I’ve been thinking about what we keep from the people, places and experiences which pass through our lives. Not necessarily the physical things, although those too. A ticket or a note inside a book becoming a bookmark, the tiny yellow shell in my car garnered from the rocks on a beautiful day, photographs, cards and messages. But in this instance I mean the less tangible things. The phrases we adopt, music we might never have discovered alone, food we learned to love because somebody else ordered it first, knowledge, ridiculous private jokes, ways of doing things and memories which become attached so firmly to a smell or song that later we’re transported back before we’ve had time to consciously remember.

Some of it becomes so absorbed into us that eventually we forget where it came from. I wonder how many words I use because someone I loved used them first. How many books I read because somebody pressed one into my hand or sent it in the post and said I’d love it. How many places I’ve visited because somebody once told me about them. There are recipes we make differently because someone we love did, expressions inherited from grandparents. My Nannan used to call all the babies in the family TinRibs. I don’t know why but I remember that and the sound of her voice as she said it. Then there’s the one most of us will relate to, a piece of music which arrives and evokes a powerful memory, or with more devastating effect, a scent which arrives unexpectedly, eliciting an emotional response entirely disproportionate to the moment.

As a writer, I wonder if we keep more than most. Everything which happens becomes the vast ocean of experience we draw from to make decisions later. We know its texture from the inside. The knowledge becomes ours and, whether we want it to or not, it changes what we’re capable of writing.

I can write love because I’ve loved. Not the glossy film version and somebody eventually gets kissed in the rain, although there’s certainly a place for that. I mean the tremulous depth of it. The particular safety of knowing someone. The private language which grows between two people until a phrase or a touch can carry an entire second conversation beneath it. The intimacy of being known in tiny ways. Knowing someone. The feeling of missing someone before they’ve actually left. The delicious anticipation of seeing them again. Love accumulates detail.

And so does heartbreak. Unfortunately. Once you’ve experienced real heartbreak you know it isn’t simply sadness. Sadness seems far too small a word for it. Heartbreak is physical. It sits painfully heavy in the chest, throttles the appetite, changes sleep and concentration. It consumes the mind and every moment is tainted by it whilst the cycle of pain revolves.

I knew these things personally long before I needed the insight professionally. Years of working in psychotherapy means I’ve sat alongside people through grief, separation, betrayal, infatuation, marriages beginning and marriages collapsing. I’ve listened to people trying to make sense of the difference between the person they believed they knew and the information now sitting uncomfortably in front of them. I’ve watched love survive extraordinary things and apparently solid relationships fall apart under the weight of something seemingly small – a dishcloth in the sink. But witnessing something and inhabiting it are different kinds of knowledge.

As we grow older we accumulate an emotional vocabulary. At sixteen I could scarcely write heartbreak because I’d only read about it and imagined it. My experience was small and scant and whilst I could trace the vastness of it I didn’t know it. I could borrow from Cathy and Heathcliff and every tragic love story I’d inhaled by then. I could feel things intensely because being sixteen makes a person good at intensity. But I couldn’t know what I know now, I hadn’t wagered a war against loss.

Love sits beside loss and the enormous wheel of other emotions. Births, deaths, friendships, arguments, reconciliations, moments of exquisite happiness and those terrible days we’d gladly erase were it possible. There are people who taught us tenderness and people who taught us caution. Those who made us braver. Someone who made us laugh until we couldn’t breathe. Sometimes it’s the same person because humans are fascinating and complex beings.

Perhaps that’s one reason fictional people can feel so real, because they’re mosaics. A tiny piece of something observed, something imagined, something researched, something remembered and something felt so deeply it became part of our emotional architecture.

The same is true beyond writing. We have a strange cultural fondness for clean breaks and fresh starts, as though life can be divided neatly into before and after. Turn the page. Draw a line. Start again. But it’s not the human experience of experiencing this or that, they bleed together. I think maturity is partly learning to tolerate the and.
I loved and I hurt. I miss and I understand. Something was real and something else was true as well. I can treasure what was given to me and decide what I do with it now. What I will take forward and what I must leave behind.

There’s something rather freeing about that. We don’t have to throw away every good thing simply because the circumstances around it altered. Experience belongs to us once we’ve lived it. What someone taught us remains known, shared memories, moments in time. Laughter happened, love was felt. The echoes remain.

And for writers, perhaps that’s the peculiar alchemy of it all. Life keeps giving us material we didn’t ask for. We absorb it, rage at some of it, revel in some of it, occasionally wish very much that we could hand it back and somewhere along the way it becomes understanding. Then one day perhaps I’ll be writing someone entirely fictional and she’ll feel something I recognise.
I’ll know the pressure in her chest, why she can’t eat, know the ridiculous thing that makes her laugh when she thought she’d forgotten how. But I won’t need to give her my story, she’ll have her own and I can shape the truth of how it felt.

None of us would choose the tragic moments in life in order to better understand or write. We would always choose joy. Though just once in a while perhaps it better illustrates a character, bringing forth recognisable facets so the reader understands the vastness of the emotions described and experiences it beside them. And maybe that is the only redeeming feature of loss, a reluctant creative framework.