It’s a familiar feeling. A sense of unease that settles in whenever the busyness of life takes over. When days rush by, one task after another, flitting between social events, engagements and milestones, I lose sight of the answer it has taken a lifetime to find: What does it all mean?
For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to meaning, or specifically, the search for meaning. Psychologists call this self-transcendence — the impulse to look beyond oneself. Yet for me, it didn’t start as a quest for enlightenment or even a desire to find my highest self. It’s always been about survival, pure and simple. A way of understanding a troubled girlhood and the comprehensive mindfuck surrounding it.
This, to me, is why I write: to witness the capability of the human heart to heal. To transcend from then to now to beyond through an act of transcription, word by word, sentence by sentence — recording the minutia of the moment.
My writing journey
A daily habit of staring into the void, asking myself simple questions — How am I feeling? Where do I want to be in a month, a year, five years? What do I know about myself through past moral inventories — has helped sculpt not just a better existence, but an evolved life.
Writing also grounds me in the present moment. There’s an old AA adage that says when you keep one foot in the past and the other in the future, you end up shitting all over today. It horrifies me thinking about all my wasted days. Yet even as the years behind me can now be measured in decades, I still can’t help but sometimes wish my time away.
When I write creatively and authentically, I am rooted. The day feels infused with purpose, as though imbued with certainty that it all means something. When I don’t write, a mist settles over the lens from which I experience the essence of life. Existentialism creeps in. Avoiding these “lost days” has become its own purpose.
In addition to morning pages, I have long tried to build a vocation out of writing. I worked as a print journalist for a daily tabloid at the outset of my career, and later as a political and social columnist for a broadsheet newspaper. These were my first experiences in having readers, a gratification the writer in me will never get enough of. Yet this kind of writing only ever scratched the surface.
“If only I could be a published author,” I lamented on numerous occasions, especially as rejection letters began piling up for early manuscripts.
Ever since the year 2000, while walking through a local bookstore with my then seven-year-old son, I have proclaimed proudly that someday I would be an author.
“You mean your book will be here on these shelves?” my sweet, naïve boy asked.
“You bet, kiddo,” I said boldly as I pointed toward the bestseller section where I imagined my book would one day land. “Your mother’s going to be a famous writer someday.”
Already I was forgetting that writing was a journey, not a destination. As I strung sentences together in hopes they would become a bestselling novel, each word carried such expectation that it landed heavy on the page, limp and underwhelming.
I went on to write essays and draft an early memoir. Like many eager writers, I began submitting far too early. My unpolished pages were sealed in envelopes and mailed to editors and agents across the land, hoping for that elusive stamp of approval, someone to declare me an authentic writer.
Small, sporadic wins along the way — acceptance into an MFA program, runner-up in an essay contest — kept me going in the face of much rejection.
“Writing is its own reward,” I would say each time a door closed.
And it was true. More than I even knew at the time.
What I was doing in all those early manuscripts, poems and essays, was circling a deeper truth. An even more authentic story waiting to be told.
“I feel as though you have more to say here,” beta readers, critique partners, and editors often told me. As though they sensed I wasn’t quite reaching the story I was meant to tell.
After earning my MFA, my day job skyrocketed in another direction. Consumed by work, I abandoned my creative writing practice almost entirely. For nearly five years, I barely managed a few scattered morning pages.
The right push
It wasn’t until 2020, when that career came to a sudden halt during the first of many public-health lockdowns, that my husband reminded me how important writing once was.
“Why don’t you get back to your writing?” he suggested as my Type-A personality flailed in search of control within a wildly uncontrollable world.
So I began again.
This time, I found source material in those early journals I had once credited with saving my life. From the safe shores of the life I had built, I examined a story long buried.
It was the story about the teenager I once was. Someone who was incarcerated by a system that could not distinguish between hardened criminals and victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
For thirty years I had buried that truth. Not even my husband knew.
One sentence, one paragraph, one page at a time, I drafted an entire manuscript. I wrote every day in search of meaning, but underneath, was also driven by a quest for validation. I believed if I published my story — if people found out about the “real” me and still accepted me — then perhaps I could finally accept myself.
I thought I was done. I thought the book was good. I had faced my demons, expunged my secrets, and laid everything on the page.
I tried to land an agent. There was early interest, but ultimately the book wasn’t ready. They said memoir is a hard sell. They said a good memoir must read like a novel. They said my memoir was too raw, too unfiltered, too traumatic. There wasn’t a market for it.
I felt dejected. My most fragile self — that unhealed little girl inside — cried out, “See, I told you. You’ll never be good enough.”
I buried the manuscript in the back of a drawer and turned in shame. Yet it kept calling me back, refusing to stay silent. Slowly, I returned, once again in search of a deeper meaning.
Two lessons I discovered
First, the real storytelling happens in the rewrite.
I needed to go back and sculpt those 300 pages into a story arc. It wasn’t enough to answer the question What happened? I also needed to answer What did it mean? I gave myself permission to revisit the trauma in a new way. I saw how my life circled around outrunning secrets and curating versions of myself I believed would lead to acceptance.
This awareness became the first step toward a realization that none of the things I had been chasing would lead to the outcome I longed for. Not a high-profile career. Not an impressive writing resume. Not even a publishing deal.
The paradox of my life suddenly became clear. I had been asking others to give me what I refused to give myself: self-acceptance.
And so, I wrote that truth. I wrote about a teenage girl who deserved compassion and a woman who deserved admiration for her resilience. Only then did I find the courage to share the story with my husband.
The second lesson required a deeper transformation still: letting go of the relentless pursuit of approval I had relied on to outrun my shame. Was I finally strong enough to offer acceptance and forgiveness to my younger self? Was I willing to let go of the self-blame and shame that had been lifelong companions?
Grappling with those questions has been the hardest part of writing memoir.
In search of an answer, I kept writing. I faced those fears again and again, draft after draft, until reaching the end of the fifth revision. I sought courage in the memoirists I admire: Cheryl Strayed, Melissa Febos, Alexandra Fuller, Dani Shapiro, and Elizabeth Gilbert. I found solace on writing retreats with fellow writers and mentors.
Now, after five years, I can say two things with certainty. I have written a memoir to the best of my ability and have found an answer to that deeper question.
The truth comes back to this: writing is its own reward.
In this vein, I submitted the manuscript — not just to a publisher, but to God and my guardian angel. After pressing send, I returned to a new kind of void.
Restless. Unmoored. Checking my inbox with a new urgency.
Yet this time, I know exactly what to do.
I pick up the pen and begin anew.
If you are interested in seeing where your instincts take you next and learning how to guide them through deeper tools of craft, join one of my workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
