It’s Safe For You To Write Again

My relationship with writing- real and personal writing- began when I was a sophomore in high school. It was in my creative writing class, second semester, second period, that I fell in love with writing. I found my home in the verses of poetry, and quickly learned to speak the language for myself. Writing soon became my therapy and avenue to healing. The deepest and most honest feelings that I buried deep within myself were given permission to come to life and breathe when pen met paper. In many ways I wrote my way out of what was, at the time, the darkest season of my life. Words strung together like homemade popcorn garland held the truest parts of my emotions that I had never before known how to vocalize. It was sacred and holy, and in many ways an introduction to myself. 

I would go on to fall more in love with writing, and have hopes and dreams of one day being a published author, to allow words that led to my healing to be shared with a broken world, so maybe another hurting and broken girl could find her home and healing in them, too. With God guiding my hand, I would go on to write my way out of many more valleys of the shadow of death. My writing still held my deepest and most honest emotions. 

And as beautiful as it always was, something inside of me was inclined to retreat and run as far away as I could from the emotions that writing gave me access to. My, very flawed, philosophy on emotions at some point became if I don’t see them I cannot feel them and they cannot hurt me. Time and space, growing pains and different states, and unfamiliar heartache would go on to introduce me to emotions greater and stronger than I knew how to handle. 

Frozen in fear, I put my pen down, and in turn, I hid away the truest part of myself. 

In a three and a half hour FaceTime conversation with a friend I cannot help but be wholly honest with, I expressed that I felt like I needed to write more again, punctuated with an eye roll. We sat together, with five hundred some odd miles between us, and unpacked it. He asked why the hesitation and eye roll, and I didn’t have the words to express why I held in my heart such great hesitation to doing one of the most healing things in the world for me. Truthfully, I have been pondering that very same question for the past year and a half now. In a moments time he said “maybe it hasn’t felt safe for you to write, because of the emotions it brings up for you. But I want you to know it’s safe for you to write again. It is safe for you to write again.”

In this life we don’t really get to pick and choose the emotions we feel. Emotions are an all encompassing, all or nothing sort of thing. When we cut off access to the hard emotions, we unknowingly cut off access to fully feel our most beautiful and wonderful emotions. It becomes as if we are only half way experiencing life. There is no life more abundant to be found in a life half lived. So if I believe that the life God intended for me to live is a life more abundant (John 10:10), and I do, then I will never truly experience that life if I live a life of cutting off and stifling my emotions. 

Life more abundant for me doesn’t exist in a life where I stand at odds with one of the greatest gifts God has given me. So I am picking up my pen again, with feet planted firmly, refusing to run away and hide from emotions that allow me to fully experience life and make me fully me. 

Yes, deep emotions are hard, painful, and gut wrenching, but they are also freeing, holy, and healing. So, here is my journey to fully experiencing the whole spectrum of them, believing I will meet new sides of my God along the way. And I’ll start right here, with writing. 

I don’t know what the tool is for you that opens up your heart to a life wide open, but I want you to know it’s safe for you to do it again. It’s safe for you to come home to yourself again. 

The road may not be easy, and the work may not be pretty, but as Brenna Twohy once wrote, “of course it is not pretty, nothing holy ever is…the work is never pretty but it is the only way the house gets built.” Though the path may not always be beautiful, may we journey down this road together, opening our hearts up to all they are able to feel. 

I’m believing we’ll find something beautiful along the way. 

It’s safe for you to write again. It’s safe for you to be you again.