Tag: healing through writing

  • What’s a fear you’ve overcome — and how did you do it?

    What’s a fear you’ve overcome — and how did you do it?

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a fear you’ve overcome — and how did you do it?
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    The fear I had to overcome was the fear of truly expressing myself.

    Not writing.

    I could write.

    I had always known there were words somewhere inside me, moving around in the dark, waiting for a place to go. But expression is different from writing. Expression asks more of you. Expression does not let you hide behind cleverness or distance. It asks you to bring the real thing forward.

    The feeling.

    The thought.

    The wound.

    The part of yourself you learned to protect because the world had already shown you what it could do with anything soft.

    I grew up being teased for anything and everything. That kind of thing does not leave you all at once. People like to pretend childhood cruelty is small because children are small, but that is not true. Small hands can still leave fingerprints. Small voices can still become the echoes a person carries into adulthood.

    After a while, you learn to hold yourself back.

    You learn to measure every word before it leaves your mouth. You learn to hide enthusiasm. You learn to make yourself less visible. You learn that being seen can feel dangerous.

    So the idea of putting myself on paper, my feelings, my thoughts, my pain, my emotions, and then placing it online where anyone could read it, was terrifying.

    It felt almost unnatural.

    Like standing in the middle of a room and taking off the armor I had spent years building.

    And yet, I did it.

    Not all at once.

    Not bravely in the way people imagine bravery.

    I did it one piece at a time.

    A sentence.

    A paragraph.

    A post.

    A confession softened by craft.

    A truth placed carefully enough that I could survive seeing it outside my body.

    The more I wrote, the more something inside me began to loosen. Not disappear. Not healed completely. But loosen. Writing became a way to take what had been trapped inside me and give it shape. Once it had shape, it was no longer just pain. It was testimony. It was a memory. It was language. It was something I could hold, examine, revise, and understand.

    And the more I did it, the better I felt.

    The better I got.

    That matters too.

    Because fear wants you to believe that expression will destroy you. It tells you that if people see the real thing, they will laugh. They will turn away. They will misunderstand. They will prove every old voice right.

    And sometimes people may not understand.

    But sometimes they do.

    Sometimes someone leaves a comment that lets you know your words reached a place in them they had not been able to name. Sometimes someone tells you that what you wrote helped them. Sometimes they do not say it loudly, but you can feel it. They saw themselves in your story. They realized they were not the only ones who had carried that kind of ache.

    That changes something.

    Because then the writing is not only about me.

    It becomes a bridge.

    A small one, maybe.

    But still a bridge.

    One person telling the truth from one side of loneliness, and another person hearing it from the other.

    That is how I overcame the fear.

    Not by becoming fearless.

    I do not think that is how fear works.

    I overcame it by learning that the fear did not get the final vote. I overcame it by writing anyway. By sharing anyway. By letting the work prove to me that vulnerability does not always lead to humiliation. Sometimes it leads to a connection. Sometimes it leads to healing. Sometimes it becomes the very thing that helps someone else survive their own silence.

    And in helping them, I help myself.

    That may be the part I did not expect.

    Every time someone responds and says, in some way, I know this feeling too, I am reminded that I am not alone either. The pain I thought was only mine was never only mine. The fear I thought made me strange was part of being human. The loneliness I carried had echoes in other people.

    Writing taught me that.

    Or maybe sharing did.

    Private writing can save you in one way. But public honesty can save you in the long run. It can turn the locked room into a doorway.

    I still feel the fear sometimes.

    I still know what it costs to tell the truth.

    But I also know what silence costs.

    And I have paid enough for that.

    So I keep writing.

    I keep placing pieces of myself on the page.

    Not because it is easy.

    Because somewhere, someone may need the words.

    And maybe I need them too.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • Another Year, Still Becoming

    Another Year, Still Becoming

    There is something strange about a birthday when you are no longer young enough to believe that time is endless, but not yet old enough to stop asking what can still be made from what remains.

    Another year has gone by.

    Usually, those words pass through me with a familiar feeling. A small accounting. A quiet glance backward. A brief pause before returning to the ordinary rhythm of the days. But this year feels different. Not louder. Not grander. Not wrapped in some sudden revelation or clean transformation.

    Just different.

    Quieter.

    Closer to the truth.

    I have been slowly becoming the person I once hoped I might be. Not in the polished way people talk about change when they want it to sound easy. Not in the clean language of motivation, where every wound becomes a lesson, and every loss becomes fuel. Real becoming is messier than that. It does not always arrive with applause. Sometimes it looks like sitting alone with a thought you used to run from. Sometimes it looks like writing one honest sentence and feeling your chest tighten because the page now knows something you were trying not to admit.

    For a long time, I carried things instead of naming them.

    Pain. Sorrow. Anger. Disappointment. The old ache of being misunderstood. The quiet exhaustion of trying to explain yourself to people who had already decided who you were.

