Tell your Story – Transform Your Life

A Private Conversation

- Sarah (Sally) Hamer

What does “writing” mean to you? Is it a chore to put coherent words down on paper? Do you fight with every sentence, every paragraph, every page?

Or, do words flow from your fingertips, whether you’re writing with pen and paper or on the computer keyboard?

Regardless of where you fit in that continuum, writing is an expression of who you are, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, business writing, or journaling.

Journaling has an additional purpose – and value. Since most journals are a private conversation with ourselves, never to be shown to anyone else, they can allow us to open up the memory bank of the past and find the wounds hidden beneath the persona we wear.

As quoted in Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo, Henry Miller, author of Art and Outrage, admitted that “The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing might have seemed monstrous [to some], for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.”

Isn’t that what we want? To get the poison out? To dig down to the deep, dark secrets which control us and prevent us from finding happiness?

Those secrets could be about anything – a divorce, a rape, an unsafe household, an abusive relationship, a natural disaster – any traumatic or stressful experience.