Find Your Writing

I have always had a deep affinity for journals even though my journaling tends to come in spurts.

For as long as I can remember, I said I wanted to be an author when I grew up, but my relationship with writing has been fairly unstable throughout most of my life.

There have been seasons when I knew writing helped me process, just as many when I struggled to see any benefit at all, and even more when I believed I didn’t have anything important or interesting worth recording.

 When I was in second grade, I overheard my parents talking about something I’d written for an assignment—and it completely crippled my excitement for writing for several years. Looking back, I trust their opinions were more than valid. But at the time, I wasn’t interested in pursuing anything I couldn’t be perfect at from the start. So, I quietly gave up on the idea that I was capable of achieving my dream.

Then, in fourth grade, I won an essay contest that reignited my enthusiasm for writing all over again. But by my senior year, that spark had dimmed once more. After rereading the journals I had filled throughout junior high and high school, I found myself unimpressed by my own perceptions. I vividly remember feeling embarrassed by my dramatic, superficial thoughts, and I seriously questioned my career path.

Even so, I had already enrolled in Pitt State’s journalism program. I decided to press on, just in time to meet a pessimistic professor who reassured our freshman class that we were still decades away from writing about anything we cared about.

That experience put the nail in that dream’s coffin for me. I made the choice after that class to switch majors and commit my future to becoming a therapist.

To my surprise, this was probably the best thing I could’ve done for my relationship with writing, but I wouldn’t understand this for a few more years…

In 2014, Lucas and I were dealing with some hard things in our marriage, and out of pure desperation, I started journaling again. For the very first time in my life, writing was guiding me into understanding. It helped me map my own insights and see things I hadn’t ever seen before. It was no longer fueled by performance but driven by the need for new perspective, and it became a treasure that I found in really hard time.

In 2016, I was deeply grateful to have writing back in my life during my pregnancy with Pepper. At 20 weeks, I began having contractions. After a trip to the hospital, I was reassured that—even though I was definitely contracting—my baby was stable. Still, I was left with the responsibility of managing the emotional and physical burden of those contractions on my own through the long, sleepless nights. So, I started writing her love letters as I lay awake.

These notes were some of my most prized possessions. I would dream about making her baby book and filling the pages with the beautiful compilation of writings I had composed, and I couldn’t wait to gift her.

Then, a year after her birth, I went to download all of my notes and images to my computer and my phone glitched in the process. I lost all my data. Every letter. Every image. Unrecovered.

This experience left me devastated. I was so furious that I cared so much about a few material mementos, and I blamed writing for setting me up for a disappointment I hadn’t anticipated. And I felt stupid for it. Superficial, yet again.

I didn’t write for my own enjoyment for 7 years. The desire and love was totally gone.

Then two years ago, God told me it was time to write again. I decided to start my blog because I knew if I didn’t have a reason to write, I wouldn’t. It was miserable for a whole year before I started to enjoy it, and just now started getting to the place where I look forward to it.

Here’s the point of this story (finally): There is something that once brought you life that you no longer do too. Something you’ve always had a longing in your heart to try or become good at, that you’ve tossed aside. Maybe because of pain and disappointment, or maybe because you just didn’t think it was important any longer, but it is.

Pick it back up. Or try it for the first time. It might just awaken a part of your soul you didn’t know was asleep.