this morning, a practice, and ten years of writing myself into a life
JUN 27, 2026
The first sound I hear as I slowly become conscious is a single, long, clear, high-pitched whistle. My sleep-filled eyes are still firmly shut beneath the silk eye mask I am addicted to. I listen for another whistle, which comes after a few moments, and try to decide whether to urge myself back to sleep. Too quickly, my mind whirrs into action — it’s chatty this morning — and I slip my mask up on my forehead. I blink my eyes open and see that it is still dark. Too early, it’s too early, I think to myself, but it’s too late, the bird already woke me. I close my eyes again and pull my mask back down to lull myself into a half-sleep, and immediately the muezzin begin their melodic, flowing adhan for Fajr, the dawn prayer. It is 5 am.
I let my thoughts play out for a little while, letting them conclude their twisted, menacing patterns from yesterday, when I had resolved to start telling a new story about something I had been irritating myself with lately. This is something I return to often: the understanding that stories are not just the way we describe our lives, but the way we experience them.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
In many of the oldest traditions, before the written word, before the self-help industry, before the modern understanding of the psyche, stories were understood to be living things. Not passive containers for information, but active forces. They shaped the people who carried them. They determined what was seen and what was missed, what was possible and what was invisible, who a woman understood herself to be and what she understood herself to be capable of.
Those who held this knowledge — the storytellers, the healers, the ones who tended the old ways in community — understood that one of the most powerful things you could do for another person was help her examine the stories she was living inside. Help her hold them up to the light. Turn them around in her hands. See them as stories, as constructions, as inherited shapes, rather than as the unquestionable fabric of reality.
Because once you can see a story as a story, it loses its totalising power. It becomes something you are carrying rather than something you are. And anything you are carrying, you can choose to put down.
I have been putting stories down and picking up new ones my whole adult life. Writing is how I do it.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
As the mercurial sky changes from black to grey, I pull myself to the edge of the bed and swing my sleepy feet to touch the floor. A fluid rush of morning movements follows: pull the heavy curtain back, pad to the bathroom, use the toilet, scrape my tongue. A little more awake, I go to the kitchen, pour spring water into the kettle, turn it on, put some loose dried hibiscus in a cup, and fill it with steaming water. Bringing my cup back to bed, I shake out ashwagandha, multivitamins and mineral tablets, while the flowers infuse, releasing their tart, floral scent.
I need to get one more thing before I can settle back under the warm covers. My laptop. I had promised myself a writing day today. It is Saturday morning.
The first time I started writing was as a child. I was a dreamer, a skinny little thing, not athletic or strong, always curled up in some chair or corner deep inside my imagination, courtesy of a book. So captivated by stories, I tried to write my own. Tiny storybooks that never quite matched my ambitions.
Later, when I was 7 or 8, I was gifted my first journal with a lock and key from my stepfather. Suspicious of his incentives, a man who never gave much from his heart, I wrote the most banal details of my days in it: what I did, what I ate. One night, when he thought I was asleep, I spied him reading it by the light of the moon through the window. It was then that I understood words could hold power. Power that had to be wielded with care.
After that, for many years, my writing was mostly performative: school projects, letters to my grandparents, whatever was required. It wasn’t until I was 17 and had moved out of home that I started writing for myself again.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
writing to process
The first kind of writing I did consistently was journaling. Not as a self-improvement practice, but as a way to discharge emotional stress from my body, through words, without filtering myself. Over the years, I have often shared my love for it, and I get so many questions about how to do it “right.”
Because it is such a private and individual practice, I thought it might be helpful to show you what it looks like for me. When you trust the process, it takes you exactly where you need to go.
I usually begin by describing the texture of my day. How do I feel, right now, in this moment? What themes have been present, or cycling around my mind? Then I move toward whatever has felt activated or uncomfortable. Lately, a frustration at not feeling seen or recognised for my writing and creativity as much as I’d like to be. I write about what that feels like in my body, and often end up somewhere in childhood: I was small, shy, soft-spoken, and I often felt steamrolled when I shared an idea. Like there just wasn’t room for me. Then I ask myself whether that is still true, and why I feel activated now.
