While it’s nice to think that the end goal will be becoming a best-selling novelist(ha!), and being able to live comfortably and happily off of royalties, watching people cosplay as the characters conjured by my imagination, the daily quality of life that is impacted by my writing is so much deeper, and more foundational to my being.

At its heart, writing helps me express thoughts and feelings that I have a hard time putting into words. Because when I put them on paper, I can take necessary care to organize them into a way that best expresses myself. By putting my thoughts and feelings on paper, it takes a lot of the anxiety of the confrontation out of the equation because I can think about what I intend to say before actually saying it. I can sit with those words before putting them into action, unlike speaking where once it’s out it’s out.

Except when I’m traveling, I’ve never been one for the daily journal or anything, but at times of duress, or grief, or big life changes, or when you have something that you’re burning to say to someone, being able to write it down and figure out how to express the things you want to say or make sense of the tangled mess of feelings is kind of a magical thing, really. It’s a safe space where you can sort yourself out, or tell yourself first before you share that with anyone else.

Sometimes the act of writing it down is the very thing that helps you figure out what the core of the matter really is. We can get so hung up on fringe details sometimes, that it’s hard to see past it to the heart. Once the words are on paper, it’s no longer a pinball bashing around inside your head, but a realized thought materialized into the world, and the pinball doesn’t have to bash around inside our thoughts anymore cuz it’s out in the world. Once that noise is gone, that distraction silenced, it’s easier to see past it to the bigger or deeper matters that may have caused it in the first place.

When I was younger and filled with so much more grief and frustration and anger about things in my life I couldn’t control, those things would keep me up at night, or torment me all day long. So, I kept what I called my “anger journal” … I would write down every thought and feeling, even when I knew I was overreacting, even if I sympathized with the other side, but just to give myself the space to feel it without it being a fight. I wrote down every nasty thing that I felt like saying but knew that I couldn’t cuz it was unfair or hurtful or that other person didn’t deserve it. But once it was on the page, it wasn’t in my head anymore and it gave me so much peace. I would feel better after putting it in that journal, cuz even if I couldn’t say it to the person that I might have wanted to, I could at least get it out of my self and sleep, or go about my day. Then a few days or weeks or months later when I revisited my anger journal, I would simply tear out those pages and burn them. They’d served their purpose, and I could move on.

So, while as an adult I love writing for all of the stories and things I can conjure and share with others, the act of writing has been so important for me to just be me, and has allowed me to unbury and hold on to my true self.

I hope it can do the same for you.