How I Started Writing: Finding My Way Back to Myself

I don't think I ever really decided to become a writer.

I think I just needed somewhere to put everything I couldn't quite say.

I started writing during a time when I was trying to understand myself, while also feeling like I was slowly losing sight of who that person was. Anxiety had become a part of my everyday life, and adolescence came with all the usual questions of who you are, who you're supposed to be and where you fit in the world.

I didn't always have the words for what I was feeling.

So I wrote them down.

At first, writing wasn't about creating anything beautiful. It wasn't about becoming an author or one day writing a book. It was simply a way of making sense of the noise in my head.

A page didn't ask me to explain myself.

It didn't tell me I was overthinking.

It didn't ask me to make my feelings smaller or more manageable.

I could just put them there.

And somehow, once they were outside of me, they felt a little easier to carry.

Writing through anxiety

For me, writing became a way of sitting with anxiety rather than constantly trying to outrun it.

There were things I couldn't say out loud that I could write in a notebook.

There were feelings I didn't understand until I saw them written down.

There were days when I couldn't explain what was wrong, but I could write a few lines about it and realise that maybe I didn't need to have all the answers yet.

I think that's one of the reasons poetry stayed with me.

It gave me permission to be unfinished.

Losing pieces of yourself

As I got older, writing became less about simply navigating anxiety and more about navigating myself.

There is a strange kind of grief that comes with growing up.

We talk so much about losing people, places and things, but I don't think we talk enough about the grief of losing versions of yourself.

The person you were before something happened.

The person you thought you would become.

The things you used to believe.

The friendships that changed.

The parts of yourself you had to leave behind.

Sometimes you don't realise you've lost a version of yourself until you look back and realise you don't quite recognise her anymore.

I've written through a lot of that.

Through grief.

Through change.

Through becoming someone new while still missing who I used to be.

Through trying to work out which parts of myself were really mine and which parts had been shaped by expectations, fear, other people's opinions and the simple process of growing up.

Writing gave me somewhere to meet those versions of myself.

Not always to bring them back.

Sometimes just to say:

I remember you.

And then came The Gentle Diary

Eventually, all those pages began to feel like they belonged somewhere beyond my notebooks.

The Gentle Diary grew from that same need to make sense of things. It became a place for the thoughts that don't always fit neatly into conversation. A place for poetry, reflection, grief, healing, faith, identity and all the messy spaces in between.

And The Gentle Art of Losing grew from there.

The book is, in many ways, a collection of things I have had to learn to let go of.

Old versions of myself.

Things I couldn't control.

People I couldn't keep.

Expectations I couldn't live up to.

And sometimes, the belief that losing something always means you have failed.

I've come to understand that sometimes losing is simply another word for changing.

Sometimes you have to lose a version of yourself to find another.

Sometimes grief isn't proof that something went wrong. Sometimes it is proof that something mattered.

And sometimes writing is the place where you get to make sense of all of it.

Why I still write

I still write for the same reason I started.

Because there are things I need to understand.

Because some feelings only become clear once they have somewhere to land.

Because I think there is comfort in knowing that someone else might read a few words and think, me too.

I don't think writing has given me all the answers.

If anything, it has taught me that I don't need to have them.

I can be becoming.

I can grieve who I was while making space for who I am.

I can change my mind.

I can lose things.

I can find things.

I can write it all down.

And maybe that's what writing has always been for me.

Not a way to escape myself.
A way to find my way back.