I Wrote To Save My Life
MEG AMY
Six years ago I wrote my first story. I was 17 at the time. I had just moved out of home and my mind was filled with an endless stream of thoughts, fears, worries and excitement. In my attempt to make sense of it all, I started pouring it out onto the page. I vividly remember how much fun I had creating that story and how I dreamed of creating a world of storytelling that instilled this same feeling in the reader.
During this time my life was free. It was a time when I had few worries or responsibilities. I would spend endless hours writing, reading and learning. This is also when I first started exploring yoga and meditation. I was beginning to feel a connection with my self and my intuition. But then real life began to speed up. Writing stories, learning for fun and creating things held no value in the eyes of society. I started to feel the pressure of focusing on formal eduction and getting a real world job. Suddenly my life became filled with endless lectures, textbooks and late nights studying academic principles. Suddenly all of the creative things I used to love doing became wasted time, time that could be used for studying or making money.
When I decided to go traveling I felt that pull back towards my creative pursuits and intuitive energy. But I still felt the pressure of needing to keep one foot grounded in reality at all times. And the moment I returned home I was pulled straight back into feeling like life was outrunning me again. This time was when I suffered the most. Mentally, I fell into a very deep depression. My time overseas had reminded me of the things I enjoyed most. And after months of overcoming an illness and having to return home, I had lost all sense of that joy. I felt as though all life had been completely drained out of me.
I dived into creating this platform in order to find a purpose in my life, and to inspire one in others. I fell in love with idea of healing my own life through healing others. And then I disappeared.
I spent a long time hiding the truth from myself, and from everyone around me, but I simply had to let go. I left this space with so many unanswered questions and empty promises hanging in the air. I did it for my health. I needed to take the time to heal.
Finally, I’ve never been in a better place mentally, physically or emotionally. It took me a long time to get here. But with this new strength I finally feel ready to be here again. There is a raw and unedited version of why I left, where I’ve been and what I’ve learnt. And I want to share it from the beginning. Through the story, that has always helped me make sense of it all.
When my world came crashing down over a sudden health issue, my physical pain turned into mental agony. I became the most depressed and anxious I had ever been. As my illness forced me to step away from my reality, my full time job, my friends and the life I was living, I began to slowly disconnect from the identity I had become so attached to. I went through a grieving process to let go of that old life. And that grieving process took me on one hell of a journey. Suddenly my whole world had changed, and I was in a lot of pain.
There were a lot of moments in this time, that I tried to convince myself I was better than I actually was. And there were times I felt worse than I really was. I tried many times to return back to a life that I thought I could live, but every attempt seemed to push me further back. And it became harder and harder to keep trying. And that’s when I started to disappear. In this time I wasn’t just hiding from this space, I withdrew from myself and from the world too. I felt so lost in my attempt to navigate a new life that I began to confuse grieving with failure. I was trying to fix what I no longer had but I was pouring from an empty cup. I was trying to bury my pain, when more than ever I just needed to heal.
I often tried to return, sometimes for days or months at a time. I would consume myself in my goals. But the truth is that nothing was clear. I didn’t know what I truly wanted because I didn’t know who I was during this time. I was still going through a process of figuring that out and I would get so lost in trying to be something, that I became a version of myself that wasn’t true. I tried to be who I thought I was supposed to be, but each time it became harder to play the role. So I would stop and retreat for months at a time, only to do exactly the same thing all over again.
I was trapped in an endless cycle of an existence that didn’t feel like mine. But I felt this pressure to fit into a box to feel worthy, and I continued to hit the wall. I was walking so close to the edge, I no longer knew if I was rescuing myself or giving up anymore. It started to become clear that it wasn’t a rescue I was staging. I had lost all sense of sanity in who I was or what I was doing because I was carrying the weight of my pain around with me, unable to move on.
After months of severe resistance I finally accepted my life and my health for what it was. It took me a long time to make peace with saying goodbye to who I was before, because I knew on the other side of that resistance was an internal knowing that I didn’t fit there anymore. No matter how hard I wanted to try. The change that I needed was painful, but I knew with it came growth. And I needed to grow to heal.
So I took the steps I needed to take in my life in order to begin healing my body and mind. This meant I had to close the door on a lot of things in my life that were no longer serving me or helping me grow. But the lessons I’ve learned in doing so and the pain I experienced throughout has taught me so much more about myself than anything else ever has. I started to get clear on who I really was and how my mind played the biggest role in shaping everything that my life currently was. So I spent my time developing and refining the tools necessary to reshape my inner world, so that I could finally feel in control of my life.
In doing this I was taking back the control I had felt robbed of when my health became an issue. I was healing every single part of me that had felt broken over the past 2 years.
During this time I developed a strong sense of what I valued most. My health, and my creativity.
My capacity and desire for personal and raw storytelling became a huge part of my healing process. My art became my most reliable tool. Through it, I began to see the world differently. I wrote to save my life. And in the process I created an entirely new one. I became obsessed with the power that writing, in its raw form, could bring into this world. And I wanted to explore it in its every capacity. I finally know without any hesitation or doubt, that this is what I must do in this life. I have always wanted to write, but my purpose for doing so became lost alongside me.
Suffering a collapse in health which ultimately lead to the disintegration of my entire life, was the gift I had been given in order to become who I was meant to be. And so while I’m learning to accept the unknown of the future, I finally feel ready to bring my story to life. Without expectations, promises or misplaced intentions, but simply the need to share my words with as many as possible.
I’m finally happy and even grateful for the pain I experienced over these past few years, for constantly reminding me of the importance of my health. Through my journey of resistance, acceptance and change I finally began my transformation. I realise now, that I am not my thoughts or the world around me. I am the one in control. And I have the tools to bring myself back to this reality in every moment.
I developed these tools through, reading books, absorbing knowledge in every possible way, taking courses and studying the mind. I managed my anxiety and learnt how to sit with and breathe through pain. I developed a daily writing practice, and began to explore the importance of self conversations. I sat with myself more times than I can count and learnt to understand, and accept, everything my body was going through. I submerged myself in cold water and began to explore the boundaries of my minds capacity to control the inner workings of my biological functioning. I pushed my body and mind into expansion and I initiated my brain into a process of rewiring. Like the stories I used to write, I made sense of the chaos in my mind, by rewriting my own story.
It took me months to crawl out of the hole I had dug myself into. But each of us are born with our own stories, our own gifts and talents. We are all on our own path of creativity.
After these long months of feeling suffocated in an image of what I felt my life had to look like and the pain I was burying inside, I had to make a choice. My life had taken a turn, I was given a wake up call, and I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I had to choose, to move out of this life of expected outcomes and certainties, and follow my own path back to myself.
When I took the steps towards this new path, I realised how calm life could be without the distractions from the everyday pressures we place in our way. From working, chasing material status and confining our worth to the external frames we build around us. I had so much more space in my mind. All of a sudden the creative forces came flooding back in. The creativity that was always within me, but was being drowned out by the noise of the external world. In the silence I found my creativity. And through my creativity I found my tools.
Here I am, doing exactly what I was doing back when I was seventeen, when I was most connected to my creativity and self. Writing stories, sharing my ideas and learning every day about life. Looking back, I understand that my suffering did not come from this external reality, but from a lack of connection to myself and my own truth. Every day, I am rewriting this narrative. And every day, I am grateful to be alive.
m.a