M.B NOVELS®

I have friends who process their emotions by talking. Some go for long drives. Some journal. Some call their mothers. Some go for runs. Some cry immediately, which honestly feels very efficient.

I, however, cry a lot and open a document.

Not because I always intend to write something meaningful, and certainly not because I think every emotion deserves to become literature. It’s just that, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, my feelings remain frustratingly abstract until I try to put them into words. Before that, they’re just… there. Floating around. Interrupting my concentration and making me unusually attached to songs or strangely quiet during conversations.

I don’t always know what I’m feeling, but I usually know what I’m writing. That’s often how I figure out the first one.

For me, writing is translation. Emotions rarely arrive with labels attached. They show up disguised as irritability, restlessness, nostalgia, or the overwhelming urge to reorganize my bookshelf instead of answering texts. They’re messy. Contradictory. Difficult to explain, even to myself. But the moment I give those feelings a page, something changes. Suddenly, I can see them.

A character who’s terrified of being forgotten teaches me that maybe I’m grieving change more than I realized. A scene about two people failing to communicate forces me to admit there’s a conversation I’m avoiding in my own life. A paragraph that wasn’t supposed to be sad somehow leaves me staring at the screen because it has quietly revealed something I hadn’t been ready to say out loud.

It feels a little like discovering your own handwriting on a note you don’t remember writing.

I think this is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to fiction (and autofiction nowadays). It gives me enough distance to be honest. If you asked me directly how I was doing, I might shrug and tell you I was fine. But give me three hundred pages and a cast of imaginary people, and apparently I’ll confess everything.

I don’t think this only happens to writers, by the way. I think everyone has a language in which they understand themselves best. For some people, it’s music. For others, it’s painting, dancing, cooking, gardening, or conversations that last until four in the morning. Mine just happens to be sentences.

Words slow my thoughts down enough for me to look at them. They force me to be specific. There’s a difference between saying, I feel bad, and realizing that what you actually feel is disappointed, ashamed, relieved, resentful, hopeful, lonely, grateful, or afraid. Those aren’t interchangeable emotions. They ask different things of us. But you can’t respond to a feeling you haven’t identified.

Of course, writing doesn’t solve everything. A beautifully written paragraph has never magically fixed my problems. It hasn’t erased grief, repaired relationships, or made uncertainty disappear. I still have to live my life after I close the document. But the page does give me something precious. It gives shape to things that previously had none. It takes the knot in my chest and turns it into something I can point to. Something I can return to weeks later and understand with kinder eyes.

Maybe that’s why I never panic when I don’t know what I’m feeling anymore. I know where to go.