Learning How to Be the Writer of Your Life.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

I’m not someone who considered myself to be a writer. At least not as an adult person. As a child, I did though; I would lie on the floor my bedroom and craft binders full of stories, sketches of imaginary worlds and dramatic tales. I would build worlds that my little 10-year old self could delight inside of, where the act of writing could occupy me for hours alone.

Yet with time and school, I stopped enjoying writing. I lost my connection to it when my imaginative lands got lost in paragraphs, on specific topics (that I may or may not find fascinating), with periods and appropriate punctuation.

It wasn’t my way with writing.

And I decided I was not a writer. I would do it when I had to, but I would let it lie in the land of essays and research papers, in the world of logic and reason, rationalization and linear thought. Which is not a bad way with writing, of course. There is a lot of power to convey that type of thinking.

It’s just … it isn’t my way with words. It’s not how I could relate to the blank page. I needed my writing to be wild, messy, expressive and sometimes illogical. I liked it to feel poetic … to hold my soapbox rants on life, and my wildest outlandish ambition. I needed my words to bounce from here to there as I wound my way to a discovery on the page. Punctuation would have to be optional.

I didn’t realize that I could still have this kind of relationship with writing until I discovered the book Writing Down Your Soul. Finding this gem gave me the permission to return to writing in the way that I had known it as a little girl. It allowed me to embrace the page as wildly and expressively as I desire, feeling the experience of inner freedom to share outside the boundaries I usually kept myself within on the grid-lined page.

With the “rules” changed, I could become a writer again.

I got to write for myself and my own discovery; to feel my feelings and the messiness that I didn’t have an answer for in life … to let it all be accepted on a non-judgemental page.

I’ve been writing for the last year and a half …mostly for me … always with discovery. In each entry, I am learning a different way writing shows up for me. Some days I want it to hold my feelings safely and the words I most need to hear within myself. Other days, I use it to summon the experiences I want to learn from, to be an outlet for understanding a new layer of wisdom inside of me.

It makes me wonder … if writing can be all of these things for me, couldn’t it be for others too?

I have this hunch that we are all writers of our own lives. That we are each the author of our experience, the meaning makers of our world. The power of writing is that it gives us this tool to unearth what is inside of us; to see, hear and understand ourselves in a tangible way, and to find our connection to our voice in the process. In this way, writing can show us our own inner guidance, inspiring us to live as uniquely as our own soul, finding its way in the world.

That’s why I love offering workshops on soul writing — it’s not to teach others how to ‘write well’ — god knows, I am no expert in that. I offer these workshops to provide an invitation back to writing for anyone who also lost their connection to this wildly free outlet of expression, discovery, creativity, therapy and connection in life … and for anyone who feels like they haven’t been a writer in a while (*raising my own hand*).

Because you are a writer, of your life. You are a writer of your story, your experience, your wonderings, your questions, curiosity and meanings. Writing can be an outlet for you in any way you want to craft that relationship, and it can serve as many purposes as you allow it to.

Give yourself the freedom to write how your soul most wants to express, and you will be granting yourself permission to connect with what is true inside of you, outside of the boundaries, outside of ‘the rules.’

Because, you never know what opens up for you, once you do in that way …

Photo by Mack Fox (MusicFox) on Unsplash

**I am leading two workshops on Soul Writing this week — one virtually, on May 16th (link here), and one in Washington, DC for those who are in the city (info here). Come join me if you’d like to learn how to open up to writing from your own soul ❤**