Writing My Truth

I have always been a writer. I started keeping diaries right around the time I was learning to write. Most of my earliest entries started with the list of my best friends, reasons why I was fighting with my sister, or writing short bursts of emotions like “I hate you!” and “I hate being grounded.” Over the years writing out what I was feeling and experiencing became a daily ritual for me, it helped me to develop my voice and get intimately connected with who I am as a person, and where I am in the world. I wrote everything I was thinking and feeling in as unfiltered a manner imaginable and with that I developed my current style.

When I started writing online I began to learn that my unfiltered self-expression and ability to articulate what my experience was at any given time was something that helped validate and crystallize thoughts, feelings and experiences for others. I noticed that the more authentic and unfiltered I became the more relatable I became, and I found myself writing more often not just for my own catharsis, but to give other people something to connect to. I have always thought of myself as being the voice for people who were afraid to speak up for themselves – mostly in workplace situations or socially – but I never thought that by sharing my own life and putting myself out there that it would actually give others the gift of knowing themselves as well.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have often learned the most about myself by either writing things down or by reading something by someone else that deeply resonated with me and uncovered some piece of information that I didn’t previously have. Having this experience opened my eyes up to what my own writing could do in this world. I know the impact that I’ve felt from other people who have been willing to openly and authentically share themselves. This has been my motivation and inspiration to write more often and to work towards writing a book about the aftermath of being Catfished, and tackling my own mental and physical health.

This world is very crowded and yet very isolated. I believe everyone is searching for something or someone to connect to. I have spent a lot of time searching for books and blogs that I could connect with and I realized the thing I was looking for was the very thing I could provide. Perhaps if I was searching for someone else’s raw and unfiltered account of their life they might be looking for mine.

Something I’ve heard a lot from people in my life is “you always say what everyone else is thinking, but won’t say.” While my fearlessness in saying what is true for me has often landed me in hot water, I feel no regrets about using my voice when people come to me and say they’ve got something from it. I want to harness this and take ownership of it and free people of their own minds and fears of speaking their truth by sharing mine first. I don’t want to just cause ripples or waves, I want a tsunami to clear away all the superficiality we have around our own feelings and experiences because as long as they continue to be buried we are at risk of losing ourselves to them completely.

I am passionate about communicating what is true for me in my writing so that it can touch something true in someone else. When words are not enough I use art to bring out the abstractions of my inner self that can’t always be best expressed in words. I love giving other people a part of themselves when I give them a part of me, and continuing to fine tune that is my expertise.

Written by: Sandra Barnhart