Why Write (Still),

On finding my voice again, and learning to trust it.

I’ve written my whole life.
Since I could read, really.

I was obsessed - with words, with stories, with fantasy. I’d immerse myself in other words so deeply, I sometimes felt I belonged there more.

Sometimes, as a child, when waiting for the next book in a fantasy series, I would try my hand at writing it myself - because I couldn’t bear to wait. I needed more.

My grandfather was a poet.
He never published any of his work, but reading his work taught me something fundamental: rhythm, weighting, the quiet agony of arranging words that don’t seem to fit - until they do.

I wrote and wrote.
Fairytale places. Impossible colours.
Words made me feel like a kind of literary Midas: If I could imagine it I could create it.

It wasn’t really tied to identity back then.
It was just something I loved.
Not an achievement. Not something I expected anyone to care about.
Writing, really, was just a place for me and my imagination.

Things changed in high school.
When the big feelings really started.
Writing then seemed more of a release.
A salve.
A way to get something out.

I felt angry often. Confused. Uncertain of who I was or what I wanted. I wrote then to help me make it all make sense.

I wrote about boys.
I wrote about girls.
I wrote about being in love with my best friend.

How could I make sense of that?
Was it companionship? Comfort? Longing?

Sometimes I wrote in journals. Sometimes in the margins of my maths book. Sometimes on my skin.

Phrases. Truths.
Things I couldn’t say out loud.

I wrote her letters. Quiet ones.
I told her I loved her without quite saying it.

It helped.
It released.
But also, it burned.

Fast forward.
I’m older now.
I haven’t really written for years.

My journals are a lonely place. Half-filled pages I open when something has happened. When I don’t know how to move forward.

I stopped reading fiction.
I stopped dancing.
I started reading self-help.
I studied psychology.
I worked in mental health.

I listened to spoken word.
I wrote case notes more than diary entries.

Every few years, I have felt a quite pull to start writing again.
I don’t quite know why.
That is part of what I am here to figure out.

Writing doesn’t necessarily make me feel good.
In fact, it brings to the surface so many truths that I have spent time, effort and money trying to turn away from.
Truths like:

You let me down.
I wasn’t okay with what you did.
I miss you more than I should.
I remember how it was.
I wish I handled it differently.

In time, it was just easier to avoid.

But still - I envied other writers.
For their courage.
They said the things that needed to be said.

I started drinking around it.
Dancing around it.
Scrolling around it.

But I think I’ve left too many things unsaid.
And now, here they are again - bubbling up.
Not just the memories, the feeling of them - the grief.

There was a time I thought that writing was a portal to nostalgia.

Why should the moment before we kissed, in a backstreet in the rain, still matter?

Why should a friendship that ended in betrayal still stir me?

Wouldn’t it be healthier to forget?

To be present?

To just be here?

I’ve always struggled to be here.

But I think learning how to be present - not just in my body but in my story - is part of what’s next for me.

To fix my eyes forward.
To the people who show up.
To the sun, quietly rising and setting.
To the home I live in now, with the vegetable gardens out the back I really should tend to.
To the relationship and love that I have called in. That I had to learn that I deserved.

A quiet kind of peace.

I don’t have the answers yet and that’s okay.
Writing is messy.
Knowing yourself is messy.

But I am starting to understand it not as something sorrowful, but as a kind of excavation.
Not a performance, not a project - a slow uncovering.

That maybe the burnout I have been feeling for years isn’t from doing too much.
Maybe it’s from not saying enough.

From not leaning in.
From listening to everything else - except myself.
I’m listening now.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash