Writing with Trauma: The "Butterfly Effect"

Turning to ritual as a way to create after tragedy

This past week has been traumatic for many. I know I felt that I’d lost a good part of the world I knew, and I fear the world that is replacing it. I didn’t write a word.

Coincidentally, a writer wrote to me to thank me for a piece I wrote over a year ago, Writing and trauma, and how it especially resonated for her now that many of us are going through a collective trauma.

I’d actually forgotten that I wrote the piece because so much has happened in the past year, but the piece grew out of an occasion where I spoke to a group of writers who were living in the midst of a war. Zoom brings me to many unlikely places to speak these days.

I’d shown up with my usual “stump speech,” meant to inspire and motivate people in normal times, normal conditions, and I quickly realized how off-key that was.

I fortunately didn’t give my stump speech because the trauma in the room was so palpable, so thick, even to me thousands of miles away.

Instead of my speech, we just talked about their experiences living in a war zone and what writing can mean in such a fearful situation. Writing anything was too challenging to start, but we worked our way toward a word sprint or two.

Our brains are wired for connections—connections that lead to creations—but trauma rewires them for protection. When we experience trauma, our thoughts dig into a painful loop as our brain tries to understand the pain of a shattered world.

A pain so foreign. A pain that hunts you down. A pain that can’t be reconciled, or it doesn’t seem so.

I haven’t experienced anything like the trauma of a war, so I don’t want to misuse the word “trauma,” but this past year included several crises and challenges that all added up to me barely writing any fiction or poetry. I’ve only written this Substack newsletter, in fact, except for a few stray lines here and there (more coming later about that).

Creating in a time of pain: “the butterfly effect”

I’m fascinated by how we create in times of pain, especially when that pain isn’t going to stop. I’ve taken inspiration from my friend, the wonderful artist

Isa Catto

, who lost her daughter Bailey to an accidental overdose of fentanyl earlier this year.

Bailey had just arrived in New York City after graduating from high school to work her first job on Broadway, but within hours of landing in the city, a “friend” gave her drugs laced with fentanyl and she died in her sleep.

Isa has been so bravely forthcoming about the many shapes her grieving has taken in her Substack newsletter, this slant of light. I’m a parent who has children the same age as Isa’s, and this is a fear I often go to sleep with. As parents, we’re wired to take care of our children, but the further they go out into the world, the less we’re able to care for them.

Given the way I tend to react to emotional troubles as if ordering from a menu of self-destructive plates, I will always think of Isa’s very artful, thoughtful, and constructive ways to grieve.

One of Isa’s ways to grieve is to make a mixed media featuring a butterfly each day to remember Bailey.¹ She says: “Butterflies were a logical choice—beautiful and fleeting like she was—but they also represent immortality, the souls of the departed, and reinvention across a myriad of cultures.”

She turned to Casper Ter Kuile's The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices to better understand the vitality behind her new ritual:

“The word sacred itself comes from the Latin sacrare, which means to consecrate or dedicate. And to consecrate means to declare or make something holy. So the sacredness is in the doing, and that means we have enormous agency to make sacred happen ourselves.”

Isa writes that according to Ter Kuile, rituals help us create critical connections during times of isolation and anguish.

“I needed a practice I could perform on autopilot to jumpstart each day,” she writes. “With the help of a friend’s candle and some preternatural survival instinct, I have a map with simple navigational points that nudge me forward, will me to seek beauty, and insist that I will fall fully, madly back in love with this life again.”

I heard a psychologist once say that unless we name trauma, we are powerless to transform it. It remains an antagonist, an enemy. The reason to try to write is that our creative urges help us explore, shape, and make sense of trauma.

Find out more about how Isa has turned routine into ritual through her beautiful butterflies. See if you can find a way to create your own butterfly each day, and “fall fully, madly back in love with this life again.”

*The image above is one of Isa’s butterflies.

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Because a quote

“The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be. This idea overwhelms some people. I have found that the wonder of life is often most easily recognizable through habits and routines.”

—Anne Lamott (via Isa’s Substack)

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The weeklong O‘ahu Writers Retreat is taking place, April 21-27, 2025, in Mokulēʻia. I’ll be there along with an amazing faculty of writers.

Because sometimes just one word …

Isa’s ritual made me think about how when challenged creatively, instead of stepping away, it’s often better to focus on one small act of creativity, even if it’s writing just a single sentence.

After the election in November, I wrote a post, Words can change every constellation, inspired by a quote by Hannah Arendt from The Human Condition:

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of … boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

The piece was about the many reasons we need to keep creating—how our stories can actually change the world. I believe our stories unearth truths that change our culture, and then we change our policies.

Trust in the power of stories. Keep the faith. Keep writing.

Because a photo

1. The image at the beginning of the post is one of Isa’s.