Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is admitting that you survived something.

In this world of instant everything, whitewashing reality, the pursuit if likes and shares, no one wants to admit their lives have always been glass smooth. Healing is jagged sometimes! It’s not in a straight line, and it’s not often visible!

I am often quoted to have said that writing is often cheap therapy. It is a close examination of your own life and struggles through either the lens of journaling, or tool of fiction in some cases. In accepting the bad things in your life which have formed whom you are, you must do two things:

1.) Accept these things happened to you. Some things have been of your own making–these you must own. There are also things which were inflicted upon you, your soul, your mind and your person that you had no control over. To go forward, the trick is to accept them, but not be defined by them.

2.) Check your perspective. As a writer, I cannot recommend therapy enough. Helping to work through the bad things, the heartbreak, the trauma, the sadness–that is work! Sometimes you need help with it. There is nothing wrong with that!

There is nothing wrong with seeing yourself as a complicated being, in order to create complicated beings. Use your pen to create the lives you want, and also to heal the life you have.