lived experience. And lately, I've also learned that one can make this choice--there is no obligation to write about the things you do not want to write about. I wrote about money in a previous essay, and I've decided I don't want to do so again. I've said what I wanted to, and I do not want to give that topic more of my words. Over and over, when I read, and when I write, I seek stories with happy endings. I try to recall memories of good times and try to write about that.

On the bad days, I take my pencil and scraps of paper and pour all the overwhelm into the paper. Then I stash those pages in the pile of old newspapers waiting to be sold to the kabadiwala. This writing for catharsis isn't the same kind of writing that I do here, or on my blog, or for work. But it is writing nonetheless, and when I had bad days during my years-long writing streak, I counted it as writing. I had made up the rules, after all, so I was allowed to change them.

And so I chose not to write about the pain, to not force meaning into an experience that was devoid of it, and to be easier on myself.

And you can do the same too. As Austin Kleon says:

“You don’t have to write about the bad stuff,” I said to the high schooler. “You can write about whatever you want. You can write about nothing but unicorns if you want to. It’s your choice.”

And even if we do write about our pain, it doesn’t mean we have to share that writing.

Sometimes you suck out the poison and spit it on the page.

Then you close the notebook so it doesn’t poison anyone else.