AN INTERVIEW ON HOW WRITING CAN SERVE AS A FRIEND AND SUPPORT US AS WE STEP THROUGH LIFE.
The gift of writing is often appreciated for what it offers to others. Yet the gift that each of us holds within offers so much to us as well: guidance in our lives, support through our struggles, and a genuine friendship to embrace and develop.
Isabelle McCrea is a writer and retired educator who expresses this perspective beautifully:
“Writing has saved me. It has directed me, comforted me, helped me understand, so often. It calls from within to be released, to show its support of me. It is my friend, my confidant, non-judgemental, always. I hear life’s and nature’s depth with my writer self. As a photo is nuanced with so much, so are my observations of life. My writer self and friend helps me understand, cope with, and live life more fully and meaningfully.”
For Isabelle, writing has always been there for her. Throughout the seasons of her life, writing has supported her. I asked her to share about when she first realized that writing was her friend, and what it has meant to her. Her answers are so beautiful and insightful, and it is my honor to share them with you here:
When did you realize that writing is a support to you?
I haven’t kept all of my writing over the years, but in looking back, I’ve noticed my writing beginning in my high school years. That makes sense to me, as that’s when I became aware of suffering from depression, although I didn’t know it to be that then. It was also when I fell in love with poetry. “How do I love Thee” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning still resonates with me to this day. It was what I chose to recite to my classmates in high school, when encouraged by my literature teacher to do so.
How has writing lifted you up? How has it made you feel?
During my high school and early college years, writing literally saved me. When I couldn’t speak the depths of me that often left me feeling alone and frightened, the written word, and most often poetry, could “speak” it for me. If ever I felt lost or restless, if I could write as it flowed with no editing whatsoever, it felt like such a healing balm, and it helped make sense of what I was feeling.
I’m always in awe and almost disbelief when I get the chance to reread something I’ve written, and wonder, “Did that really come from me?” Our words really do speak something from deep within and are often unrecognizable because it is something of ourselves that only surfaces briefly, and not the person we necessarily present to the outside world or on a daily basis. It is a depth that only writing can express.
Are you willing to share a piece of writing that captures the essence of what writing has meant to you and the way it lifts you up?
Below, you’ll find an early piece of writing I titled “Gift”, and aptly so, as I was writing to my inner self, my writer self, the one I was tentatively opening up to, to test the waters of other-acceptance and self-acceptance. If my pencil could handle the depths of me, then perhaps another could as well.
- Gift -
I am very afraid
But so too am I excited
That as of now
I want to give you me.
Not the me you knew
Or the me you thought you knew
But only the me of today
Who wants to tell you I see.
Gone the masks of the past
This very moment I give you now
The gift of me
That is and still is yet to be.
Please my friend
If I tell you who I am
Will you not accept me
For even as I am I still wish to be.
Forgive me as well
The many games and lies
In the past they were all I knew
All I knew and lived by.
I didn’t know me then
And yet I cried always to say
Please would you help me
Tell me who I am.
So you have helped me friend
Simply time and time again
Accepted and loved me
You had a sense of me even then.
Though I’ll not stay the same
Even tomorrow I’ll have changed
For now I just want to grow into
I am I am I am.
With a most willing heart
And as well a wish to live
I want to take the risk
And the pain of getting to know.
Still with a fear of rejection
At showing you all that seems to be me
Please for yet another time my friend
Let me really be me.
~ Isabelle McCrea is a writer, retired educator, wife, mother, and grandmother who recently sold a 2800 sqft home and downsized to a lake property of 800 sq ft, where she takes long walks with her husband. She dreams of one day putting her writing to photos she’s taken, or at the very least, to leave her writing for her granddaughters to enjoy reading at some point in their lives.