Three Ways Writing Changed My Life

"I have no fear, I have only love." -Stevie Nicks

Writing has been an important part of my identity since the second grade. I wrote stories, journals, poetry, and long-winded notes to crushes and best friends. I wrote about my fears and anxiety. I wrote about positive, strange, and questionable experiences. Everything that happened to me, good or bad, I wrote my way through. Writing has helped me make sense of a complicated world, process the chaos that is my life, and better understand who I am. Writing has impacted my life in countless ways. In the past few years, I have faced an overwhelming number of difficult experiences in a short time. These experiences tested me, slashed me open, bled me out. But writing helped me not just learn how to heal, but find a way to fight back against the pain of these experiences. Writing has changed my life in three significant ways:

1. By helping me process grief and depression.

My mom died three years ago. This threw everything I knew out of orbit. My daughter was born exactly five weeks before my mother died. Between grieving my mother's death, and navigating my own postpartum struggles, I started to shut down. I didn't want to talk to anyone about my mom. I didn't want to ask anyone advice about how to take care of my daughter. Everyone had opinions about how I should grieve and how I should be a mother, but I felt like nobody could possibly know what I was going through. I struggled with every aspect of motherhood, like most new mothers do, but I still felt alone on every level. I was living hours away from family in a strange city without any friends. I didn't have a job and my husband and I were barely making ends meet. I couldn't get my daughter to nurse, and at her first several pediatric appointments she was underweight. At her later appointments, after starting formula, she was nearly considered overweight. Nothing I did was right, and I didn't know who to turn to. I thought of myself as nothing more than a failure to my newborn. But when I began to write about my frustrations and struggles, I slowly began to find clarity. I started to see sharper, more defined lines in the moments of motherhood that were once fogged by depression. Maybe this wasn't a failed attempt at motherhood. Maybe this was just motherhood.

Although writing can be therapeutic, that isn't what it was for me. Not at first. It deepened my wounds before it healed them. It forced me to pour pieces of myself onto the page before I accepted them. Writing about my mom helped me understand the relationship we had when she was alive. It helped me see who she was outside of my clouded vision of her. It helped me process her illness, which lasted less than a year, and through which I was mostly in denial. Writing helped me realize it was okay to fall apart again and again and again.

Even three years after her death, I still fall apart. So I write. I write to raise questions about my pain. I write to accept this reality that my heart tries daily to deny. I write to forgive myself for all of the things I did but shouldn't have, or the things I never had a chance to say, but wanted to. Writing about the loss of someone so significant in my life, the person who created me--grew me inside of her, birthed me and clothed me and fed me and taught me how to love the world, was my way of surviving that loss. It was my way of keeping parts of her forever. It was a way of realizing that I wasn't a failure to my child. She was safe. She was clothed, and fed, and loved. Writing helped me find courage within myself to get through this dark cavern of grief and depression and self loathing, and find peace within myself.

2. By helping me understand and accept my shortcomings. Although I have made many mistakes in the past few years, getting married was not a mistake. Giving birth to my daughter was not a mistake. It may be true that I probably wasn't ready to have a baby when I did. It may be true that my ex and I grew apart, and our marriage ended early. But I do not regret my funny, strong, smart little girl, or the years my ex and I had together. Writing about our relationship, the good and the bad, helped me understand who we are. We are best friends. We are opposites who sometimes balance each other, and sometimes make each other crazy. We love each other, but not romantically. We are excellent parents--both of us. We want happiness for each other. We both know that moving in different directions was the best choice for us, and an even better choice for our daughter, regardless of what the town gossips are saying. Regardless of what some of our religious friends think about divorce. Regardless of what people who wanted us to be together forever, but didn't understand the inner workings of our relationship would say. I couldn't understand these things about us before I wrote them down. I couldn't understand why we both seemed so unhappy, or why I was afraid to say anything. Writing gave me courage to face the fact that I was not a good wife by traditional standards (to be clear, these aren't the standards my ex-husband held me to). I failed as a homemaker. I hate cooking and I can't sew or knit or make pretty things from Pinterest. I would rather spend all of my money on travel and books and concerts than on having a beautifully decorated home. But this does not mean I do not deserve love. I'm not one of those moms who brings homemade cookies everywhere I go, and purees her own baby food, and looks flawless every day. I only have one kid, and she is three now, and I'm still lucky if I find time to brush my hair in the morning. But this does not mean I am a bad mother. It has taken me years to accept these parts of myself. It has taken courage to understand that my failures, or those things that others view as failure, do not make be a bad person, and they do not mean I don't deserve happiness.

3. By showing me the way out.

I'm gay. For those I haven't told, and others who haven't heard through small-town gossip--surprise! What I mean by this is that I am attracted to both women and men. In other words, I am bisexual. But I am only interested in dating women at this point in my life.

I came out to my family and closest friends last October, soon after my ex and I decided to get a divorce. Almost everyone, even my ex, was extremely supportive. But all of them asked the same question: How long have you known? I'm almost embarrassed to answer this question, because it doesn't make me look courageous at all. I've always known. I knew when I developed a crush on one of my friends in the fourth grade. I knew in junior high when my friend came out as gay and everyone bullied her so badly she changed schools. I knew when I fell in love with a gal I knew in high school. I even knew when I started dating my ex, when I fell in love with him, when I married him, when we started a family.

It doesn't mean our marriage wasn't real or important or wonderful. It doesn't dismiss the feelings I had for him for over ten years. It also isn't the reason we decided to divorce. But writing about the pieces of myself I never let anyone know about helped me accept them, and in that acceptance I found the courage to let myself be who I really am. Because even though the people I have confided in thus far are incredibly accepting, I know not everyone here is. I live in a county that is primarily conservative. I have realized that there is never a way to know for sure if certain people will be accepting until I tell them. That terrifies me. I also know that many people, gay and straight, don't understand bisexuality. I have feared people thinking I'm confused or experimenting (and have even been asked if that is the case by a couple of people). I'm not confused. I know who I am.

I have dreaded coming out for years. However, the more I wrote about my mother and my regrets and my fears, I saw how quickly one's life can be turned inside out. I saw how someone can go from believing she is happy and healthy, to praying to God from her death bed to please just make the pain stop. I realized I didn't want to live another day pretending. I wanted to be the kind of mother that could show my daughter that being real is more important than being accepted. Being happy is more important than being liked. I have learned that it does take courage, not only to be yourself in a not-so-kind world, but also to accept that not everyone will be okay with the real you. It's unfortunate, but it takes strength not to internalize it and to be understanding of those people. It was my writing that helped me find that courage, and it will continue to help me in that way.

I spent much of my life being a coward. I was afraid to stand up to bullies. I was afraid to have a voice. I was afraid to show emotion or follow my dreams. I was afraid to try new things, or go new places, or be alone. I was afraid to express myself. But the more I wrote about the truth, the more courage that truth demanded of me. Because of my writing, I feel like I can be the person I want to be and live a life I'm proud of.