Why I Stopped Writing Safe and Started Telling My Truth

How vulnerability, awe, and fearlessness became my pathways to authentic writing

The Sanctuary of Truth Museum in Pattaya, Thailand

Hi, and a very warm welcome to my hundreds of new subscribers who’ve joined me over the past few days after a Note I shared went viral (which was nice but an very overwhelming experience!). I hope you enjoy what you find here.

Before we dive into my latest post, I just wanted to remind you that the Mindful Memoir Course starts 2 weeks today. If you’ve been wanting to write about a part of your life, I hope you’ll join us. 💙

Tuesday is my fifty-third birthday, which I am spending on holiday in Greece with my husband. I’m feeling blessed that I have created a life for myself in which I spend my days doing work I love that is helping people and expanding my mind, my compassion for myself and others, and my consciousness.

My life is filled with love and laughter, and I am physically and mentally healthy, and happy despite the many challenges that life always brings.

So while this year has been a really tough one, I’m still smiling. Still dancing in the kitchen. Accepting the good and the bad.

Perspective is everything. 💙

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Why I Stopped Writing Safe and Started Telling My Truth

There have been many moments in my life when my perspective shifted, when the version of myself I'd been inhabiting suddenly felt too small, too constructed and constricted, too removed from what was really true. Each moment forced me to abandon some identity or idea I'd been clinging to and step into something more authentic, more alive. These moments transformed not just how I write, but how I am in the world, how I relate to others and myself, how I understand the nature of reality.

When My Shell Finally Cracked

Photo by Peter Werkman on Unsplash

For most of my life, I lived inside a protective shell I'd built as a child. It kept me safe (or so I thought!), but it also kept my writing careful, controlled, and a bit lifeless. Then in 2009, when I started writing my first novel, something unexpected happened. The hurt and fear I'd spent decades hiding began appearing on the page through my protagonist.

I didn't plan this. The characters simply refused to let me write surface stories. They demanded I write the truth about family dysfunction, about the wounds we carry, about the lies we tell ourselves to survive. As I poured all my buried pain into that novel, something fundamental inside me began to shift.

The month after that novel was published, my carefully constructed and maintained shell shattered. All the fears and shame and fragility I'd kept locked away wrenched up from deep inside me, and suddenly I couldn't hide anymore. It was terrifying. It was also the beginning of something wonderful. Something that has been so hard to live through, but was the start of the healing I needed to do and has led to the happiest and healthiest version of me, physically and mentally, that I’ve ever been.

That breaking open taught me that vulnerability isn't weakness, it's the price of authentic expression. Every meaningful piece I've written since has required me to risk something real. To let myself be seen in ways that sometimes still make me uncomfortable. Because that discomfort is where the truth lives.

Maybe you know this feeling? That moment when you realise the very thing you've been hiding is exactly what needs to be shared. When the parts of yourself you've deemed unacceptable turn out to be where true acceptance of yourself really lies. Please do share your experiences.

The Day Reality Changed

I'll never forget the moment in 2018 when I first saw what appeared to be a fossilised microchip in the documentary series, Missing Links. The certainty I’d always had of what's real, which had already been undergoing some radical shifts since 2012 when I left London and the urban life I’d always known and moved to Exmoor (which at the time felt like a really wild place but now feels really tame!), was completely blown away. The agreed-upon story of how the world works suddenly felt much more fragile, more made-up, than ever before.

This wasn't gentle wonder. This was the kind of awe that stops you cold, that makes you question everything you thought you knew. I felt simultaneously terrified and electrified, like I'd glimpsed something behind the curtain of ordinary existence.

That experience, and others like it when watching that series and many other documentaries — artefacts that shouldn't exist, the same patterns in ancient ruins all around the world from civilisations that weren’t supposed to have had contact with each other, an anomaly in our DNA chromosomes that suggest the evolving from apes story simply can’t be true — taught me that awe isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it's the vertigo of having what you thought you knew about reality, about yourself, about your world, completely up-ended.

