Finding My Nerve to Write Again

I’m swishing warm salt water through my teeth as I type. My gums ache, and my jaw feels like it has been clenching a pen.

It started almost two years ago with a strange habit called tongue thrusting. I thought it was stress. The tip of my tongue searched for textures in the back of my teeth the way my fingers once worked prayer beads when I needed comfort without words. It was unconscious—and weird.

Unsurprisingly, when I looked into the metaphysical cause, it pointed to unspoken words, silences piling up where sentences should be. By then, my whole jaw had joined the silent Quaker’s Meeting.

The ache nudged me toward my laptop. I figured if I started writing again, maybe I’d find relief. I’d been circling the idea for as long as the tongue thrusting had been happening, though I hadn’t made the connection until now.

I used to be a writer, long before I ever studied English in college. Back then, my closest confidante was a small yellow diary where I spilled tween torment and woe. On the cover, a cartoon bird left its mark on the head of Ziggy with the caption: My Everything Happens to Me Diary. It had a lock, though someone picked it so many times the clasp barely works anymore. I don’t blame the peeping mom-stepdad-sister. I was a hypersensitive, moody, worry-prone kid, and I think they were just trying to figure me out.

On Sunday, January 11, 1987, I wrote about the girl who was to me what Diana was to Anne from Anne of Green Gables: Oh dear diary, I’m so sad. Sadder than I’ve ever been in my life! Aimee and I are faded. We aren’t BFFs anymore. We can say we are but it wouldn’t be right. Monica and Marie are my BFFs and I have to accept it. I never thought this could happen.

The situation devastated my 12-year-old heart. But the diary didn’t just hold grief—it also carried my obsessions and everyday drama. One day I wrote about how I always got picked last to join groups, another about how sinful I was according to Sister Seton Marie. On more hopeful days, I scribbled cheers for my grade school basketball team, the Royals: Go-fight-win.

I kept journals nonstop—through college and into my 20s—where I described in detail how romantic the wind felt on an August evening, how morose I was because the young man I’d been pining for didn’t care whether I existed, and how Enigma’s French lyrics wrapped around me like a cosmic spell. Journaling was a lifeline. Words were an anchor. I didn’t realize it then, but as long as I was narrating what I felt instead of drowning in it, I could keep from being swept away.

At some point, I thought maybe I’d write for a living. I struggled most of the time from debilitating anxiety and depression. I figured if I was going to suffer, I might as well turn it into art. Becoming the tormented writer would give my darkness meaning—or at least a costume: long black skirts with tiny flowers, black-ribbed tights, maroon Doc Martens, and yes—the eyebrow ring.

I became a journalist—first for a small-town newspaper, then for a scrappy Gen-X zine, then for magazines. But I was so convinced I lacked talent that every word I typed came with blood, sweat, and self-criticism. Writing felt less like art and more like a bodily function gone wrong—like trying to move my bowels on a keto diet without water. I was certain the veins in my head would burst.

My vocabulary felt limited, simple and straightforward, the kind of language I grew up around. I wasn’t clever. My more-articulate colleagues pounded out clean copy in under an hour while I stared at a blinking cursor. Even the sound of a coworker clearing his throat shattered my concentration. Eventually I begged to work from home, taking days to labor over a thousand-word piece others would have filed before lunch.

After 15 years of therapy and 10 years of bleeding onto the page, I decided on a clever reinvention: if I couldn’t be the tortured artist, I’d be the selfless healer. I went back to school to be a therapist, burying myself in textbooks and theory, certain that soothing the hurts in other people would finally prove that I was good at something and therefore mattered.

What I didn’t realize then was that I’d also made a vow I’d forgotten about until a couple of months ago. I recall it now just as clearly as the bright-blue cloudless sky on that late-winter day in 2005. I was walking upright, shoulders back, past a long row of four-story red brick row homes that led to the coffee shop near my Philadelphia apartment. It would be the place where I’d write college papers for the next few years with the seriousness of a doctor determined to cure cancer. I declared inwardly in a way passersby could have heard as though I’d spoken aloud: I will make sure that no one ever has to suffer the way that I have.

It felt noble. It didn’t just give me a renewed purpose; it gave my pain meaning. And surely it would impress not only sister Seton Marie but God himself.

But that vow bound me to rescuing and set me on a path toward illness. Those upright shoulders slumped further each day I subconsciously carried for clients what they weren’t ready to face themselves. A deep feeler who’d become increasingly clairsentient as the years progressed, I unknowingly digested the unresolved grief, rage, and fear they disowned.

Eighteen-plus years later, my adrenals were shot for the fourth round in my career, this time far worse. My body showed me what my mind refused to see: my belly thickened, layer by layer, as if trying to pad me against the weight of emotions I inadvertently processed for others who never asked me to. Even my nervous system, worn from feeling so much, hummed with anxiety that wasn’t mine. I was like an electrical cord with frayed wiring, sparks flying out, unable to ground. When burnout became undeniable, I had no choice but to walk away.

And yet, I don’t minimize what came of it. The healing work mattered. People did benefit. But now I understand: the deepest healing doesn’t come from rescuing. It comes from remembering that every soul carries its own medicine, its own capacity to meet life’s challenges. What we go through, what our clients and loved ones go through, are not problems to fix—it’s part of the mastery our souls came here to embody. My work was never to save anyone. It was to witness, to walk beside, to remember light in the shadows.

