I write to process. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or anything really, I write about it. I let the words just flow out of me, onto the paper. I love filling up notebooks of my writing. I get a weird pleasure thumbing through pages of paper that have been written on front and back by me. My words, my thoughts, representing moments in time in my life.

Writing has completely changed my life. I’ve had a blog for 10 years, but I started writing consistently and for processing 5 years ago. I dove into The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. She suggests starting every morning with 3 pages free flow writing, which she calls the morning pages. I started doing that on my 35th birthday (February 2, 2018) sitting on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

I haven’t been perfect through the years, and the morning pages have morphed into nightly pages for me. I sit down at the end of the day and let it out. I try to get all the stuff that’s taking up real estate in my brain onto the paper, so I can either sort through it, acknowledge it, or even just let it be. The fact is, I have a lot of stuff going on in my head and writing about it helps me weed out the stuff that doesn’t matter.

When I get in a zone, the words just flow out of me. I don’t even think about it, I just let them come. I get them down on paper and sometimes, those words end up being something that needed to get out. And needed to get noticed.

Here’s a page from one of my notebooks, written last May.

Woah. I wrote that and now its becoming a reality. I’ve created a space that feels like a breath of fresh air for me and a few other women coming to the slow down retreat in October.

I still can’t believe it’s happening. That I created something that feels so damn good to me and get to share it with women who are old friends and new.

If what I wrote about back in May (before I even knew the Slow Down Retreat existed) seems like something you could use more of in your life, I invite you to click below and see if it resonates.