The Writing That Made Me
How writing carried me — and how I'm expanding beyond old beliefs through relationships
I sit down at an empty page and let my inner writer express herself.
My hands start moving and my inner landscape reveals itself.
This has been a practice since I was young.
I remember my mom gifting me journals as soon as I was able to hold a pen.
She’d write her way through life and all its challenges, and eventually burn the pages
to protect her kids from one day discovering things we wish we didn’t know.
Some of the pages, we kept. And even have her handwriting on our bodies as tattoo art. I wouldn’t be the writer I am without her.
She was unknowingly gifting me a sacred friend I would rely on most of my life.
A friend who meets me without agenda.
A friend who travels everywhere with me and never judges.
A friend who remains neutral—no matter how triggered I am
or how harsh my words sound.
Writing has been a lifeline for me.
I’ve written almost every dream I’ve had into reality—
from deciding to leave the corporate tech job and big shiny building in San Francisco,
to manifesting the type of life partnership that I knew was possible,
to stepping boldly into coaching and soul-led life’s work,
and aligning with getting pregnant against all medical odds
(technically, I have very low egg count but that didn’t stop us).
I’ve relied on writing to recalibrate doubts into trust and knowing.
I’ve felt through fear of never having what I want,
and found the enjoyment of yearning
through putting words onto a page.
I’ve written as my form of processing big emotions,
before I knew how to move them through my body.
I’ve written poetry and grieved through every heartbreak—
from a deeply loving (yet toxic) relationship with an alcoholic,
through claiming my bisexuality and falling deeply in love with a woman
I must’ve spent many lifetimes with,
and dancing into Edmond’s arms to find the most transformative partnership
I could’ve ever imagined.
It was my writing that carried me through.
Before I knew it was safe to open up deeply in my friendships.
Before I had the resources to afford therapists or coaches.
Before I trusted the attachment within partnerships enough
to truly lean on my partner for emotional support.
My writing was my trusted space of safety.
I wrote my way through every major life decision and transition—
from moving across the country to California,
through my parents’ divorce after thirty-three years of marriage,
through a house fire and job offer that moved me up to San Francisco,
and through two years of nomadic travel full-time,
then finally rooting in Colorado where we now live.
All those decisions were supported by my writing too.
As I reflect on why I’ve written, I can see a general theme
of processing through difficult times.
To write my way through the chaos
means that it’s biased towards the difficulty I’ve experienced in life.
I believe we attract what we focus on.
And when we focus on the beauty in life, it attracts more beauty.
But when we focus on the difficulty, it attracts more of the same.
So much of my writing that I’ve shared externally
has focused on growth through challenges in life.
Some part of me has been thinking that’s how to belong.
The subconscious narrative goes like this:
If I were to capture and share how beautiful my life is,
surely that would push people away?
I’m realizing, I’ve believed that “the world is generally suffering.”
In our tea-meditation this morning, my partner pointed out to me
that there is an alternative perspective.
“What other beliefs are there? Isn’t the world generally struggling?
Global warming, fires, injustice, etc…” I said.
“What if the world is generally awakening—with suffering in it too?”
he says in response.
My body feels stiff.
I feel strong resistance.
An emptiness in my belly.
All somatic signs that he’s pointing to a core belief
that doesn’t want to budge.
I had a similar experience during our early dating chapter in 2019
when he said to me…
“You know you’re not broken, right?”
“Uhhhh, what. Why do you do all this personal development then?” I responded.
“To expand.” he said, with a smile and shining eyes.
That moment pointed to a core belief
that I’d related to as fact:
that “I’m broken and I need to be fixed.”
Which wasn’t true.
Moments that question our core beliefs are a doorway.
They welcome us into a new reality we couldn’t see before.
Then our choice is whether to stick to that belief, or to make an empowered choice to shift it (that’s why I love being trained as an NLP coach).
I’ve been seeing the world through a lens I’d developed as a child,
and I’d believed it to be a fact.
When the only real fact is that—
I choose how to see the world around me.
And when I can identify the beliefs I’m relating to as facts,
then that’s where the empowered choice shows back up again.
When I can see through my own stories—
that’s when the “observer” and the “adult” parts are accessible again,
and I’m no longer stuck in the “child consciousness.”
Without my partner to reflect this truth, I may have never seen it.
And simply writing in my journal likely would’ve never revealed it either.
That unconscious belief was water I was swimming in.
I wouldn’t have thought to question it.
This is why we (writers, but also all humans) need each other.
This is why we share what we create.
To be reflected.
To be seen.
And to be challenged sometimes.
So we can consider a new lens on life.
And expand how we’re seeing the world.
It’s why my soul attracted a life partner,
who is literally a Reflector in Human Design.
So that I can be shown the ways I’m still limiting myself.
So that I can be mirrored.
And from the mirror, I get to choose.
If we can’t see what’s in front of us, there is no choice.
It is only through visibility that we have our agency again.
And I choose to focus on wellbeing.
I choose to focus on beauty.
I choose to belong—no matter how good my life gets.
This piece of writing is a deep bow to “writing” as an entity that has carried me through life.
It’s an acknowledgement that we can only grow so much in isolation, and we need each other as mirrors.
And it’s a promise to start capturing more of the beauty in life,
not just the moments of growth through difficulty.