I attended a winter solstice writing retreat in 2014 where I didn’t know a single person. Everyone was older. Scholars and teachers. People who wrote for a living. We stayed in cabins without electricity and no one wore makeup. It was if they already knew the secret- you can’t make your writing better by looking better. There was nothing to prove, no one to impress through appearance. It was all about the picture you could paint with your words and your ability to cut through the fluff to touch down into something real.

Afternoons were spent walking silently near the ocean or writing in the grassy fields. We sat on thick wooden chairs with velvet cushions around the fireplace in the evening and read our work aloud to each other. I was scared and shy and wrote about subjects that were safe. As a result, my writing was distant and dull. Writing from a deeper place seemed impossible at the time. I needed to pierce through my own pain with self-compassion and acceptance before any breakthroughs in my writing took place.

It took time, but words were the breadcrumbs that led me back home to myself. I journaled every morning, writing longhand. Page after page. Through this writing practice I found my voice. It took this retreat to teach me the effort that goes into safe writing. That space of self-protection actually takes work. The writing also suffers. One of my friend says, “It’s too much effort to pretend to be anyone other than myself.” I vowed after this retreat to write from a truthful, raw, vulnerable, and real place. It’s in those corners of the soul where the real magic lives, and where we can connect most intimately with others. When we write what we know, inevitably, we write what others know too.