On Being Silenced
...and the real cost of writing the truth
(Our first ever Literary Salon, Writing About Love, is this coming Wednesday April 1st at 5 pm PST. There’s still time to grab a ticket! Our reading lineup is so fantastic, you’re almost guarenteed to cry. Happy tears)
I have been writing my entire life. The first book I was ever given was a journal—plush, white, lock and key. I wrote in it every night from the age of six. Mostly drawings at first, then lists, and by the time I was twelve, pages. I wrote like someone might find it. Like someone might take it. Like the act itself was both sacred and dangerous. Maybe I already understood the value of an inner world. Maybe I already knew how words could save you or destroy you, depending on who was reading.
I didn’t grow up thinking of writing as a career. Sure, my parents had books (the Bible, Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Abraham Hicks) but writing was never something I considered for fun. For me, it was survival. A place you could go to regain your strength.
As I got older, writing became a way to make sense of what didn’t make sense in my body. I didn’t know where else to put fear, put rage. Pain on the page was tolerable. Pain unexpressed became something heavier, something that burrowed itself into my bones. Writing wasn’t something I chose. It was something I returned to, over and over again, because I didn’t know how to have secrets and still live honestly inside my own life.
For over a decade, I have taught women how to write and publish their stories. Not just their stories—but their truth. You know the difference. A story is what lands on the page: characters, plot, arc, dialogue. But truth is what you have to excavate. It’s what lives beneath the sentences, what hides in the lines you keep deleting.
The writers I work with are almost always women. We recognize one another immediately. Women who have survived something. Women who have survived someone.
I have midwifed hundreds of manuscripts into the world by women who left their marriages in the middle of the night, one child in each arm, backing out of their driveways in neutral so no one would hear them go. I have edited stories by women who were taken from their beds at ten years old and left in the desert for dead. Women who have loved the kind of men who only know how to hurt. Women who have rebuilt entire lives after violence, after divorce, after betrayal, after the sort of rupture that changes how you move through the world. I have written with women who have lost their children, women who have been put behind bars, women who have learned that sometimes the closest you’ll ever come to peace is by staying compliant. Women who have carried their stories so close to their bodies for so long that the weight of them began to feel normal, a second skin.
And what I have learned, sitting across from these women as their fingers hover over the keyboard, is this: they are not afraid of writing.
They are afraid of what will happen once they do.
Because the price you pay for saying what happened can be devastating. Not just emotionally, but in ways that reach into every corner of your life. It can cost you relationships, stability, reputation, safety. It can rearrange your world in ways you cannot control once the words leave the page and ripple outward endlessly.
This is the part no one wants to talk about. Not the reader, not the editor. We love the idea of truth-tellers. We romanticize the woman who finally speaks, who summons the strength of her ancestors and writes the essay, publishes the book, finds her voice and steps up to the microphone. We clap for her bravery. We call it healing. We call it liberation. We say, yes, tell your story, your voice matters, your truth will set you free!
And sometimes it does set you free.
But sometimes it detonates your entire fucking life.
