Sherri Mandell

Resolve to Revise Your Life

It’s that time of year when we make resolutions. We will eat more healthily, we’ll write in our journals and do yoga every day, we’ll be kinder to others; we’ll cook dinner and lose weight.  Yet most of our resolutions are never fulfilled. Because it’s hard to change. We prefer the status quo even if we don’t like it.

But writing can help. In my new book, “The Kabbalah of Writing: Mystical Practices for Inspiration and Creativity,” I describe how writing can empower us so that change is possible.  Writing can be a means for us to transcend the boundaries of our lives so that we forgive, reimagine, and even reconstitute ourselves. In this way, writing can help us reinvigorate our lives.

In order to keep our resolutions, we probably need to deal with the past—what is blocking us– by revisiting it. Writing gives us the chance to change our relationship with the past by imagining and writing about alternative scenarios: If I had been thinking, I would have said… or how I would have liked to… or I might have said. I would have preferred, or I imagine or suppose.

We can return to a scene and replay it, inventing a different or more satisfactory encounter or outcome—a kinder, preferred story that exists in imagination. And by replaying an experience in a way that’s more satisfying, by writing about it in a different way, we transform it—and ourselves. When the new words enter our psyche, these words have their own substance and reality and somehow resonate with the lived experience so that change is possible, creating the possibility of healing. In this way, we can revise our lives. A second draft is possible—one that is more coherent, perhaps with a different ending than the one we lived.

When we write, our job is not to tell the story we know but the story we don’t know. The one that is waiting to be born. Each day offers us the opportunity of renewal and writing can help us get “unstuck” so that we can activate our vision and will.

So write about how you imagine yourself changing this year. First write ten wishes for yourself. Write ten things that you imagine could be possible this year. Write ten hopes, ten dreams.

Now return to the past, the scene of a disturbing episode. Write about what you wish had been different, how you would change things. Use words like “I wish I had,” or “If only” or “If I could or “If only I had said.” Now you can write what was not possible to say then. Keep writing.  See where the writing takes you. Read aloud what you wrote. If you want, write about another troubling incident. Write about what you wish you had said, or what you might have said. Imagine a different ending to that story.

Now you are ready to move into the New Year with more conviction and power.