There is obviously a childhood wound there. But the adult version of me has some agency over it. So perhaps I am not even fully recognising myself.
Which leads me to what I actually need: to value my own work, my own time, my writing and creativity, more completely. The moment I decide my work is valuable and act accordingly is the moment other people begin to recognise it too.
That is how you move from complaining about your day to finding a root and working through the emotions that are keeping you stuck. Not every journaling session flows like this. Sometimes I write “I don’t know!!!” over and over again, which is sometimes exactly what I need.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
rewriting reality
The other writing I did for myself was to rewrite my story.
To move forward with a real foundation, you have to be able to stand and deliver the story of your own life. Not just know it, but tell it with self-respect and accountability. Tell it with the self-forgiveness you deserve as an inherently innocent and valuable person. And also with honesty about the role you played in your own pain and suffering, and sometimes in that of others. The story has to feel accurate enough to land as a truth in your body.
Until you can do all of that, something keeps snagging. You will keep being called back to the same material, gently or not so gently, until you have moved through it. It is a lot of work. Some people have far more of it to do because their lives have been objectively harder. That is just the reality. But the steps are the same.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
My hibiscus tea has run dry, and the sun is glinting between the bamboo fencing and the palm fronds outside. I get up, roll out my yoga mat with every intention to stretch on it and go to the kitchen to heat more water. There’s a single drip coffee filter filled with local Arabica grounds waiting in the drawer, one I’d been saving for this morning. I hook the arms over my mug, bloom the grounds for twenty seconds, then pour three slow rounds of hot water through until the cup is full. I taste it and add a splash of milk. The coffee, my laptop, and I pile back into bed together. The yoga mat forgotten and ignored.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
from private to public
The first public writing I did was an unglamorous but surprisingly popular version of a newsletter sent from a Hotmail account in the early 2010s. I wrote about that here:
how to write
everything I know about writing I learned from other writers and from writing for hundreds of hours. Here are 10 tips that have helped me become a better writer.
Those emails became a blog. I spent a year writing truly awful posts that I’m fairly certain no one read before I started to find my voice and style. Then the blog began to be found. By strangers around the world who left comments and sent emails in response to what I had written. Without fully understanding what was happening, my writing was compounding into a personal brand, which became a business, which started generating money.
Writing is not just expression when it is done consistently in public. It becomes something others can orient around. A lighthouse that draws attention, slowly builds an audience, and opens into opportunity. Something that I built a life on.
The first line, when you get it right, immediately sets the tone. It tells the reader not just what they are reading, but what kind of world they are entering, what kind of attention is being asked of them, what kind of relationship is being formed. People don’t just follow information. They follow energy, honesty, taste, tone, and a sense that there is someone out there like them.
When I started, I was trying to make sense of my own thoughts, in public. I was trying to find ways to think and connect that felt true to me. That honesty, repeated over time, became something other people could recognise themselves in. Writing turned from private practice into a shared space, and eventually, into a body of work.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
writing as a tool for life
going pro is a writing course for women who want to use a newsletter or Substack as a marketing tool, for those who already have something to say and want to learn how to say it in a way that builds an audience and brings in clients.
It grew out of The Art of Noticing, a live creative writing course I ran four times across two years. What I kept noticing in each cohort was that many of the women didn’t just want to write. They wanted their writing to do something. They were building businesses, developing a body of work, and becoming known for something.
going pro is the next step: writing that builds a brand, an audience, and a business.
applications close friday july 10
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
The rumbling in my stomach reminds me it is now noon. Somewhere behind the bamboo fence, a neighbour has started up a saw blade, the sound needling through the wood and into my ears. I can’t tell if he just began or if I was too deep in the writing to hear it. My body has that sticky, heavy feeling that comes from too much time in the same position. The laptop is warm. I close it and get on with the rest of my day.
