Write from the scar or the wound?

Where emotion meets craft

Described by critics as “the most powerful farewell ever captured on film,” Johnny Cash’s Hurt became his final testament — released months before his wife’s death, and only seven months before his own.

The fourth and final collaboration between Johnny Cash and maverick producer Rick Rubin came in 2002 with American IV: The Man Comes Around. By then, Cash was a revered cult figure — admired across genres but long past the charts. The legend survived, but the spotlight had moved on.

While working on the album, Rubin searched for a song that could carry the full weight of Cash’s life — something raw enough to hold his faith, regret, and defiance all at once. He sent him dozens of possibilities, but nothing stuck. Yet on every list Rubin made, one track kept showing up at the top — Hurt, written by Trent Reznor.

Reznor wrote Hurt around 1993, while finishing The Downward Spiral, an album he described as “a journey through self-destruction.” At that time, he was actively living through the mental and emotional chaos the song describes — isolation, addiction, depression, and self-loathing.

Cash barely gave it a chance — industrial rock wasn’t his world. Rubin pressed him: “Forget the sound. Listen to the words.” Still nothing. It wasn’t until Rubin finally sang the lyrics aloud that Cash stopped, really listened, and suddenly heard something strikingly familiar: his own life inside the song.

Within days they were in the studio. As Cash recorded, his voice cracked on certain lines — “everyone I know goes away in the end” — and Rubin knew they had entered territory beyond mere interpretation.

Cash changed a few lyrics — “crown of shit” became “crown of thorns” — and the song transformed. What Reznor wrote as a portrait of addiction became, in Cash’s mouth, a spiritual reckoning: a confession from a man looking straight at the end of his life.

But the music video is what turned the song into something immortal.

The video feels less like a performance and more like a cinematic elegy. It opens on the decaying remains of the House of Cash Museum — the glass cases cracked, trophies covered in dust, relics of a life that once glittered. The camera lingers on rot and ruin: fruit spoiling on a banquet table, fading photographs.

Between these images, fragments of old footage flicker — the young Johnny Cash in his prime, striding across stages, full of power. The cuts between past and present are merciless. They collapse time, forcing us to witness the distance between who he was and what remains. His trembling voice becomes the only bridge between the two — the myth and the man meeting one last time.

And then there’s June Carter Cash, standing in the background. She doesn’t move. She simply looks at him — the gaze of someone who has witnessed both his genius and his destruction, and knows the cost of both.

Not long after the filming, June passed away. Johnny followed her a few months later.

As Trent Reznor later recalled, seeing the video was so powerful he felt as if the song no longer belonged to him.

Write from the Scar

It fascinates me how some songs — like Hurt — seem to cut straight through the surface, snapping us out of the autopilot state we drift through most days. They offer an experience that feels almost physical, as if the sound is speaking directly to something deep inside us.

But can essays have the same effect?

When I read one, I often feel smarter — like I’m adding another piece to the puzzle of understanding myself, the people around me, and the systems we live in. But if I’m honest, I rarely feel anything in the body. The intellect sharpens, but something deeper stays untouched.

Maybe that’s the cost of following the familiar advice to “write from the scar.”

The saying goes: wait until pain has hardened into perspective, so you can turn emotion into insight and offer readers something useful. If you write from the wound — when the feeling is still raw — your work risks becoming self-centered, indulgent, or incoherent. More catharsis than communication.

Readers, we’re told, don’t care about what happened. They care about what you’ve learned because of it.

And yet, every once in a while, you come across something that seems to breaks that rule — works like James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son or Cheryl Strayed’s The Love of My Life. They make you feel something visceral, almost electric — as if the writer’s emotion were still alive beneath the words. And you start to wonder whether “write from the scar” is really such good advice, or whether it hides something more nuanced.

Take a Baldwin line like “I hated her for her white face, and for her great, astounded, frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worthwhile” and you can sense that the prose carries an anger that polished reflection wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

Baldwin is so close to his own emotion that the essay invites readers not just to observe, but to feel with him. And you can feel him thinking his way toward compassion, step by step, discovering the essay’s meaning as he writes:

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated…”

Strayed’s essay goes even further, offering almost no resolution at all. It drags you straight into her grief and disorientation, making you uneasy from the very first line: “The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.”