Clarity came too late, sadly. My body was begging me for a reprieve, and I was begging Spirit for deliverance. Gazing into the oppressively hot night sky while insects pecked at my skin, I realized that no one was going to rescue me either. The Andean mystical tradition in which I’d apprenticed for almost a decade to become a paqo, or shamanic priestess, taught me that the Divine is as much within as it is without. Therefore, I was the only one who could give myself permission to do what came next: I chose myself and walked away from my 18-year career without any idea when or if I’d return.

After I left, I felt stunned. Ordinarily, I’d be logging onto Zoom, filling my day with faces and voices I cared deeply about. But suddenly there was no one to tend to, no responsibility for other people—only myself. Stripped of the role of healer, I was left wondering: Who was I? Did I still matter? Without the structure of sessions and the rhythm of showing up for others, I was face-to-face with the unknown.

I wasn’t in a place to rebuild. My body required stillness. So I surrendered to small rituals of survival: sucking on lemon balm gummies, soaking in epsom salt and vetiver, drinking lavender tea. For days I lay on my sofa, letting ambient music drift through the room as I practiced breath work and waited for my system to remember what calm felt like.

Slowly, those tiny rituals became more than survival. They taught me how to listen—to my breath, to my body, to the quiet underneath the noise. I discovered that presence and sensation were the keys to resurrection.

Yin yoga and yoga nidra became my triage healers—the ones who showed up in the emergency room for tired souls. Holding still in a pose, I deepened my ability to remain compassionately present with discomfort and love the parts of me that ached. Resting in yoga nidra, my nervous system loosened its grip, as if someone had turned the volume down inside me. When I stepped outside, putting my bare feet in the grass, the ground settled me. The chorus of cicadas by the water wrapped around me like a late-summer sound bath. These became my second-wave healers, carrying me from crisis into recovery.

And in that recovery, something unexpected stirred. When my body finally quieted, the static inside me gave way to a familiar voice who’d been drowned out by exhaustion over the past year. Spirit uttered presence and sweetness in ordinary yet poignant ways: through Matilda the self-named tree leaning towards my office window, sunlight playing peek-a-boo through leaves, an inner vision of a compassionate smile meant just for me. It was the version of me that’s always been there—without worry, without ego—the one that speaks through plants and rivers, through sudden knowing, through the subtle company of guides who never really left.

I grabbed a notebook and pen. I began to write again—this time from heart rather than from torment.

I realized this was what was missing in my early writing life: presence. Thirty years ago, I lived in my head, terrified of being human and of feeling. Detached, disembodied, living in the future and the past, I couldn’t slow down enough to hear what I truly wanted to say. My inner critic was louder than my own voice. I missed the vivid details that make life worth describing.

Now, when I still, my nervous system settles into writing like it’s my beloved late grandmother’s couch. Paying attention to what I sense in my body, and to the subtle currents moving around me, gives me something solid to rest in. This way of noticing supports me. It’s how I bring Spirit down to earth, and how I recognize Spirit in the ordinary.

And when the inner critic pipes up again, I know how to pause and root back into my heart. I take my time and get quieter. That’s what my body craves. This slowness.

Books on writing are stacked all over my sofa. The sight of them overwhelms me. I’m still afraid—afraid I’ll never measure up, afraid I’ll never get it “right.” So I’ve decided to start smaller. Maybe I’ll just begin here, the way I once did with that little yellow diary. Only this time I’m a little less distraught, a little more steady. That young girl who longed for an adult to tell her she mattered and wasn’t alone in her well-deep emotions—is still here. And now, the adult who gets her and appreciates her most has finally shown up.

Together we’ve realized there’s no joy in competition, no point in trying to be the cleverest or the greatest. What matters is that we use our own voice, speak in our own rhythm, and add our frequency to the chorus that already exists. I don’t need to be Didion or Plath—or even Mirabai Starr or Elizabeth Gilbert. I only need to be Allison, bringing my own essence into the world.

Somewhere along the way, I realized the question I’d been considering all this time—do I still matter?—was already answered. I do. The work I’ve done matters, too. The years of sitting with people in their pain, of holding space for what they thought was unholdable, were not wasted. They mattered. They still do. I can honor that work without needing to carry it forward in the same way. My sensitivity is not a weakness—it is a gift. It is simply asking for new forms of expression.

So I turn now toward other ways of healing. Healing through words, presence, and one day teaching others how to heal themselves. Healing through frequency, through tending my own within and allowing that care to ripple outward. What I have to say matters—not because of elaborate vocabulary or polished cleverness, but because I have a ton of heart, 51 years of raw introspection, and nearly a lifetime of personal experience and growth behind me. My words may be simple, but they are ripe with the depth I’ve lived. That’s enough.

It’s another August night. The breeze through the balcony screen door feels as romantic as it did in 1993 when Enigma chanted from my pink stereo. Only now, instead of pining away, I’m listening to the orchestra of crickets and katydids, steadying me in the present. My gums and jaw ache a little less now. But, to be sure, I’ll call a dentist. I also know I’m tending to the deeper cause—finding the nerve to write again, and with it, the courage to live as I am: sensitive, real, and ready to offer my medicine in a new way.