On writing and the power of telling your own story
It took a few decades to get here, but here I am.
I recently started writing again and can I just tell you how good it feels?
I’ve always been a lover of words - both the spoken and written, both consumed and shared - but aside from books and podcasts, I’ve fallen away from it in recent years. It makes sense, of course - I’m a single mom to a preschooler and work a 9-5, so time is limited. But lately I’ve been prioritizing reading things that are not books. More long-form articles, more Substack posts, more mediums that I accidentally gave up when free time got tough. I’ve been loving it, but perhaps more importantly, I’ve been inspired by it.
Inspired to write, to share my experiences and observations, to tell my story. To combine what is personal to me with what I know to be true about the world and try to make it a little bit better, help one person feel less alone, inspire one person to take action to better their situation or their community. And yet, despite putting pen to paper (so to speak), I don’t consider myself a writer. I feel like an imposter. A lurker. A wannabe.
And yet, I don’t consider myself a writer. I feel like an imposter. A lurker. A wannabe.
Looking back at my life, I’m not sure which came first - the need to share or the need to consume. I was reading by the age of 4 (which I’ve been told landed me the coveted spot of Mother Goose during preschool graduation), but I was also sending conversational cassette tapes back and forth to my grandparents from Florida to Massachusetts.
In high school, I was an avid reader of anything that wasn’t assigned, but I was also sharing, writing for the school newspaper and competing on the varsity debate team, both of which required a level of proficiency at connecting the dots and telling a cohesive story, skills that have carried me far in my professional life.
I recently found an anthology I put together for a class assignment my sophomore year, a collection of poems and short stories centered around love - love of friends, family, and self. You can tell it’s from 1997-1998 because both Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul make an appearance, but what jumped out at me is how disconnected I feel from that girl who put together 62 pages about love for other people to read.
Because somewhere in my late teens/early 20’s, things shifted. I was still reading, but I lost my ability to tell my story, to open up, at least in any meaningful ways. Life got hard, important people in my life died, bad things happened. I didn’t have the tools to cope with it, never mind process it, so I kept most of it to myself. By then I’d learned that just because people say they love you doesn’t mean they’re interested in really hearing or seeing you - what matters is what you achieve.
So I kept a lot to myself, sharing it in doses, and even then, only when the pressure rose to a point where I couldn’t keep it in. No one had the full story. I scattered it around like breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs that I’ve followed in recent years in an effort to piece it all back together, as I began to see how pivotal those years were to how I related to others and to myself as an adult. But through it all, I had my books. My writers that got me through the endless nights.
Several years later, after too many glasses of wine, I bought a domain and started a book blog. I was nowhere near having the confidence to write about myself, but the pull to write, to share, was still in me and writing about other people’s stories was much easier. I loved that blog, the people, the community I built, some of whom I’m still close to. But life got busy and there just wasn’t time to keep up with it all. Things were also shifting to bookstagram, and shorter blurbs were never really my strong suit. I’m much better suited for longer, more nuanced writing that includes too many commas.
(Side note, shout out to ’s recent post for highlighting the importance of community and reminding me of how much I loved it.)
So while my love of stories remained constant, I still didn’t know how to tell one, how to use my voice with regard to myself. One of the things they teach women about running for office is that you have to get comfortable telling your story in order to connect with people and earn their vote (I wonder whether men get this advice). I must have done something right because I won my seat, but I never did quite figure out how to do that or, if I did, how to stop the vulnerability hangover that would wake me in a panic at 2 am. Even at 35, I couldn’t shake the lessons I’d learned more than a decade earlier, that my story was irrelevant (but at least now I had achieved some things?). So, as with book blogging, I continued to be more comfortable supporting, elevating, and advocating for others than I was talking about myself in any meaningful ways. (I wrote a little more about this here).
And so I did just that. I gave speeches and news interviews, published magazine articles, and advocated for the things I cared about. I focused on public policy because I knew I was good at it and kept most pieces of myself to myself. For someone who talked a whole lot, I said surprisingly little. This is partly because I (misguidedly) thought I was protecting my husband at the time, a man who had no interest in participating in this part of my life, but also because it’s easier to be attacked for your policy positions than for who you are as a person, even if those lobbing the attacks don’t actually know you.
Which all brings me to now.
I started Delightfully Difficult six months ago but didn’t really get going until the last 1-2 months. It wasn’t that I didn’t have plenty of ideas, but that I had a lot of insecurities around doing it. Despite decades of writing both personally and professionally, I still don’t consider myself a writer. Which is crazy, of course, and I know that any writer will tell me that the very act of writing is what makes you one, but I’ve had the privilege of working with so many incredibly talented writers that I have a hard time placing myself in that group, that elusive community of thinkers and storytellers whom I admire so much.
But I’m doing it anyway. I’m doing it for the me two decades ago who lost her voice, who internalized the idea that her story didn’t matter and spent far too many years believing that. I’m doing it because I know that my experiences are not all that unique, and that for so many women like myself, motherhood has changed them, divorce has liberated them, and that our society and government are failing them in so many ways. And I’m doing it for my son, for whom I want a better, more equitable future, one where he sees his mother actively working towards that future outside of the few years she was a lawmaker.
So here I am, writing again. Still a bit terrified but drawing inspiration from the people who get up every day and share the pieces of themselves they are probably also scared to show but do anyway. Because in a world where our voices are too often silenced and our experiences dismissed, getting vulnerable it is the first step to building connections and communities, and it is through them that we can fight for a better future.
Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please consider subscribing. You can learn more about me and what to expect here, as well as connect with me on Instagram.
I love reading your posts and I'm glad you've started writing again.