Instinctively, you wait for her to soften it — to say “I know now that…”, “In hindsight…”, “I wasn’t myself…” — but she never reaches for those shields. She refuses the safety of distance. She doesn’t frame her choices as moral failure, or trauma logic, or some neat psychological pattern. She simply lets the facts sit between you and her, unprotected.

What remains is pure exposure — emotion without insulation.

“I drank, I smoked, I fu——d.”

Pieces like these feel magnetic the first time you read them — so magnetic that it’s tempting to think they violate the “write from the scar” rule entirely.

But it isn’t that simple. And here’s an important fact about both works:

Baldwin’s father died when he was nineteen; Notes of a Native Son appeared when he was thirty-one. Strayed wrote The Love of My Life nearly a decade after her mother’s death.

So we have to ask: if so many years had passed, weren’t they writing from the scar?

And if so, why do their words still feel so unmistakably wounded?

Opening the Scar

When you listen to Cash’s words, you immediately feel a man reckoning with his mortality — looking back on a life marked by triumphs and damage, naming the regrets he can no longer outrun. And much like Baldwin and Strayed, he draws us not just into the memory, but into the emotion beneath it. It’s as if we’re standing inside the wound with him.

But none of these works come from the fresh wound itself.

What they’re doing is far more deliberate: they’re reopening the scar as a form of craft.

They return to the wound with enough distance to stay grounded, but enough vulnerability to let the heat rise again. They’re not consumed by the emotion; they’re channeling it. And that distance gives them control — the ability to shape how the feeling reaches us.

It shows up first in pacing. Instead of spiraling the way unprocessed pain does, they slow the memory down. They choose where to zoom in, where to linger, when to hold back, when to let silence speak. Every beat feels intentional, not reactive.

It shows up in tone. Baldwin can move from rage to tenderness to analysis within a single paragraph, and it never feels inconsistent. It feels human. That tonal range is only possible when the writer is close enough to feel the emotion but far enough to direct it.

And it shows up in structure. Strayed’s nonlinear movement — looping, doubling back, jumping in time — isn’t a lack of order; it’s the architecture of grief itself. She’s shaping the chaos without pretending it’s tidy.

All of this is why the writing lands. Without that level of craft, the reader would slip into pity: pity for the old man full of regrets, for the son who couldn’t get love from his father or his country, for the woman who imploded after losing her mother.

But what these pieces evoke isn’t pity — it’s recognition.

Because there’s something in all of us that fears reaching the end of life and realizing how much regret we pilled up. Something that fears the moments when life proves itself unfair. And something that knows one sudden loss can destroy everything we built.

And their refusal to make themselves look “good” is what makes their work feel honest rather than performative. They move between vivid memory and reflection without moralizing, without tidying anything up for the sake of a lesson.

There’s no hero’s journey here. Just life — as complex as it is.

And once you see what they’re actually doing on the page, a harder truth emerges: writing like this requires reopening your own scar.

The Resistance

Most people resist reopening the scar — including me. And not only because it’s uncomfortable.

The deeper reason is this: the scar isn’t just healed pain; it’s part of the identity you built to survive it.

To revisit the wound means risking the story you’ve been telling yourself:

• that you’ve moved on,

• that you’ve learned the lesson,

• that you’re no longer that person.

Stepping back into that earlier version of yourself is frightening. What if the wound is not as closed as you believed? What if revisiting it destabilizes more than it clarifies? What if you reveal more than you can take back?

That’s why it’s far easier to keep the analytical distance — to think about the wound instead of entering it.

And if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noticed something:

I did exactly that. I analyzed Baldwin, Strayed, and Cash. I talked about craft. But I didn’t open my own scar.

I’m trying to learn how.

Some days I write something raw and delete it. Other days I soften the edges to protect myself from judgment. On the rare occasions I let the truth stay on the page, I’m terrified of how it will land.

The part of me that knows how to sound smart is the part that built my career. Opening the scar feels like putting that identity at risk.

So why bother?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

But when I listen to Cash, or read Baldwin or Strayed, I feel like it’s worth trying.

Because ideas have never changed me on their own.

Real transformation has always begun in the place where the wound once lived.

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