Writing About Tough Times

By Zanny Merullo Steffgen

The first time I sat down to write about my experiences as an expat in Cambodia and the circumstances surrounding my departure from the country, paralysis struck. Suddenly I was wading through memories. I searched for one to jot down that could encapsulate how I’d felt at home in the town of Siem Reap, or how painful it was to need to leave in search of first-world healthcare. Part of writing personal essays or memoir is putting myself mentally back in a particular scene, viscerally remembering all that I had noticed in it so I can choose which details to write about. This time I appeared on street 26, where my German boyfriend’s hostel stood among the banana palms. The dusty red road covered in a mess of traffic came to life, as did the tendrils of jungle that crept toward that traffic, as if the infrastructure of the city were only a temporary obstacle for the tangle of green to overcome. I heard the cries of tuk-tuk la-dyyy from the drivers that lined street, saw the floral pajama sets that the local women wore, smelled the burning trash and incense. Something powerful welled up in my chest, choking me with a former reality that was now intangible. I backed away from my computer, wrapped in a shroud of memory. My mind raced toward the moment I’d gone swimming in a flooded rice paddy and developed an E. Coli sinus infection, and the months of pain, fatigue, IV antibiotics, and hospital visits that followed. Memories passed through me like a ghost, so I turned on a sit-com and distracted myself with it for the next few hours. It was too soon to revisit that tender place in my mind. 

In my experience, writing about painful times is tricky. In order to do justice to such moments, I need to feel them deeply again, get really close to the memories so I can characterize them in words that bring the reader there with me. At the same time, I cannot write from a place of self-pity. There is a delicate balance to be found in all first-person writing, but especially when it comes to writing about the tough stuff. Two excellent examples of personal writing I’ve been drawn to are Maya Angelou’s honest memoirs or Jeannette Walls’ haunting book The Glass Castle. Of course, there are also many well-known authors who choose not to divulge the most intimate details of their lives, instead skirting the edges of personal wounds to focus on other, less painful subjects or making up new worlds altogether. It isn’t easy to bare inner scars to complete strangers, nor is it necessary. Personally, I’ve found writing about difficult times to be a form of therapy, the last step in my release of an inner torment. If I attempt to publish these stories, it’s only because I believe in the power of human connection. One thing most human beings have in common, at some level, is hardship. Maybe reading about someone else’s hardship can be a way to feel less alone.

Years ago, when I studied abroad in Italy (after missing the first year of high school due to a mysterious chronic illness), my host mother said something that I often come back to. We were riding home from the gym one dark January night when Carmela turned from the wheel to pin me with her gaze. “Quando hai sofferto, Zanny, riesci a capire tutte le persone nel mondo.” When you’ve suffered, you can understand anyone in the world. This was her response to my attempt at piecing together the few words of Italian I knew to tell her about my illness and how it still held me in its grasp. Until that point, my suffering had felt so internal, so personal, that I had never before imagined that it could be a source of understanding and compassion. If I write about the look on my boyfriend’s face when he told me he’d decided to sell his hostel in order to join me in America, or my last glimpse of the busy market by my house in Siem Reap, maybe other people will recognize my pain. Even if readers have never been to Cambodia or gotten an E. Coli sinus infection, maybe they, too, have lost a home, or have surrendered a battle to their body, or know what it’s like to be the reason a person they love gives something up. 

Some pains and traumas will remain forever locked up within me. When I wrote about how I was assaulted during my solo travels, I did so delicately, dancing around the details in order to keep that particularly private experience unspoken to the public. Even mentioning it in a piece of writing, however, released feelings I could then discuss with my inner circle. Conversation was that particular pain’s way of getting out of my body. It’s the other pains—the breakups and heartaches, the years I’ve spent in poor health—that I’ve chosen to work through on the page. When I’m ready, I sit down with all the hurt from former times and I write essays, many of which will never be seen by anyone except me. Then I get up and I feel lighter, having emptied any lingering feelings onto a page where I know they’ll stay preserved as I felt them without necessitating any more agonizing on my part.

So, with Cambodia, how did I eventually make my way back to the memories in order to write about them? I let two years pass. Days faded into a monotonous stream of bartending shifts and walks through the mountain town where I made my next home with that same boyfriend. I visited Siem Reap in my dreams and cried myself to sleep a few nights thinking of the community I’d left behind. After some time, I began to forget words in Khmer. I became re-accustomed to walking into superstores where the shelves were lined with all I could ever need, I learned to wear a coat again and got used to seeing snow, until the events surrounding my departure became fixed as a memory of the past. There was pain in the knowledge that I was letting go, too. That’s when I knew I was ready. Slowly but surely, I gained the ability to walk through a slideshow of my life in Siem Reap. I could recall the sights and sounds and smells required to write vividly about Cambodia without keeping those sights and sounds and smells pulsing through my head like a hangover. Eventually, I was able to tell that story. And when I did, the words came quickly. They had been stored somewhere in my body along with the memories and, when I finally opened the floodgates, they were ready to get out into the world. It was then that I wrote an essay about the moment I fell ill—that glorious swim in a flooded rice paddy after a difficult day of work—and could do so with an appreciation for the beauty of the moment and all that it had led to since. 

Zanny Merullo Steffgen is a young freelance writer currently living in the mountains with her husband. She still dreams often about Cambodia and is currently working through her experiences during the pandemic before attempting to commit them to the page. Her essays have been featured in The Manifest Station and The Drop wine magazine, among other publications. Visit her website at zannymerullosteffgen.com.