The Rhythm of the Page Became the Rhythm of My Healing

One year ago today, The Seeker's Lessons was published.

A whole fucking year. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.

And somehow, a year later, I'm still learning from the process of writing it.

It seems particularly fitting that today's reflection is about learning to trust my instincts, questioning the rules I thought I had to follow, and giving myself permission to do things differently.

Now, about those rules...How much of what you do is because it feels right to you, and how much is because someone taught you that's the way it's supposed to be done?

I've gone with vibes for most of my life. That's probably not the most sophisticated way to explain it, but it's true. If something doesn't feel right, I pay attention. I may not always know why. I may not be able to explain it immediately. But I've learned not to ignore that feeling.

Writing was no different.

When I started writing my story, conventional paragraphs were my safe space. That's how I was taught to write. Paragraphs had structure. They had rules. They made sense to me. Honestly, they still do. Given the choice, that's usually how I write.

But there were places in my story where paragraphs didn't feel right. Some memories needed space around them. Some sentences needed to stand alone. Some thoughts needed somewhere to breathe. Sometimes the white space needed to say what I couldn't.

And I fought it. Not necessarily because I thought it looked bad, but because I wasn't sure it looked right.

I spent an absurd amount of time researching what a memoir was supposed to look like. If I was going to write one, surely there was a structure I was supposed to follow. A correct way to do this. Some literary version of instructions that would tell me where everything belonged.

So I researched the shit out of it.

And eventually I discovered something incredibly helpful and mildly irritating. Not one memoir looked like another.

There wasn't one structure waiting for me to discover it. There wasn't a template everyone else knew about that I had somehow missed. I was going to have to decide what felt right for my story.

That sounds liberating. It was. It was also uncomfortable as hell.

Because knowing there wasn't one correct way to do something didn't immediately erase everything I'd been taught about how writing was supposed to look.

So the structure evolved as I wrote. I didn't sit down beforehand and decide I was going to create some nontraditional hybrid memoir. I wrote. I listened. I changed things. I moved things around. Sometimes I wrote in paragraphs. Sometimes a memory came out in fragments. Sometimes a sentence needed an entire stretch of white space around it.

And slowly, I stopped fighting the page.

The silence started to matter.

I'm good with silence. I've always thought you can learn a lot in silence. People rush to fill it because silence makes them uncomfortable. They talk. Explain. Justify. Ask another question. Turn on the television. Pick up their phone. Do something, anything, to make the quiet go away.

I've never felt that same need.

Silence gives things room to exist without immediately demanding something from them. I started realizing the white space on the page could do the same thing. It could let a sentence sit. It could let a memory breathe. It could give me a second before moving into whatever came next.

Sometimes what wasn't written seemed almost as important as what was.

There is a line in The Seeker's Lessons that eventually became the best way I knew to describe what had happened: "The rhythm of the page became the rhythm of my healing."

I didn't plan that rhythm. I found it. Or maybe I learned to stop interfering with it.

The more I wrote, the more I realized that the structure of the book was developing alongside me. I was learning when to keep going and when to stop. When to explain and when to leave something alone. When a memory needed paragraphs and when it needed fragments.

I had spent so much time wondering what a memoir was supposed to look like that I almost missed the more important question: What did mine need to look like?

And I don't think that struggle belongs only to writing.

We spend an awful lot of our lives being taught what things are supposed to look like. Success is supposed to look like this. Family is supposed to look like this. Grief is supposed to look like this. Healing is supposed to look like this. Progress is supposed to move in this direction.

We absorb those structures because someone handed them to us, and sometimes they work beautifully. Sometimes they feel safe. But sometimes we reach a place where what we were taught and what feels right no longer match.

That's where things get uncomfortable.

Because doing what feels right for you can look an awful lot like doing it wrong when you're measuring yourself against someone else's structure.

I think healing can be like that. Sometimes healing is a paragraph. Everything connects. One thought leads neatly into another. You can see where you've been and understand how you arrived where you are.

Sometimes it's a sentence. Sometimes it's a fragment. Sometimes it's three steps forward and two backward. Sometimes it's an entire stretch of white space where nothing seems to be happening at all.

But silence isn't necessarily nothing. Neither is white space.

Sometimes that's where we're listening. Sometimes that's where we're processing. Sometimes that's where we're finally giving ourselves enough room to hear what we've been trying to say.

Sometimes it's being okay with using the word "sometimes" repeatedly for emphasis, even when everything you've been taught tells you it's wrong.

Writing The Seeker's Lessons taught me something I apparently needed to learn beyond the page.

Structure can be useful without becoming a cage.

I didn't have to abandon everything I'd been taught. I didn't have to reject conventional writing just to prove I could do something differently. I could use what served the story and leave room for what didn't fit.

I could trust the paragraph when the paragraph felt right. And I could trust the silence when it didn't.

Maybe that's what the rhythm of the page eventually became for me. Not a rejection of structure. Permission to choose my own.

Where in your life are you still trying to follow a structure that no longer feels right for you?

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