Giving My Words Wings

Why I started sharing my writing

For years I’ve been writing. Mostly when I’m sad. Correction: mostly when I’m devastated. It helps me process, it helps me heal and it makes me feel alive. When I am happy and optimally functioning, I tend to feel less inspired. When I am sad and in the midst of struggle and inquiry, however, I am profoundly in touch with my emotions, deeply connected to my inner wounds, and explicitly able to convey them.

I wrote often and a lot as my marriage fell apart. I wrote about shattered hopes and dreams, about the strong woman who had lost her voice and about the reemerging one I was becoming through the gruelling journey that is divorce.

I wrote about the week I ate nothing but Cheerios and champagne and called it an acceptable meal and about the night my friend swept me off my floor; crying, beer in hand, after not having eaten for three days while packing up my family home. I was a mess, a hot mess! I wrote about the evening I drove around town wondering where I would live, unable to breathe through my anguish and tears. I wrote the day we moved out of our big beautiful house and into the much smaller rental I am now proud to call our happy little home.

I wrote through the myriad of bad relationships, or better yet situation-ships, with the handful of unavailable men I subconsciously selected to choose me and who inevitably never did. I wrote after my first boyfriend post-divorce dumped me in Mexico, at a couples’ resort, on Thanksgiving Day and subsequently about the experience of dating men with mental illness. I wrote as I self-destructed with food or lack thereof, with drinks, and with toxic men as I tried to run from my feelings only to get in touch with them again through my writing, ultimately sending me right back to therapy.

I wrote through the #MeToo movement, as I too had a story to tell. I wrote as I mourned, as I processed and as I healed.

I wrote as I forgave myself, and others, as I accepted and as I started to reclaim my sense of self and to see glimpses of the old or rather renewed me. I continue to write today through difficult times, through deep self-inquiry, through struggle and through the growth and reemergence that always lies on the other side of breakdown if we are willing to endure it.

For years I’ve been writing, mostly when I’m sad, and for years I’ve been holding onto that writing despite a deep desire to share it and an inner yearning to be known. What if my parents disapprove? What if it’s too unprofessional or too revealing for my professional persona? What if my writing exposes someone else’s story, someone else’s truth, that is not mine to share? What if my humanness is judged? Considerations of others’ feelings over my own, fears of the unknown and worries of others’ seemingly needed approval, have held me back in unleashing my inner voice and in sharing my personal truth with a world I deeply want to feel more connected to with all of its imperfections and mine.

So, hear me roar world! I am ready to be vulnerable with you. I am ready to be known. I am ready for this next part of my journey.

I am empowered. I am capable. I am brave. I have a voice and it has a lot to say about life and love and my perfectly imperfect self. And I am ready to share that voice, real and raw, and I hope it is a positive force that brings value and that makes a difference for someone in this world, even just one someone. Humanistic psychologist Sidney M. Jourard, in The Transparent Self (1971), spoke of self-disclosure as a symptom of personality health that requires the courage, to be known by others, as one knows himself to be. I come to know myself through my writing. I write because it makes me feel alive because it is my self-care, my passion, and my full self-expression in the world. Writing sets me free.

I share my writing from the inside out because I deeply believe that sharing of ourselves connects us and because the time has come to give my words wings.