Have you ever had one, or more, of these moments? When something you encounter completely rewrites your understanding of what's real? Maybe a conversation that shifted everything, or a moment in nature that stopped you cold, or a book that made you question reality itself. I’d love to hear about your experiences.

When Spirit Said “Stop Hiding”

The most recent shift in my reality is ongoing. Just weeks ago at the start of August, during my Usui Holy Fire III Reiki training, in one of the meditations I received several messages so clearly they couldn’t be ignored. One of them was: "You must not be afraid to share your truths." I’ve realised that doesn’t mean just my safe truths. Not only my insights about writing and my life. My deeper truths I’ve come to understand — the ones about consciousness, reality, and that we're living in something far stranger and more awesome, in the real sense of the word, than we've been taught to believe.

For years, I've been dancing around the edges of what I really want to say. Writing stories and courses that hint at deeper mysteries without fully committing to them. Sharing insights about mindful writing while holding back on the more esoteric experiences that have actually shaped my understanding and development of it. Part of me worried that speaking about channeling characters, reality-shifting moments, or the spiritual dimensions of creativity might undermine my credibility as a teacher. Life is already precarious enough without jeopardising my income, which has already shrunk massively this year after my journalism work completely dried up.

But grief and uncertainty have already stripped away most of my pretences about who I’m supposed to be. Living nomadically, seventeen friends and family members dying in the space of nine years, everything feeling temporary and fluid and uncertain. All of this made me realise the messages I received are permission to finally be completely free.

So I'm starting to write and share things I've never dared before. Ideas that I thought might make people think I've lost my mind. The strange thing is, every time I’ve shared something that scares me, someone responds with relief. "Finally," they say. "Someone willing to talk about this." As if authenticity itself is inherently a little wild, a little beyond the boundaries of what we're supposed to say publicly.

Maybe you've felt this too? The sense that we're living in times when the old stories about reality, consciousness, and who we are, are no longer enough. No longer make sense. When the most important work we can do as writers is to explore what lies beyond the edges of conventional understanding and mainstream dogma.

I'm learning that fearlessness isn't the absence of fear but sharing my truth even when my hands are shaking. It's understanding that the things that make me feel most exposed are often exactly what others have been waiting to hear someone say out loud. I know when I have found others writing and talking about things we don’t find in the mainstream narrative, I feel great relief.

The Integration

These three elements — vulnerability, awe, and fearlessness — aren’t just changing my writing. They’re continually changing me. I'm not the same person who started that first novel in 2009, hiding behind careful words and conventional ideas. I’m not the same person I was at the start of this year before my abusive stepfather died and everything I feel about him shifted, before my husband and I became suddenly homeless in March, before I broke the lifetime habit of drinking wine every single evening.

Now I write from the understanding that reality, and who I am, is far more fluid than we've been conditioned to believe, that consciousness is what all our experiences are coming from, that the stories we’ve been told about who we are aren’t necessarily true, that the stories we tell have the power to literally reshape how we perceive and interact with the world. To create our reality and influence others’ realities too.

The characters who come through me aren't just figments of my imagination — they're wisdom teachers, carrying insights about the nature of existence, and the human experience I’m having, that I'm still learning to understand. The places I've lived and travelled have been my spiritual classrooms, the people I’ve met there my teachers, each one revealing new layers of what it means to be human in an infinite universe.

This is why I'm so excited at having

Alexander Lovell, PhD

,

Ros Barber

and

Mel Moseley

join me and

Teri Leigh 💜

for next year's A Year of Mindful Writing. Their approaches to the full spectrum of awe, vulnerability, and fearless truth-telling align perfectly with what I've discovered through my own journey and what I’ve written about these subjects in the course.

It’s why I love running this course and working with people in an ongoing relationship where we learn from each other, where we feel safe to share what’s really in our hearts, and where we let it all guide what appears on the pages we write. Where we know and accept that some days we stumble but even so we are powerful. Where we support each other through all the joys and sorrows in our craft and in our lives.

If you're ready to move beyond safe writing into the territory where real transformation happens, I'd love to have you join us to explore all of this too. Right now, the world really needs writers who are willing to walk through these doorways and share what they discover on the other side. Get more info and apply here.

With love,

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