If you sensor the story, you will never know what it was meant to be

Danny Shapiro

I write from my scars. I don’t recall ever writing anything sensible from a bleeding wound. One of the gifts of healing is the ability to write about the experience of pain clearly, authentically and coherently. The ability to write about it with the 20-20 vision of hindsight. Pain is not coherent. My pain is not coherent. My pain rarely even talks. It just bleeds. It hurts. It sucks. And, I let it. I let it because I have learnt that if I sit with it consciously long enough to let it say all it has to say, my healing will come. She will come and she will be worth it.

My healing… My healing is coherent. That’s how I know she has arrived. She is a storyteller. She can sit with the memory of the pain and make it useful. She can lay it out in a word painting to serve me and others. She can take a mess and see the art in it. Give it a voice. Give it a name. She reminds me from time to time that I struggled so hard to overcome the shyness and inexplicable shame I grew up feeling so that she could be free to do the work God sent her to do. To speak. I was not born this way. I was healed this way.

“I think that, for writers who are women, it is a very empowering thing to see your words on paper because so much of how we experience women has to do with appearance and writing or art is one of the only ways in which women can put themselves out into the world and actually be seen separate from their appearance.

Glennon Doyle