If Your Writing Is Tied To Your Personal Experiences — Keep This In Mind

Because no one will keep it top of mind for you

I started my career in the grief space when I was only 21 years old. I wrote blog post after blog post about my own experiences with loss. I put pen to paper because for me, after years of sitting in silence with my grief, writing felt like the only way I was going to survive the second biggest loss of my life.

It turns out though that writing poetry in a blue feathered journal after losing my mom when I was 10 years old is vastly different from writing online about losing my second mom (my grandmother) when I was 21 years old. Yes, the differences took years to become clear to me, but once they did I couldn’t keep them to myself.

I wanted others who create at the intersection of their personal experiences to know that no piece of content matters more than their personal well being, mental health, or journey to process their lived experience.

Once you start publishing in that specific pocket of creativity the above can be hard to remember because everyone else’s voice becomes louder. Others want you to keep creating, writing, producing, so that you can help them cope. You want to keep creating, writing, producing, so that you don’t feel alone.

But, eventually you shut the computer off and stop writing for a second, only to realize you still feel kind of lonely in the middle of it all. This doesn’t mean you’re far gone or that you should quit, but it does mean you have an opportunity to cultivate something for yourself that’s outside of what you’re able to create to connect with others.

You want to have a little piece of the pie that’s just yours.

Here’s the golden rule I wish I had been given years ago — your creativity is a skillset and your humanity contains multitudes.

The more you can sit with this as your golden rule the less likely you are to fall down the rabbit hole of writing or creating only because it feels like an obligation. You’ll have a better understanding of what your gut continues to tell you because you won’t have stopped listening to it after its first few sentences. You’ll try different outlets, just for you. You’ll explore…