Thank you AM Costanzo, 📚Carolyn Parker, Elizabeth Naylor, Sunday Santiago, Tranquil Rain, and many others for tuning into today’s Write the Hard Thing Live.
Each week we gather for a small ritual of grounding, writing, and telling the truth on the page—together. We begin with the body, because when we’re approaching hard stories, the nervous system needs to know it’s safe enough to let memory surface. A few breaths, a moment to arrive in the room you’re in, a reminder that the story lives in the past, even if the sensations are arriving right now.
And then we write for ten minutes.
Last week’s invitation was about beginnings because sometimes the stories that shape us don’t start where we think they do.
“It started with…”
We wrote for ten minutes without fixing or editing or trying to make anything good. Just letting the words come however they needed to.
These short writing rituals are meant to be something you can actually return to—ten minutes, one breath, one small opening. Over time, the body begins to trust the process. The story becomes something you can walk alongside instead of something you feel buried under.
If you feel called, I’d love to hear how it went, whether that means sharing your writing, your title, or simply naming what you noticed in your body while you wrote.
An invitation…
If this kind of practice speaks to you, I also host an ongoing somatic writing community called The Inner Room. It’s a space for women who want to write the hard story without losing themselves in the process. Each week we gather to ground, breathe, and write together—learning how to open the story without reliving it, and how to close it again when the writing is done so the rest of your life is still waiting for you on the other side.
And once a month, we go deeper through longer workshops on memoir, voice, resistance, publishing, and the writing life, all through a nervous-system-informed lens. The rhythm of returning each week, the presence of other women doing this work alongside you, the steadiness of the room itself—that’s where the real shift happens. Over time, the page stops feeling like a cliff edge. You’re no longer circling the hard story anymore—you’re living in relationship with it.
