Narrate Your Way Home: Journaling as a Soulful Practice of the Self
Angelina Bliss, PC, ATRShare
Sometimes the pen knows what you don't. This is a story about learning to follow it.
Sometimes I sit down with a blank page, and I don't write. Not yet.
I close my eyes. I listen to my body—where it's tight, where it's open, where it hums. I wait for images to surface, the way shapes appear when you stare at clouds long enough. One of them steps forward, asks for attention.
And from that image, I begin to write—without knowing where I'm going.
I call these pensieri di getto—Italian for thoughts that pour out.
Not poems.
Not essays.
Something rawer. Something that comes before structure, before editing, before I decide whether it's good or worth keeping.
The pen moves, and I follow.
This is what emerged one morning:
Crystal drops, light as dust
in the pale rose light.
Silver raining over all of nature,
waking lush and full.
And suddenly it's morning, alive—
the way I feel when I run.
I run breathless
and feel full,
full of an emptiness
that expands,
that expands me
until I touch the world
and then further still,
until I touch myself
in a rising crescendo.
Reaching the center of my being,
where the flame crackles.
A flame bathed in love,
bathed in tears
that sweetly feed it.
And there is peace in this place,
a silence dense
with slow, whispered words.
Murmurs of voices
chasing each other
as they dance.
A joyful song rising,
flowing free.
Flashing.
Thundering.
Pouring.
And suddenly
it's evening.
I didn't plan any of that.
I didn't choose the images or decide that the flame would be bathed in tears.
The writing chose itself.
And when I read it back, I recognized something I hadn't been able to say out loud.
This is what journaling can do—when you let it.
We Are Made of Stories
We don’t just live our lives—we keep telling them to ourselves, all the time.
Sometimes quietly.
Sometimes in ways we don’t even notice.
We are born into stories. We grow inside them.
And for every experience—even the smallest—we could tell one.
When we write, that flow slows down just enough for us to actually see it.
We begin to notice what we felt. What we didn’t say.
What we turned into silence.
I remember reading a few pages of my father’s diary, many years after he was gone.
They were from his youth. He wrote about my mother—before they were married.
It was a strange kind of closeness.
As if I could glimpse a version of him I had never met, but who had existed.
And reading your own words years later can feel just as unexpected.
“Did I really write this?”
As if, for a moment, something in you had spoken
without asking for permission.
A quieter part.
A deeper one.
One that keeps listening, even while you are busy living.
When Writing Cuts and Heals at the Same Time
One of my clients went through a period when expressing her emotions felt almost physically impossible.
She started a diary, trying to understand what writing even meant to her.
This is what she wrote:
Writing is wringing my guts, squeezing out the juice of a woman.
Writing cuts me and heals me.
Writing has never been this hard.
When only banalities reach the mind,
and what flows through the pen is diluted blood.
Writing is controlling what I feel—crumpled emotions to be inhaled.
I want back every letter I sent to the world.
How many I threw away because the ears were blocked and the heart was shut.
I want to dance, and surrender to all the beauty.
I am constipated with emotions and they turn against me.
See? I put so many periods.
I close the sentences and I close the thoughts.
Predetermined furrows that don't travel through the ether.
Writing, staying here with the pen in my hand
so I don't have to give,
so I don't have to go to work—because that would force me to create.
Writing is giving myself permission to complain
when I deny it with my lips,
even though my heart does it anyway.
Truth and beauty I can't find, but I search for.
Where do I search?
Everything is disguised as lies.
And I fall for it.
I contain too much pain.
Who will want to open this vessel—
I myself hold the cap down,
because if it slipped I would have to hide from the horror.
Nothing in those words is pretty.
Everything in them is true.
And if you read carefully, there’s something else beneath the pain:
awareness.
She sees herself closing the sentences and closing the thoughts.
She names what she’s doing as she does it.
This is not someone lost in a loop.
This is someone standing at the edge of her own walls—
and beginning to see them.
Not All Writing Heals
There’s something that often gets overlooked when we talk about journaling:
writing, by itself, is not enough.
And sometimes, the way we write can even keep us stuck.
This isn’t just an impression.
Research on expressive writing has shown that writing can help—but not in every form, and not in every condition.
James Pennebaker, who pioneered this field, found that writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings for even short periods can reduce anxiety, improve mood, and support overall wellbeing.
But he also made something very clear:
writing must not become another form of rumination.
People who repeat the same story in the same way, over and over, tend to stay where they are.
What makes a difference is movement.
A shift in perspective.
A new word.
A new way of seeing what happened.
Not writing at your pain, but writing through it.
And sometimes, writing is not the right place to start.
When emotions are too intense, or too tightly held, the page can amplify what is already overwhelming.
So what makes the difference?
Awareness.
The willingness to notice what you are doing while you are doing it.
And the openness to let something change, even slightly.
What Changes When You Write with Presence
Something begins to loosen.
Not because the page solves anything,
but because what felt tangled starts to show its threads.
You begin to notice what you feel while you’re feeling it—
not days later, when it has already hardened into something else.
A kind of continuity appears.
A sense that there is a place—a page, a notebook, even a scrap of paper—
where you can return to yourself.
And slowly, a relationship forms.
With your own voice.
The more you write, the more you begin to trust that what comes out—
unpolished, unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable—has value.
That the part of you that writes
knows things the rest of you hasn’t caught up with yet.
My client—the one with the crumpled emotions and the diluted blood—kept writing.
Not every day.
Not perfectly.
But she kept showing up.
And over time, something shifted.
The periods became fewer.
The sentences opened.
The furrows began to travel.
Try This
If something in these words has stirred you, you can begin here.
Choose one of these words:
curiosity, sadness, gratitude, anguish, joy, respect, emptiness, hope, roots, frustration, courage, serenity, optimism.
Don’t define it.
Find a memory that holds that feeling.
Write the memory—not the explanation.
The scene.
The light.
The sounds.
The texture.
Let the feeling live inside the details.
You might surprise yourself.
Writing is not about producing something worth reading.
It’s about listening to something worth hearing—
your own voice, saying what it’s been waiting to say.
If you recognized yourself somewhere in these pages,
maybe it’s time to open a notebook and begin.
What would you write,
if no one were watching?
🌀 Ready to Begin?
If you feel like staying with this a little longer, the Creative Mindfulness Kit was created for that—a space for your words, your images, and your becoming.
✨ Craft your soul every day. Little by little. A tiny action away.
✨ Take a moment: What would you write, if no one were watching?