Write So You Don’t Lose Yourself in the Sauciness of Life OK?
I believe that words can rearrange your DNA to make beauty out of chaos, and I hope that you do too.
My therapist keeps asking me how I’m “coping” these days and I keep wanting to tell her that coping is for people who haven’t discovered that words can rearrange your DNA. But that sounds unhinged, even for me.
Instead, I tell her I’m writing. She nods like she understands, but I can’t help but think that she doesn’t really get it. She thinks writing is a hobby. A nice outlet. Something to do with my feelings instead of sitting in them like pre-packaged pasta in slowly boiling water, waiting for the gift of time to make it soft again.
She doesn’t understand that writing isn’t what I do WITH my feelings. It’s how I survive having feelings at all.
The Thing About Sauciness
Life gets saucy fast, doesn’t it? One minute you’re just existing in your itty bitty bubble of a routine and the next your entire world is spinning like a washing machine on the fritz and you can’t tell which way is up.
The sauciness comes in waves. Job stress mixes with family drama mixes with political chaos mixes with personal growth mixes with random Tuesday anxiety about whether you remembered to lock the front door, or if your coworker was secretly enraged by the email you sent last Monday at 4:24pm. All of it swirls together until you can’t taste any individual flavor anymore.
It ignites overwhelm. Invites the sense that you’re drowning in a pot of emotional soup that someone else is stirring. And that sucks.
So, How Do We Come Up for Air?
By understanding that it’s not actually about the circumstances being too much (though they often are). It’s about losing track of who YOU are underneath all the swirling.
For me, that’s done through writing.
I started writing not because I had anything profound to say, but because I literally couldn’t find myself anymore.
I was 22 and working a soul-crushing job on the verge of performing mass layoffs, recovering from being the key witness (*cough cough* victim) in a two week long sexual assault trial, dating people who had no business being in my life and drinking every weekend with surface-level friends to try and cope with it all.
But when I sat down to write—even just angry journal entries about how much everything sucked—something would happen. I’d find the pieces of myself I didn’t even know were missing.
A sentence would come out that sounded like ME. Not the version of me I thought I should be, not the version other people wanted me to be. Just… me. Raw and honest and probably a little unhinged, but undeniably ME.
Writing became this archaeological dig through all the layers of other people’s expectations, my own people-pleasing and societal conditioning.
And I dug until I hit bedrock.
That’s When I remembered What My REAL Voice Sounded Like
Writing is medicine. Period, point blank. And the “healing” doesn’t happen in the pretty sentences.
It happens in the margins. In the crossed-out words. In the rambling paragraph that goes nowhere. The bits and pieces in your notes app that are too disconnected to even make it into a first draft. It’s in the angry scribbles and the tear stains and the places where you write the same phrase seventeen times because your nervous system needs to FEEL it leaving your body.
I have notes app folders and digital notebooks (*sighs* yes, I’ve been converted from a pen and paper gal to a full-blown digi gal for the most part) full of absolute garbage.
I’m talking pages and pages, and pages of “I don’t know what I’m feeling but it’s BIG and SCARY and I can’t breathe and no one is here to save me but myself.”
Pages of the same complaint written over and over until it loses its power. Pages of questions I don’t have answers to yet. Pages of divine inquiry that only hindsight can create from.
But Underneath All of That Messiness, Alchemy Turns Chaos Into Clarity
You ready for the part that’s going to sound completely unhinged?
Sometimes when life gets really chaotic, I write letters to my anxiety. To my depression. To my people-pleasing tendencies. To the part of me that wants to control everything. And they write back. (Stay with me here.)
They write back because the energetic act of writing gives voice to parts of yourself that usually just show up as uncomfortable sensations in your body.
The anxiety writes back through urgent, scattered thoughts about worst-case scenarios. The depression writes back through heavy sentences that trail off mid-thought. The control freak writes back through detailed lists and contingency plans scrawled in the margins. They all find recognition through ink-flooded alchemy.
When I write, I’m in conversation with specific parts of myself that have specific needs, and I identify parts of myself that I can actually work with instead of against.
When I Write, My Messiness Gets to Exists With Permission
Most people treat writing like it has to be good. Like it has to make sense. Like it has to be worthy of other people reading it. But writing isn’t about being good.
It’s about being real.
It’s about giving yourself permission to be a complete mess on paper so you don’t have to be a complete mess in your life (or at least, so you can be a mess with more awareness and intention), so that you can heal the wound while it bleeds, then create from the scar that is left behind.
I write things I would never say out loud. I write the mean thoughts and the scared thoughts and the completely irrational thoughts. I write the anger that isn’t socially acceptable and the grief that feels too big for normal conversation. Not because I want to stay stuck in those feelings, but because acknowledging them is the only way through them.
Because in order to create something meaningful, your messiness must exist with permission beforehand.
And From This Comes Creative Clarity
Now, when my therapist asks how I’m coping, I want to tell her this: I’m not coping. I’m composing.
Every morning I sit down with my notebook and I write myself back into existence. I write through the anxiety about the day ahead. I write through the overwhelm about everything on my plate. I write through the weird dreams and the random worries and the big feelings that don’t have names yet.
And by the time I’m done writing, I remember who I am again. And that’s better than coping. That’s surviving with your soul intact.
I don't know what this says about me, but I don't think this is unhinged at all. I think it makes total sense.
I really appreciated this post. Thank you.