    I kept too much inside.

    That is a dangerous kind of storage. The body becomes a basement. The mind becomes a locked room. The heart becomes a pantry full of old things nobody has touched, but everybody can smell. You think you are protecting yourself by not opening the door. But silence does not preserve pain. It ferments it.

    People say writing helps.

    I had heard that for years.

    Write it down. Get it out. Put it on the page.

    It sounded too simple to be true. Too soft. Too neat. The kind of advice people offer when they do not know what else to say. But this year, I learned there is a difference between hearing something and finally understanding it in your bones.

    Writing does help.

    Not because the page fixes everything. It does not. The page is not a miracle worker. It will not reach backward and undo what happened. It will not make childhood kinder, grief lighter, or disappointment less sharp. But the page gives the pain a place to stand outside of you.

    That matters.

    There are things I have written that no one will ever see. Things too private for public life. Things that belong only to me and the silence that held me while I wrote them. And maybe that is the point. Not everything has to be published to be powerful. Not every wound has to become content. Not every confession needs an audience.

    Some writing is not for the world.

    Some writing is how you survive yourself.

    This year, I learned how to write without holding back. Or at least, I began to learn. I started putting down the things I had been carrying in secret. The thoughts that came in the dark. The old sorrows with familiar faces. The questions that do not have clean answers.

    And somehow, in putting them down, I left some of them behind.

    Not all.

    I know better than that now.

    Healing is not a dramatic exit. It is not the door slamming shut behind pain while you walk into the sunlight reborn. Sometimes healing is smaller than that. Sometimes it is realizing that a memory no longer controls the whole room. Sometimes it is noticing you can speak of something that once broke you without breaking again. Sometimes it is simply waking up and discovering that yesterday’s sorrow did not take all of today.

    There are pains I have left behind.

    There are sorrows I no longer feed.

    I can now look at old versions of myself with compassion instead of shame.

    That is no small thing.

    We live in a world that loves measurement. Numbers. Milestones. Income. Followers. Weight lost. Books sold. Goals achieved. Proof, proof, proof. We are told to become better, but usually in ways that can be photographed, posted, monetized, or turned into a lesson for strangers.

    But some of the most important growth is invisible.

    No one claps when you stop hating yourself in one small area.

    No one sends flowers when you choose patience instead of anger.

    No one gives you a certificate for writing the truth in a private notebook and choosing not to drown in it.

    Still, these things count.

    They may be the only things that truly count.

    I still have goals. I still want to write better. I still want my work to reach people. I still want the sentences to carry more truth, more weight, more tenderness. I still want to build something that lasts beyond me, something my descendants might one day hold and say, He was here. He tried to tell the truth. He tried to leave a light on.

    But my goals feel different now.

    Less like a punishment.

    Less like a whip.

    Less like a scoreboard I use against myself.

    My current goal is simple.

    To be better.

    A better writer.

    A better person.

    That sounds plain, almost too plain. But there is depth in plain things. A pot of beans. A clean table. A quiet morning. A sentence that does not lie. The older I get, the more I trust what does not need decoration.

    To be better does not mean to become perfect.

    I am not interested in that kind of performance.

    Perfect people are usually hiding something. Or selling something. Or both.

    To be better means to be more honest than I was. More patient. More disciplined. More willing to listen. More willing to admit when I am wrong. More willing to soften without becoming weak. More willing to stand firm without becoming cruel.

    It means learning that strength is not always volume.

    It means understanding that manhood is not the absence of tenderness.

    It means knowing that pain may have shaped me, but it does not have to govern me.

    And it means accepting that none of this happens overnight.

    There is a kindness in that realization. A mercy. We are not finished products. We are not machines waiting for the correct program. We are living things. We grow unevenly. We bend toward light when we can. We carry damage in our rings like old trees. Some seasons produce fruit. Some seasons only teach the roots to hold.

    This year, I think I learned something about roots.

    I learned that private work matters.

    The unseen work matters.

    The quiet effort made when no one is watching matters.

    The sentence was written and deleted. The memory faced and survived. The apology is considered. The old anger questioned. The small promise kept. The day endured without giving up on yourself.

    These are not small things.

    They are the architecture of becoming.

    So this birthday does not feel like a celebration in the usual sense. I do not need noise. I do not need spectacles. I do not need the day to prove my worth through attention.

    What I want is quieter.

    A good meal.

    A little music.

    A clean room.

    A page.

    A moment to look at the man I was, the man I am, and the man I am still trying to become.

    And maybe that is enough.

    Maybe another year is not just a reminder that time is passing.

    Maybe it is also evidence.

    Evidence that I stayed.

    Evidence that I changed.

    Evidence that some part of me, even in the worst seasons, kept reaching toward the life I had not yet learned how to live.

    I am still becoming.

    Not quickly.

    Not perfectly.

    But honestly.

    And this year, that feels like a gift.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times