Why Waiting to Be “Ready” Is Keeping You from Writing the Story You Need To Tell

Why clarity comes through writing—not before it—and how to reframe fear

I didn’t write the hardest story of my life first. I wrote around it. For years, I circled the truth in fragments. I wrote about the aftermath—how my mom robbed over 300 houses, how the other kids at school looked at me like my life might rub off on them. I wrote about the desert that nearly swallowed my family whole. My mother’s addiction. My father’s silence. The grief. The way he’d polish guns at the kitchen table like it was therapy. The tension in my body that never really left.

But the scene I couldn’t touch—the one that eventually opens my memoir—was the morning the cops kicked down our door when I was three. That memory lived in my body long before I ever put language to it. I told myself I needed more time. More distance. More healing. That once I could talk about it without crying, I’d finally write it.

But healing, it turns out, isn’t a milestone you reach. It’s not a green light. It’s a spiral. A slow, circling return to the same story—each time with a little more softness. A little more truth. If I had waited until I felt whole, I never would’ve written a single word.

Instead, I wrote messy. I wrote scared. I wrote in pieces and started over a hundred times. And eventually, the truth started to take shape. When I could finally tell myself that I was writing a memoir, I didn’t have a structure. I didn’t have a point. What I did have was fragments, scenes, sensations—a body full of stories and a deep need to make meaning of them.

I wrote about growing up in a meth lab in the Mojave Desert.
About my mom sharing a prison cell with a member of the Manson cult.
About the cast of addicts who drifted through our house like ghosts.
About how love and chaos were always knotted together in our home—impossible to untangle.

The first draft was a disaster. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t linear. And it definitely wasn’t “healed.” It was raw. Jagged. Emotional. Too much and not enough all at once. But it was honest. It taught me things about myself I once wasn’t able to name. It gave form to shadows. It gave voice to the parts of me that had been silent for years.

And it reminded me that you don’t have to be ready to start writing.

You just have to be willing to stay.

Stay with the sentence that makes your stomach clench. Stay with the memory your body still flinches from. Stay with the part of you that’s afraid—and write anyway.

Because the writing that saves us doesn’t come from the tidy, resolved version of our stories. It comes from the raw middle. The part that still stings.

---

---

I’ve worked with so many writers who say some version of:

“I’ll write it when I’m ready and know how to tell it.”

“What if it’s not good enough?”

“What if it changes how people see me?”

What they’re really saying is, I’m afraid to be seen before the healing, before the story has a shape or a point. I want to have it all figured out first.

But here’s the thing—clarity doesn’t come before the writing. It comes through it.

And you don’t need to be healed to begin. You don’t have to tie a bow around the pain or find the perfect lesson. You don’t have to wait until your voice stops shaking.

You just have to start.
Start mid-sentence.
Start in the mess.
Start before you’re sure.
Start while it’s still unraveling.

That’s the part most writing advice doesn’t cover—how to write while still inside the story. How to tell the truth without abandoning yourself. How to stay grounded when fear floods your system.

That’s why I created the Fear-to-Flow Framework—the same body-based writing process I used to write my memoir without losing myself in the process.

One of the core steps in the framework is this: reframe fear as a signal.
When fear shows up, we usually treat it like a stop sign.

We think:
If I feel this scared, I must not be ready.
If it hurts this much, maybe I’m not healed enough.

But what if fear is a doorway? What if it means you’re getting close to something true? A signal that the story matters.

In the framework, I invite writers to complete this sentence:

The fear I feel about writing this story is actually a signal that…

Maybe its…

… this story is important.
… it still lives in my body.
… I’m growing.
… I’m reclaiming my life.
… I’m breaking a cycle.

And when we meet fear with compassion instead of judgment, something shifts. The story begins to feel less like a burden and more like a thread we’re finally ready to follow.

You don’t have to push through the fear. You don’t have to bully your way to the page. You can stay. With the fear. With your body. With your story.

Because the stories we’re most afraid to write?
They’re usually the ones we need the most.

What about you? What would you write if you didn’t have to have it all figured out first?

Start there.

---

You don’t have to be fearless to tell the truth.
You just have to be willing to stay.

And if you want support writing your hard truths, you can check out the Fear-to-Flow Framework.