Written By: Lauren Howard
I wrote my way out.
That’s literally what I did.
I was in a headspace that I could not reconcile, and I had to find a way to get out of it.
And just like A. Ham (at least the fictionalized version that we know), putting pen to paper was the only way to do it. I didn’t realize that until after, though.
I was in the darkest spot of my life with what felt like everything crumbling around me, and I started to do the only thing that has ever felt natural to me.
I did it against my own voice that was telling me not to. There was this other voice, not the brain but the gut, that was pushing me toward it.
I created some words. I strung them together to try to explain all of these big emotions that I had that I thought no one else would ever understand.
I couldn’t believe how right it all felt considering how hard I had resisted doing exactly this for so many years.
It was always there, buzzing beneath my fingertips and trying to get out. But I told it no. I told it that writing that way would just be a way to get attention. What would people think?
More than that, I told myself for years that I wasn’t a writer. Writers create stories and build fantasies. They develop characters who don’t exist and turn them into fully realized people. The storyboard and know what’s happening next. They build plots.
I cannot, for the life of me, build a plot.
Blank space to play in? No thanks. Too much pressure.
I can, however, put together a whole lot of words based on just an inkling. I can tell you what just happened so you can feel every part of it.
That doesn’t make me a writer, though. That just makes me someone who talks on the internet sometimes, right?
Right?
Once I started, though, I couldn’t stop. There was no plug to the word geyser. Everything that popped into my head became a thing to write about.
And two years later, I’ve written almost every single day, and I’m not tired of it. I live for it. I constantly want to do more. It never feels like work. It just comes out when it’s ready to as if it’s been simmering low and slow in a cooker for however long it took to make it tender enough to be shared.
I wrote my way out.
Founder & CEO at elletwo