There’s a version of the “why I started writing” story that’s easy to tell and mostly untrue: inspiration struck, and a writer was born. Mine didn’t happen that way. It came out of a single night that split my life into a clear before and after — a serious medical emergency, a traumatic brain injury, and a recovery long and uneven enough to change my relationship with time itself. I didn’t become a writer that night. But something shifted that eventually made writing feel less like an option and more like a necessity.
What Broke Open
A brain injury does something specific to how you hold your own history. Some of it gets harder to access — the edges soften, the sequence shifts, certain details simply aren’t as reliably there anymore. But alongside that loss came something I didn’t expect: a new urgency about the things I still had. What I could still recall suddenly mattered more than it ever had before, precisely because I now understood how easily it could have been otherwise.
Recovery also changes your relationship with time. When you’ve spent days unconscious and months rebuilding basic function, the assumption of unlimited future — the quiet, unexamined belief that there will always be more time to say the things you haven’t said yet — doesn’t fully return. You start moving through your days more deliberately, more aware that the space to account for your own life isn’t infinite.
I had lived with a difficult, often invisible condition for decades by that point, and I had gotten very good at carrying it privately. That night didn’t just add a new injury to an already long medical history. It broke something open in how much longer I could keep doing that.
Why Telling the Truth Felt Necessary
I hadn’t identified as a writer. It wasn’t a role I’d ever positioned myself for, professionally or otherwise. What I had instead, after that recovery, was an accumulation — decades of illness, loss, effort, and quiet endurance that had simply been lived through rather than examined. And at a certain point, continuing to just carry all of it stopped being enough. The living itself seemed to be asking for more than endurance. It was asking for form. For honesty. For a way of being examined and offered to something beyond the private interior space where it had lived for so long.
Writing it was difficult and clarifying. Putting it into the world was different — it meant the interior life I’d spent decades keeping carefully managed was suddenly available to anyone who wanted to look at it.
Publishing that honesty turned out to be its own kind of vulnerability, separate from the vulnerability of living through the material itself. There was no taking it back once it was out, no calibrating who got to see how much, the way I’d always been able to calibrate disclosure in individual relationships.
Writing as Part of Healing
What I didn’t anticipate was how much the writing itself would become part of the healing rather than simply a record of it. Putting language to something you’ve only ever held wordlessly changes your relationship to it. It’s one thing to survive an experience. It’s a different thing to find the sentence that finally describes it accurately — and that second thing did work in me that the years of just living through it hadn’t managed to do on their own.
Why Vulnerable Memoir Matters
What actually happened once the writing was out in the world surprised me. People didn’t pull back the way I’d sometimes braced for. They came forward. They reached out. Honesty, it turned out, didn’t read as a burden to the people who found it — it read as permission. Permission to acknowledge their own difficult truths without minimizing them first.
That’s the part of this that connects most directly to why I do any of this work at all. Truth-telling, done carefully and without performance, is a form of stewardship — a way of taking what you’ve been given, including the hard parts, and using it for something beyond yourself. It’s the same instinct behind everything Natural Vitality Advocate is built around: not polished certainty, but honest accounting, offered to people who are somewhere in the middle of their own difficult thing and looking for evidence they’re not the only one.
Where This Leaves You
That single night is where the writing actually started, even though it took time — and a great deal more living — before it became a book. Healing, in my experience, was never a straight line from that point forward, and I’ve written elsewhere about what that non-linear process actually looks like in Why Healing Isn’t Linear — And Why That’s Not a Failure.
If any part of this resonates — if you’re sitting on your own version of something that’s asked you for more than just carrying it privately — that instinct is worth trusting. The fuller account of that night, and everything that came after it, is in “Still Walking.” The book that grew out of it, written from the middle of the healing rather than the beginning, is “Healing Against the Odds.”
Read the Full Story
This post touches one chapter. The full account is in “Still Walking.”
Disclaimer
Disclaimer
This content reflects personal lived experience, perspective, and opinion. Individual experiences and outcomes vary, and nothing shared here should be interpreted as a guarantee that the same approach or outcome will apply to someone else. Where health or other professional matters are discussed, the content is informational and is not a substitute for individualized professional care. See the full Disclaimer for additional information.